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"Yo're yo're lyin'," sputtered Luke Tweezy. "Am I? We'll see. When playin' cards with old Dale didn't work they caught the old man at McFluke's one day and after he'd got in a fight with McFluke and McFluke downed him, they saw their chance to produce a forged release from Dale." "Who did the forging?" broke in the Judge. "I dunno for shore. This here was found in Tweezy's safe."
If I could only talk to you a li'l while." At this she came forth. Her eyes were downcast. Her cheeks were red with shamed blood. She leaned against the table. One closed fist rested on the top of the table. The knuckles showed white. She was trembling a little. "Where and what is McFluke's?" he asked. "Oh, that's where he got it!" she exclaimed, bitterly. "I guess.
He wasn't drunk, neither." "Then he must have serious intentions." "Somethin' like that. Five of us heard him say it. Lookit, while I was at McFluke's alone day before yesterday Doc and Peaches Austin and Honey Hoke was all three bellying the bar, and while I was tucking away my nosepaint they was mumbling to themselves how you was all kinds of a pup and would stand shootin' any day."
"They knowed you was my friend," said Rod, simply. "Anyway, you keep away from McFluke's." "Maybe I will take yore advice. It has its points of interest, as the feller said when he sat down on the porkumpine. And speakin' of porkumpines, have you seen Lanpher?" "Shore. Him and Alicran pulled in a hour ago. Guess he's in the office Lanpher." "See anything of Tweezy lately?"
"They been after him to sell a long time," said Chuck Morgan, rolling a cigarette as he and Racey Dawson jogged along toward McFluke's at the ford of the Lazy. "Who?" asked Racey. "I dunno. Can't find out. Luke Tweezy is the agent and he won't give the party's name." "Has Old Salt tried to buy him out?" "Not as I know of. Why should he? He knows he won't sell to anybody."
"I tell you I couldn't help his getting the whiskey," McFluke was whining. "It ain't my fault if somebody gives it to him, is it?" "Of course not," chimed in Racey, briskly. "Mac means all right. He didn't know there was any law against providing old Dale with whiskey." "They is a law," insisted Chuck Morgan, belligerently, his gun trained unswervingly on McFluke's broad stomach. "They is a law.
While in some ways the murder might be considered sufficiently safe, the method of it and the act itself did not smack of Pooley's handiwork. It was much more probable that the killing was the climax of Luke Tweezy's original plan adhered to by the attorney and his friends against the advice and wishes of Jacob Pooley. "Guess we'd better go on to McFluke's," was Racey's suggestion. They went.
Well, gents," he resumed, "what I heard in that corral showed plain enough there was something up. Dale wouldn't sell, and they were bound to get his land away from him. So they figured to have Nebraska Jones turn the trick by playin' poker with the old man. When Nebraska They switched from Nebraska to Peaches Austin, plannin' to go through with the deal at McFluke's from the beginning.
"Yonder's McFluke's," he added, nodding toward two gray-brown log and shake shacks and a stockaded corral roosting on the high ground beyond the belt of cottonwoods and willows marking the course of the Lazy. "Them's his stables and corral," went on Chuck. "The house she's down near the river. Can't see her on account of the cottonwoods." "And they can't see us count of the cottonwoods. So "
Chuck Morgan nodded, and turned his horse aside toward the draw. Ten minutes later the water of the Lazy River was sluicing the dust from the legs and belly of Racey Dawson's horse. Racey spurred up the bank and rode toward the long, low building that was McFluke's store and saloon. There were no ponies standing at the hitching-rail in front of the place. For this Racey was devoutly thankful.
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