The Message to Buckshot Jim/Chapter 10

six hours later, the soul boat grounded upon an uncharted reef. There was no sudden jar, no shock, no disturbance of any sort, but the boat was aground and the journey was over. Little by little, consciousness began to steal back to the man in the bed.

In that shadowy border-land between dreaming and waking where there are neither realities nor unrealities, there came to Gilmore an undefined sense of discomfort. Something distressed him, but so vague was the impression that he did not know whether it was mental or physical or both.

After some little time he identified it as a sensation of oppression. Gradually it took the definite form of a heavy weight which seemed to be bearing down upon him. He lay perfectly still with closed eyes. Once his left hand moved slightly, and touched something rough in the bed beside him; without knowing why, he found the contact reassuring.

The sense of security was short-lived. He began to toss about restlessly, in an attempt to throw off the thing which seemed to hang over him. It was then, with the first dawn of consciousness brought about by the movement of his body, that he realized that the weight was there. It was real!

The brain began to reason. If the weight was there, it was on the bed. There had been nothing on the bed when he went to sleep; nothing in the room. The door was locked and barricaded; the window was secure. Manifestly, it was outside of the possibilities that something should have crept into the room; and yet reasoning did not remove the strange sense of physical oppression.

He determined to make sure. Slowly he moved his leg toward the side of the bed. The covers drew tight over it, and then the movement was met and blocked by a steady pressure.

His whole body suddenly grew cold. He opened his eyes. Buckshot John was sitting on the edge of the bed!

The lamp on the table was burning dimly, turned down to the barest edge of flame, but there was light enough for Gilmore to see the close-cropped hair, the heavy features, and the peculiarly sinister expression in the pale-gray eyes.

A hoarse whisper broke the stillness.

"I didn't wake you too sudden for fear of busting that delicate nervous system of yours," it said. "I was afraid you might be in another one of them trance states!" The tone of the voice, more than the words, drove Gilmore's hand toward his pillow.

"Aye!" said Buckshot John. "Look for your gun if you want to. I got it here!"

The figure on the side of the bed made a sudden gesture, and there was a flash of dull metal in the half light.

The Great Gilmore was no coward, but the cold shudders were fluttering up and down his spine. It is a sensation which may come to any one at two o'clock in the morning. It cost him a great effort to find his greatest asset—his tongue.

"You!" he muttered thickly. "You! What are you doing here?"

Buckshot John waved the pistol toward the window.

"That's how I got in," he said gravely. "I didn't make much noise, and I didn't bust nothing but the catch. If there hadn't been no other way, I'd have took down the side of the house." He looked at Gilmore with a thoughtful air. "You act kind of surprised," he said. "I should have thought that the spirits would have told you that I was coming, and that the whole bunch of 'em couldn't stop me from getting you!"

Again the ugly undertone behind the words. The Great Gilmore grew numb with the sense of impending disaster. He fought for time with a question.

"How did you get here?"

"I walked," said Buckshot John quite simply. "Mostly at night."

The mental picture of that heavy, sinister figure striding through the darkness was not a pleasant one. Gilmore still played for time.

"You—escaped?"

"Call it anything you like," said the convict calmly. "The main thing is that I'm here—in time. I thought it all over, and I didn't see no other way; so I just picked up and come along."

A sudden hope flashed into Gilmore's brain. The brown bag was in the bed. Moran could not have seen it. But he did see the light in the Great Gilmore's eyes, and he killed that hope while it was in the process of birth into words.

"Now then!" said Buckshot John. His voice was hard, and his eyes were harder than the voice. "Gimme that bag you've got around your neck! And that sleeping companion of yours! Hand 'em over!"

"What for?" said Gilmore weakly. "They are all right here. You couldn't—"

"Pity you quit the stage," said Buckshot John grimly. "People are missing a lot. What for? Why, you don't think I took all this trouble to let a petty-larceny bunco-steerer fool me again, do you? Hand 'em over!"

Gilmore opened his mouth to say something, and it remained open. Buckshot John accompanied his last word with a forward thrust of the revolver, and Questo, who had hypnotized others, was himself hypnotized by a round, black eye which looked unwinkingly into his.

"Come on, you sneak-thief! You thirty-cent patent-medicine faker! Shell out!"

The Great Gilmore shelled out. There was nothing else for him to do. The brown bag came first. Buckshot John stepped back from the bed and laid the revolver upon the table. With one movement of his powerful hands he tore the lock from its fastenings, and pulled out one of the packages.

"This is it!" he said quietly.

He dropped the express package back into the bag, and thrust it behind him with a movement of his foot. Then he carefully felt the bed from end to end. The gun was in his hand again, and Gilmore said nothing, but fumbled with the strings about his neck.

Buckshot John shook the small pouch speculatively. Then he opened the bag and thrust in a finger.

"Are they all here?" he asked suddenly.

"Of course they're all there!" snarled Gilmore. "Say, what's the matter with you?" he continued querulously. "Didn't you ask me as a favor to go and get these things? You can see that I've done everything I promised to do, and then you come here by night, break into my room, and threaten me with a gun! You and your conscience! I didn't think I was dealing with—"

Buckshot John stopped that tirade with the muzzle of the revolver, which he wagged like a forefinger.

"Shut your gab!" he ordered sternly. "I'm going to talk a while. You remember you told me that night that you didn't know nothing about me, or my record, neither? You remember, before you went into that trance, you said I mustn't tell you nothing, because your mind had to be open? You remember that?"

"What has that got to do with it?" demanded Gilmore sullenly.

"Everything!" ejaculated the convict. "You lied to me, and a man that will lie will steal! You had me dead to rights when you come down there, and the only thing you didn't know about me was the thing you framed up to find out!"

There was still a fighting chance, and there was pluck enough left in Gilmore to take it.

"There must have been some mistake—" he began bravely, but the sentence ended with a gulp. Buckshot John had produced the silencer.

"You bet there was a mistake!" There was a ring of finality about the convict's voice. "And you made it when you went to that newspaper office in Denver on a Wednesday night!"

Every word in the last sentence was cold when Moran dropped it, and the chill struck home to the heart of the listener. So that was it! Buckshot John knew about the searching of the files!