“And risk Terry getting his head blown off?”
“If he can’t beat Larrimer, he’s
no use to us; if he kills Larrimer, it’s good
riddance. The kid is going to get bumped off sometime,
anyway. He’s bad—all the way
through.”
Pollard looked with a sort of wonder on his companion.
“You’re a nice, kind sort of a gent, ain’t
you, Denver?”
“I’m a moneymaker,” asserted Denver
coldly. “And, just now, Terry Hollis is
my gold mine. Watch me work him!”
It was some time before Terry could sleep, though
it was now very late. When he put out the light
and slipped into the bed, the darkness brought a bright
flood of memories of the day before him. It seemed
to him that half a lifetime had been crowded into
the brief hours since he was fired on the ranch that
morning. Behind everything stirred the ugly face
of Denver as a sort of controlling nemesis. It
seemed to him that the chunky little man had been
pulling the wires all the time while he, Terry Hollis,
danced in response. Not a flattering thought.
Nervously, Terry got out of bed and went to the window.
The night was cool, cut crisp rather than chilling.
His eye went over the velvet blackness of the mountain
slope above him to the ragged line of the crest—then
a dizzy plunge to the brightness of the stars beyond.
The very sense of distance was soothing; it washed
the gloom and the troubles away from him. He
breathed deep of the fragrance of the pines and then
went back to his bed.
He had hardly taken his place in it when the sleep
began to well up over his brain—waves of
shadows running out of corners of his mind. And
then suddenly he was wide awake, alert.
Someone had opened the door. There had been no
sound; merely a change in the air currents of the
room, but there was also the sense of another presence
so clearly that Terry almost imagined he could hear
the breathing.
He was beginning to shrug the thought away and smile
at his own nervousness, when he heard that unmistakable
sound of a foot pressing the floor. And then
he remembered that he had left his gun belt far from
the bed. In a burning moment that lesson was
printed in his mind, and would never be forgotten.
Slowly as possible and without sound, he drew up his
feet little by little, spread his arms gently on either
side of him, and made himself tense for the effort.
Whoever it was that entered, they might be taken by
surprise. He dared not lift his head to look;
and he was on the verge of leaping up and at the approaching
noise, when a whisper came to him softly: “Black
Jack!”
The soft voice, the name itself, thrilled him.
He sat erect in the bed and made out, dimly, the form
of Kate Pollard in the blackness. She would have
been quite invisible, save that the square of the window
was almost exactly behind her. He made out the
faint whiteness of the hand which held her dressing
robe at the breast.
