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Updated: May 3, 2025
My notion is we'd better make a bee-line for Malapi right away," proposed Bob. "We'll travel all night. No use wastin' any more time." Dug Doble received their decision sourly. "It don't tickle me a heap to be left short-handed because you two boys have got an excuse to get to town quicker." Hart looked him straight in the eye. "Call it an excuse if you want to.
Say, son, look who's here!" His thumb hitched toward his right shoulder. Dave looked down the line of blackened, grimy fire-fighters and his eye fell on Shorty. He was still wearing chaps, but his Chihuahua hat had succumbed long ago. Manifestly the man had been on the fighting line for some hours. "Doesn't he know about the reward?" "Yes. He was hidin' in Malapi when the call came for men.
At the junction he took the stage for Malapi. Already he could see that he was going into a new world, one altogether different from that he had last seen here. These men were not cattlemen. They talked the vocabulary of oil. They had the shrewd, keen look of the driller and the wildcatter. They were full of nervous energy that oozed out in constant conversation.
If some one had made Emerson Crawford a present of a carload of Herefords he could not have been more pleased than he was at the result of the Jackpot crew's night adventure with the Steelman forces. The news came to him at an opportune moment, for he had just been served notice by the president of the Malapi First National Bank that Crawford must prepare to meet at once a call note for $10,000.
The third day was wasted in aimless drifting among the defiles of the mountains. "No use, Bob," said his friend while they were cooking supper. "They've made their getaway. Might as well drift back to Malapi, don't you reckon?" "Looks like. We're only wastin' our time here." Long before day broke they started.
We're after a pair of shorthorn crooks that stole our horses." The foreman flushed angrily. "Don't come bellyachin' to me about yore broomtails. I ain't got 'em." "We know who's got 'em," said Dave evenly. "What we want is a wage check so as we can cash it at Malapi." "You don't get it," returned the big foreman bluntly. "We pay off when we reach the end of the drive."
The jealousy of the man urged him to it, and his consuming vanity persuaded him that out of evil might come good. He could make the girl love him. So her punishment would bring her joy in the end. As for Crawford and Sanders, his success would be such bitter medicine to them that time would never wear away the taste of it. At dusk he rose and resaddled. Under the stars he rode back to Malapi.
They had waited a long time in the lofty mountains south of the boundary, watching the malapi flats for a party of Americans; and at last these had come. They had dogged their trail through the long hot afternoon, keeping well back lest they should be discovered. Now they were closing in. The air grew cooler and the hour of dawn approached.
One contractor was putting down sidewalks in the same street where another laid sewer pipe and a third put in telephone poles. A branch line of a trans-continental railroad was moving across the desert to tap the new oil field. Houses rose overnight. Mule teams jingled in and out freighting supplies to Malapi and from there to the fields.
To the west lay Malapi and the plains. Eastward were the heaven-pricking peaks. A long, bright line zig-zagged across the desert and reflected the sun rays. It was the bed of the new road already spiked with shining rails. "I'm goin' to town," announced Doble. Shorty looked at him in surprise. "Wanta see yore picture, I reckon. It's on a heap of telegraph poles, I been told," he said, grinning.
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