“Who? Riggs? Wal, I don't know. But I reckon he's somewhere out in the woods nursin' himself.”
“Not Riggs. First tell me where HE is.”
“Shore, then, you must mean Las Vegas. I just left him down at the cabin. He was gettin' ready for bed, early as it is. All tired out he was an' thet white you wouldn't have knowed him. But he looked happy at thet, an' the last words he said, more to himself than to me, I reckon, was, 'I'm some locoed gent, but if she doesn't call me Tom now she's no good!'”
Bo actually clapped her hands, notwithstanding that one of them was bandaged.
“Call him Tom? I should smile I will,” she declared, in delight. “Hurry now—what 'd—”
“It's shore powerful strange how he hates thet handle Las Vegas,” went on Roy, imperturbably.
“Roy, tell me what he did—what TOM did—or I'll scream,” cried Bo.
“Miss Helen, did you ever see the likes of thet girl?” asked Roy, appealing to Helen.
“No, Roy, I never did,” agreed Helen. “But please—please tell us what has happened.”
Roy grinned and rubbed his hands together in a dark delight, almost fiendish in its sudden revelation of a gulf of strange emotion deep within him. Whatever had happened to Riggs had not been too much for Roy Beeman. Helen remembered hearing her uncle say that a real Westerner hated nothing so hard as the swaggering desperado, the make-believe gunman who pretended to sail under the true, wild, and reckoning colors of the West.