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He closed his mouth and drew the corner of a blanket over the cruel, narrow face. How still it seemed after the commotion and Slim's maniacal screams! He had joined the army of men who have killed their partners. What trifles bring on quarrels in the hills; what mountains molehills become when men are alone in the wilderness!
Bruce stared at the awful pallor of Slim's face, then he got up and washed his hands. He looked at the watch ticking steadily through it all; it was barely a quarter to five. He spread his slicker on the bunk and laid Slim on it and tried to wash the blood from the floor and the logs of the cabin wall, but it left a stain. He changed his shirt murderers always changed their shirts and burned them.
The thought of assuming Slim's responsibilities, of making up for his own futile years, and bringing to pass at least a few of his mother's dreams for him, had become a kind of obsession since that first night of horror after his quarrel with Slim. It had kept him going, hanging on doggedly, when, as he since believed, he might have given up.
When he regained partial consciousness Sergeant Martin was in the water with him, and trying to raise his body over the side of the launch; then he relapsed again, for what seemed to him hours, but what was actually only about two minutes, and was awakened to his real senses by the shouts of Slim, on shore. "Slim's got him," Jerry almost shouted. "Hurry, captain, right off this way to the shore.
But, most curious of all, Slim's face was evenly marked by a perpendicular series of long, red scratches as though he had been dragged from stem to stern along a particularly abrasive gravel walk. Slim seemed quite calm. His approach was made in a somewhat strained silence. At length there spoke a dry, sardonic voice. "Well," said it, "did you kill Beck?"
They made a pack; they saddled horses; they filled canteens and rifles. Slim's car came to Cobre at half-past nine. The message from Dewing ran thus: For Fishhook Mountain. Benavides, S., J., and another. Ten words. Five minutes later the four confederates thundered south through the night.
The sheriff took no stock in Buck McKee's professed reformation, and was greatly worried over the influence he had acquired over Bud Lane, who had before this been Slim's protege. Accordingly, he readily conspired with her to break off the relations between the former outlaw and the young horse-wrangler, but thus far had met with no success.
"It's all the same." Yet he felt a little surprise. "But the letter from 'Slim's' sister, and the picture I want them, too." "I'm sorry," Sprudell frowned in perplexity, "but they've been mislaid. I can't think where I put them, to save my soul." "How could you misplace them?" Bruce demanded sharply. "You kept them all together, didn't you? I wanted that picture."
In Slim's phrasing, he did not seem to be so good on "humans." Behind his live oak, Buck was so well protected that only a chance shot could reach him before his enemies should outflank him. How long that would have taken nobody ever found out; for an intervention occurred in the form of a flying Diana, on horseback, taking the low fence like a huntress.
The crowd yelled with laughter, and the breath went out of poor Slim with a terrible snort, as Delicate came down squarely upon Slim's stomach. And thus, the most ludicrous sight imaginable, they went sliding under the tape. "All bets are off," shouted the other man who had been boxing; "they broke before the finish."
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