Irish, Big Medicine and Jack Bates had sprung guiltily to their feet and started down the steps. The drawling voice of the Native Son stopped them, ten feet from the porch.
"Twelve, or fifteen, I should make it. That horse of his looked to me like a drifter."
"Well--are yuh goin' t' set there on your haunches an' let him GO?" Slim, by the look of him, was ripe for murder.
"You want to look out, or you'll get apoplexy sure," Andy soothed, giving himself another luxurious push and pulling the last, little whiff from his cigarette before he threw away the stub. "Fat men can't afford to get as excited as skinny ones can."
"Aw, say! Where did you put him, Andy?" asked Big Medicine, his first flurry subsiding before the absolute calm of those two on the porch.
"In the blacksmith shop," said Andy, with a slurring accent on the first word that made the whole sentence perfectly maddening.
"Ah, come on back here and sit down. I guess we better tell 'em the how of it. Huh, Mig?"
Miguel cast a slow, humorous glance over the four. "Ye-es--they'll have us treed in about two minutes if we don't," he assented. "Go ahead."
"Well," Andy lifted his head and shoulders that he might readjust a pillow to his liking, "we wanted him to make a getaway. Fact is, if he hadn't, we'd have been--strictly up against it. Right!
If he hadn't--how about it, Mig? I guess we'd have been to the Little Rockies ourselves."
"You've got a sweet little voice," Irish cut in savagely, "but we're tired. We'd rather hear yuh say something!"
"Oh--all right. Well, Mig and I just ribbed up a josh on Dunk.
I'd read somewhere about the same kinda deal, so it ain't original; I don't lay any claim to the idea at all; we just borrowed it. You see, it's like this: We figured that a man as mean as this Dunk person most likely had stepped over the line, somewhere. So we just took a gambling chance, and let him do the rest. You see, we never saw him before in our lives. All that identification stunt of ours was just a bluff. But the minute I shoved my chips to the center, I knew we had him dead to rights.
You were there. You saw him wilt. By gracious--"
"Yuh don't know anything against him?" gasped Irish.
"Not a darned thing--any more than what you all know," testified Andy complacently.
It took a minute or two for that to sink in.
"Well, I'll be damned!" breathed Irish.
"We did chain him to the anvil," Andy went on. "On the way down, we talked about being in a hurry to get back to you fellows, and I told Mig--so Dunk could hear--that we wouldn't bother with the horse. We tied him to the corral. And I hunted around for that bum chain, and then we made out we couldn't find the padlock for the door; so we decided, right out loud, that he'd be dead safe for an hour or two, till the bunch of us got back. Not knowing a darn thing about him, except what you boys have told us, we sure would have been in bad if he hadn't taken a sneak. Fact is, we were kinda worried for fear he wouldn't have nerve enough to try it. We waited, up on the hill, till we saw him sneak down to the corral and jump on his horse and take off down the coulee like a scared coyote. It was," quoth the young man, unmistakably pleased with himself, "pretty smooth work, if you ask me."
"I'd hate to ride as fast and far to-night as that hombre will," supplemented Miguel with his brief smile, that was just a flash of white, even teeth and a momentary lightening of his languorous eyes.
Slim stood for five minutes, a stolid, stocky figure in the midst of a storm of congratulatory comment. They forgot all about Happy Jack, asleep inside the house, and so their voices were not hushed. Indeed, Big Medicine's bull-like remarks boomed full-throated across the coulee and were flung back mockingly by the barren hills. Slim did not hear a word they were saying; he was thinking it over, with that complete mental concentration which is the chief recompense of a slow-working mind. He was methodically thinking it all out--and, eventually, he saw the joke.
"Well, by golly!" he bawled suddenly, and brought his palm down with a terrific smack upon his sore leg--whereat his fellows laughed uproariously.
"We told you not to try to see through any more jokes till your leg gets well, Slim," Andy reminded condescendingly.
"Say, by golly, that's a good one on Dunk, ain't it? Chasin' himself clean outa the country, by golly--scared plumb to death---and you fellers was only jest makin' b'lieve yuh knowed him! By golly, that sure is a good one, all right!"
"You've got it; give you time enough and you could see through a barbed-wire fence," patronized Andy, from the hammock. "Yes, since you mention it, I think myself it ain't so bad."
"Aw-w shut up, out there, an' let a feller sleep!" came a querulous voice from within. "I'd ruther bed down with a corral full uh calves at weanin' time, than be anywheres within ten mile uh you darned, mouthy--" The rest was indistinguishable, but it did not matter. The Happy Family, save Slim, who stayed to look after the patient, tiptoed penitently off the porch and took themselves and their enthusiasm down to the bunk-house.