“You know,” he said with sudden savagery, “what’s coming?”

“I’m a pretty good guesser,” nodded Red Jim.  “When a fellow tries to shoot me in the dark, and then slugs me with a chair and ties me up, I generally make it out that he figures on murder, Hervey.”

He gave just the slightest emphasis to the important word, and yet something in Hervey grew tense.  Murder it was, and of the most dastardly order, no matter how he tried to excuse it by protesting to himself his devotion to Oliver Jordan.  The lies we tell to our own souls about ourselves are the most damning ones, as they are also the easiest.  But Hervey found himself so cornered that he dared not think about his act.  He stopped thinking, therefore, and began to shout.  This is logical and human, as every woman knows who has found an irate husband in the wrong.  Hervey began to hate with redoubled intensity the man he was about to destroy.

“You come here and try to play the cock of the walk,” cried the foreman.  “It don’t work.  You try to face me out before all my men.  You threaten me.  You show off your gun-fighting, damn you, and then you call it murder when I beat you fair and square and—­”

He found it impossible to continue.  The prisoner was actually smiling.

“Hound dogs always hunt in the dark,” said Red Jim.

A quiver of fear ran through Hervey.  Indeed, he was haunted by chilly uneasiness all the time.  In vain he assured himself with reason that his victim was utterly helpless.  A ghostly dread remained in the back of his mind that through some mysterious agency the red-headed man would be liberated, and then——.  Hervey shuddered in vital earnest.  What would happen to a crow that dared trap an eagle.

“I’m due back at the ranch,” said Hervey, “to tell ’em how you jumped me here while I was waiting here quiet to warn you again to get out of the Valley of the Eagles peaceable.  Before I go, Perris, is they anything you want done, any messages you want to leave behind you?”

And he set his teeth when he saw that Perris did not blench.  He was perfectly quiet.  Nearness to death sometimes acts in this manner.  It reduces men to the unaffected simplicity of children.

“No message, thanks,” said Red Jim.  “Nobody to leave them to and nothing to leave but a hoss that somebody else will ride and a gun that somebody else will shoot.”

“And the girl?” said Lew Hervey.

And a thrill of consummate satisfaction passed through him, for Red Perris had plainly been startled out of his calm.

“A girl?”

“You know what I mean.  Marianne Jordan.”

He smiled knowingly.

“Well?” said Perris, breathing hard.

“Why, you fool,” cried the foreman, “don’t you know she’s gone plumb wild about you?  Didn’t she come begging to me to get you out of trouble?”

“You lie!” burst out Perris.