“Some things don’t need telling.  I don’t have to be told, for instance, that if things get too hot for Brill Healy he will slide out and leave you to settle the bill with the law.”

Irwin’s eyes glared angrily at his smiling ones.  The unabashed impudence, the unfluttered aplomb, but above all the uncanny prescience of this youth disturbed him because he could not understand them.  Moreover, it happened that his suspicious mind had lingered on the chance of a betrayal at the hands of his chief.  For which very reason he broke into angry denial.

“That’s a lie!  Brill ain’t that sort.  He’d stand pat to a finish.”  Then, tardily, came the instinct for caution.  “And there’s nothing to tell, anyways,” he finished sulkily.

“Sure.  What’s a little rustling and a little bank robbing among friends?” Keller wanted to know cheerfully.

For just an instant he thought he had gone too far.  The big ruffian opposite choked over his biscuit, the while rage purpled his face.  He caught up the revolver, and his fingers itched at the trigger.

His prisoner, leaning back in the chair, held him with quiet, unwavering eyes.  “Steady!  Steady!” he drawled.

“That will be about enough from you,” Irwin let out through set teeth.  “You padlock that mouth of yours, mister.”

Keller took his advice temporarily, but it was not in him to long repress the spirit of adventure that bubbled in him.  The temptation to bait this bear drew him irresistibly.  He could not let him alone, the more that he sensed the danger to himself of the prods he sent home through the thick skin.

Lying carelessly on the bed with his head on his arm, or perhaps sitting astride a chair with his hands crossed on the back support, he would smile with childlike innocence and sent his barbs in gayly.  And Irwin, murder in his dull brain, would glare at him like a maniac.

“Now would be a good time to blow off the top of my cocoanut,” the nester suggested more than once to the infuriated cave man.  “I’m allowing, you know, to send you to Yuma as soon as I get out of this.  Nothing like grabbing your opportunity by the forelock.”

“And when are you expecting to get out of here?” his guard demanded huskily.

Keller waved his hand with airy persiflage.  “No exact information obtainable, my friend.  Likely to-day.  Maybe not till to-morrow.  The one dead-sure point is that I’ll make my getaway at the right time.”

“There’s one more dead-sure point—­that I’m going to blow holes in you at the right time,” retorted the other.

“Like to bet on which of us is a true prophet?”

Brad relapsed into black, sulky silence.

The hours followed each other, and still nobody came to relieve the guard.  Keller could not understand the reason for this, any more than he could fathom an adequate one for his abduction.  There was of course something behind it—­something more potent than mere malice.  If the intention had been merely to kill him, the thing could have been done without all this trouble.  But though he searched his brain for an explanation, he could not find one that satisfied.