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Updated: May 25, 2025
But now I slid from my chair with my hat pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step of the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at the slightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in the cool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathing too bitter to be set in words. But the fact remained.
It was doubtful if any one besides Kellow and the keeper of the police records would know or remember my name. There had been many travelers to board the through train with me, and surely one might consider himself safely lost in such a throng, if only by reason of the unit inconsequence.
During this Sunday morning talk I was little more than an abstracted listener. I could think of nothing but the raw hazard of the previous night and of the frightful moral abyss into which it had precipitated me. In addition there were ominous forebodings for the future. So long as Kellow remained in Cripple Creek, danger would lurk for me in every shadow.
Kellow kicked out a chair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side of the small round card-table over which a single gas-jet hissed and sizzled, lighting the tiny box of a place with a sickly yellow glare. "What'll it be?" he asked, when the waiter came in.
In the isolation and loneliness of the night watch it was inevitable that my thoughts should hark back to the near-meeting with Kellow, and to the moral lapse which it had provoked. Doubtless every man rediscovers himself many times in the course of a lifetime. In prison I had been sustained by a vindictive determination to win out and square accounts with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers.
Like myself, Kellow had been a "trusty," and under certain relaxations of the rule of silence in the prison we had talked and an acquaintance of a sort had slowly grown and ripened.
Touching this matter of peril, the period of our beginnings as a corporation was not without its alarms. Twice I had seen Kellow at a distance, and once I had stood beside him at the hotel counter where he had been examining the registered list of names at a moment when I, all unconscious of his presence until I was elbowing him, had stopped in passing to ask a question of the clerk.
Kellow sat back in his chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring into my brain. When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fat roll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills from it and tossed them across the table to me. "There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely.
Bimeby, when I've collected enough of the debt I spoke of, I'll shake the dust and disappear." "They'll find you and bring you back." "Not without a fine-tooth comb, they won't. This old world is plenty good and wide when you learn how to use it." "I suppose I haven't learned yet; and I don't want to learn in your way, Kellow." Again he gave me the sneering laugh.
So it was a potential murderer, at least in willing intention, who took the long trail back under the summer stars to the hills, with the rifle and Barrett's shot-gun the latter picked up in passing the sampling works nestling in the hollow of his arm. God or the devil could have given me no greater boon that night than the hap to meet Kellow on the lonesome climb.
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