Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/213

 it'll be too short to pull him back out of the fire by," said Dan.

Fred Grubb sat smoking his thin cigarette, which he crooked to bind the paper, after the Mexican fashion, instead of licking it with his tongue. He seemed to be leading off by himself on some intricate branch of the matter, his brow gathered in deep meditation.

The other two said no more. Together the trio sat, their weapons beside them, as if waiting some event that fate plotted against them in the hovering dusk. Fred Grubb shifted his back against the logs presently, and still keeping his cast of meditation, rolled and crushed the fire out of the low-burned stub of his cigarette.

"Of course, a man's got to be sound, his gun arm's got to be studdy, before he goes out to check up his business with any two-leggid wolf that roams the range," he said.

It appeared to be an observation entirely irrelevant to anything under discussion, as indeed it was. Yet it bore acutely on the thing that ran through the minds of all of them: the vengeance that Barrett must go out to claim, as a man among men, from Dale Findlay very soon. Barrett was thinking of it, as he had thought of little else, since he came out of the delirium of fever. His pact with Alma Nearing, as he looked back on it that evening, was but an incidental subterfuge to put her aside and quiet her fears. Nothing could come of a scheme like that. Before they could stage their little interlude of jealousy, some new tragedy would develop to darken that melancholy house.

More than that, and first of all, he did not want