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Updated: June 6, 2025
But he would have to let me go sometime." "Not till you'd promised to stick by him. I told him that myself, but he said that you're young and that he'd teach you to like this life whether you wanted to or not. Me speaking personally, I agree with Black Gandil: This is the worst fool thing that dad has ever done. What do we want with you in Hal's place!"
The first to break the long silence was Jim Boone, with "Who brings in the wood?" And Black Gandil answered: "We'll match, eh?" In an outburst of energy the day before he disappeared Garry Patterson had chopped up some wood and left a pile of it at the corner of the house.
The glance of Pierre still lingered on Gandil as he turned and followed Wilbur up the complaining stairs to the one habitable room in the second story of the house. It was set aside for the use of Jacqueline. At the door Wilbur said: "Shrug your shoulders back; you look as if you were going to jump at something. And wipe the wolf-look off your face. After all, Jack's a girl, not a gun-fighter."
Pierre was paler still, and there was an uneasy twitching of his right hand which every man understood. He barely whispered. "No; damn you!" But Black Gandil loved evil. He said, with a marvelously unpleasant smile: "Then she was " The voice of Dick Wilbur cut in like the snapping of a whip: "Shut up, Gandil, you devil!"
And she said, because she could think of no way to cover the confusion which came to her after the outbreak: "Yes." He dropped her arms and strode a pace or two up and down the room. "Gandil?" "N-no!" "You're lying. It was Gandil." And he made straight for the door. She ran after him and flung herself between him and the door.
Bud Mansie, meager, lean, with a shifting eye; Garry Patterson, of the red, good-natured face; Phil Branch, stolid and short and muscled like a giant; Handsome Dick Wilbur on his racing bay; Black Gandil, with his villainies from the South Seas like an invisible mantle of awe about him; and her father, the stalwart, gray Boone.
It was early morning before Pierre reached the refuge of Boone's gang, but there was still a light through the window of the large room, and he entered to find Boone, Mansie, and Gandil grouped about the fire, all ominously silent, all ominously wakeful. They looked up to him and big Jim nodded his gray head. Otherwise there was no greeting.
And Black Gandil answered with his evil, sudden grin: "Maybe McGurk, but not God." They started on again with Garry Patterson and Dick Wilbur riding close on either side of Pierre, supporting his limp body. It delayed the whole gang, for they could not go on faster than a jog-trot. The wind, however, was falling off in violence.
"From the front, Jack. No, he's fought square with each one. The wounds of Black Gandil were all in front, and when McGurk and I meet it's going to be face to face." Her tone changed, softened: "But what of me, Pierre?" "You have to leave this life. Go down to the city, Jack. Live like a woman; marry some lucky fellow; be happy." "Can you leave me so easily?"
They would take the trail, and Jim Boone, no longer agile enough to be effective on the trail, would guard the house and the body of Gandil in it. There was little danger that even McGurk would try to rush a hostile house, but they took no chances.
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