"Twenty thousand on the Flyer. I reckon you ship by express, don't you?"

"Yes. Don't mention it to anyone. That twenty thousand would come handy to a good many people in this country these times."

"It would come right handy to me," Luck laughed ruefully. "I need every cent of it. After the beef roundup, I'll be on Easy Street, but it's going to be hard sledding to keep going till then."

"You'll make a turn somehow. It will work out. Maybe when money isn't so tight I'll be able to do something for you."

Luck returned to the hotel morosely, and tried to figure a way out of his difficulties. He was not going to be beaten. He never had accepted defeat, even in the early days when he had sometimes taken a lawless short cut to what he wanted. By G.o.d, he would not lose out after all these years of fighting. It had been his desperate need of money that had made him sit in last night's poker game. But he had succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. He knew his debts by heart, but he jotted them down on the back of an envelope and added them again.

Mortgage on ranch (due Oct. 1), $13,000 Note to First National, 3,500 Note to Reynolds, 1,750 I O U to Mackenzie, 1,200 Same to Flandrau, 400 Same to Yesler, 300 ------ Total, $20,150

Twenty thousand was the sum he needed, and mighty badly, too.

Absentmindedly he turned the envelope over and jotted down one or two other things. Twenty thousand dollars! Just the sum Jordan had coming to the bank on the Flyer. Subconsciously, Luck's fingers gave expression to his thoughts. $20,000. Half a dozen times they penciled it, and just below the figures, "W. & S. Ex. Co." Finally they wrote automatically the one word, "To-night."

Luck looked at what he had written, laughed grimly, and tore the envelope in two. He threw the pieces in the waste paper basket.

CHAPTER III

AN INITIALED HAT

Mackenzie was reading the _Sentinel_ while he ate a late breakfast. He had it propped against the water bottle, so that it need not interfere with the transportation of sausages, fried potatoes, hot cakes, and coffee to their common destination.

Trying to do two things at once has its disadvantages. A startling headline caught his eyes just as the cup was at his lips. Hot coffee, precipitately swallowed, scalded his tongue and throat. He set down the cup, swore mildly, and gave his attention to the news that had excited him. The reporter had run the story to a column, but the leading paragraph gave the gist of it:

While the citizens of Saguache were peacefully sleeping last night, a lone bandit held up the messengers of the Western and Southern Express Company, and relieved them of $20,000 just received from El Paso on the Flyer.

Perry Hawley, the local manager of the company, together with Len Rogers, the armed guard, had just returned from the depot, where the money had been turned over to them and receipted for. Hawley had unlocked the door of the office and had stepped in, followed by Rogers, when a masked desperado appeared suddenly out of the darkness, disarmed the guard and manager, took the money, pa.s.sed through the door and locked it after him, and vanished as silently as he had come. Before leaving, he warned his victims that the place would be covered for ten minutes and at any attempt to call for help they would be shot. Notwithstanding this, the imprisoned men risked their lives by raising the alarm.

Further down the page Mackenzie discovered that the desperado was still at large, but that Sheriff Bolt expected shortly to lay hands on him.

"I'll bet a dollar Nick Bolt didn't make any such claim to the reporter.

He ain't the kind that brags," Mackenzie told himself.

He folded the paper and returned to his room to make preparation to return to his ranch. The buzz of the telephone called him to the receiver. The voice of Cullison reached him.

"That you, Mac. I'll be right up. No, don't come down. I'd rather see you alone."

The owner of the Circle C came right to business. "I've made a raise, Mac, and while I've got it I'm going to skin off what's coming to you."

He had taken a big roll of bills from his pocket, and was counting off what he had lost to his friend. The latter noticed that it all seemed to be in twenties.

"Twelve hundred. That squares us, Mac."

The Scotchman was vaguely uneasy without a definite reason for his anxiety. Only last night Cullison had told him not a single bank in town would advance him a dollar. Now he had money in plenty. Where had he got it?

"No hurry at all, Luck. Pay when you're good and ready."

"That's now."

"Because I'll only put it in the Cattlemen's National. It's yours if you need it."

"I'll let you know if I do," his friend nodded.

Mackenzie's eye fell on a copy of the _Sentinel_ protruding from the other's pocket. "Read about the hold-up of the W. & S. Express? That fellow had his nerve with him."

"Sho! This hold-up game's the easiest yet. He got the drop on them, and there was nothing to it. The key was still in the lock of the door. Well, when he gets through he steps out, turns the key, and rides away."

"How did he know there was money coming in last night?"

"There's always a leak about things of that sort. Somebody talks. I knew it myself for that matter."

"You knew! Who told you?"

"That's a secret, Mac. Come to think of it, I wish you wouldn't tell anybody that I knew. I don't want to get the man who told me in trouble."

"Sure I won't." He pa.s.sed to another phase of the subject. "The _Sentinel_ says Bolt expects to catch the robber. Think he will?"

"Not if the fellow knows his business. Bolt has nothing to go on. He has the whole Southwest to pick from. For all he knows, it was you."

"Yes, but----"

"Or more likely me." The gray eyes of the former sheriff held a frosty smile.

In spite of that smile, or perhaps because of it, Mackenzie felt again that flash of doubt. "What's the use of talking foolishness, Luck? Course you didn't do it. Anybody would know that. Man, I whiles wonder at you,"

he protested, relapsing into his native tongue as he sometimes did when excited.

"I didn't say I did it. I said I might have done it"

"Oh, well! You didn't. I know you too well."

But the trouble was Mackenzie did not know him well enough. Cullison was hard up, close to the wall. How far would he go to save himself? Thirty years before when they had been wild young lads these two had hunted their fun together. Luck had always been the leader, had always been ready for any daredeviltry that came to his mind. He had been the kind to go the limit in whatever he undertook, to play it to a finish in spite of opposition. And what a man is he must be to the end. In his slow, troubled fashion, Mac wondered if his old side partner's streak of lawlessness would take him as far as a hold-up. Of course it would not, he a.s.sured himself; but he could not get the ridiculous notion out of his head. It drew his thoughts, and at last his steps toward the express office where the hold-up had taken place.

He opened a futile conversation with Hawley, while Len Rogers, the guard who had not made good, looked at him with a persistent, hostile eye.

"Hard luck," the cattleman condoled.

"That's what you think, is it? You and your friends, too, I reckon."

Mackenzie looked at the guard, who was plainly sore in every humiliated crevice of his brain. "I ain't speaking for my friends, Len, but for myself," he said amiably.

Rogers laughed harshly. "Didn't know but what you might be speaking for one of your friends."

"They can all speak for themselves when they have got anything to say."

Hawley sent a swift, warning look toward his subordinate. The latter came to time sulkily. "I didn't say they couldn't."