“Sure, I got feelin’s!  Have a d-drink?” Dade leered drunkenly at the speaker.  “Jack’s—­no good anyway.  Tol’ ’im he’d get hung if he—­have a d-drink?”

The loose-jointed one would, and so would his neighbors.  The Captain glanced back at them, gave a contemptuous lift to his upper lip and faced again to the front.

Dade uncoiled his riata with aimless, fumbling fingers and swung the noose facetiously toward the bottle, uptilted over the eager mouth of a weazened little Irishman.  He caught bottle and hand together, let them go with a quick flip of the rawhide and waggled his head in apology.

“Excuse me, Mike,” he mumbled, while the Irishman stopped and glared.  “Go awn!  Have a drink.  Mighta spilled it—­shame!”

Jack looked back, his heart thumping heavily at sound of the voice, thick though it was and maudlin.  Dade drunk and full of coarse foolery was a sight he had never before looked upon; but Dade’s presence, drunk or sober, made his own plight seem a shade less hopeless.  He did not dare a second glance, with Davis and the Captain walking at either stirrup; but he listened anxiously—­listened and caught a drunken mumble from the rear, and a chorus of chuckling laughs coming after.

He looked ahead.  The great oak was close, so close that he might have counted the narrow little ridges of red soil beneath; the ridges which he knew were the graves of those who had died before him.  The great bough that reached out over the spot where the earth was trampled smooth in horrible significance—­the branch from which a noosed rope dangled sinuously in the breeze that came straight off the ocean—­swayed with majestic deliberation as if Fate herself were beckoning.

He clasped his hands upon the saddle-horn and, stealthily loosening the dagger-point from the hem of his sleeve, slid the weapon cautiously into his hand.  When he felt the handle against his palm, he knew that he had been holding his breath, and that the sigh he gave was an involuntary relief that the others had not glimpsed the blade under his clasped fingers.  He would not have to dangle from that swinging rope, at any rate.

“Hello, pard!” Dade’s voice called thickly from close behind.  “Looking for some rope?”

Jack turned his head just as the looped rawhide slithered past him and settled taut over the head of the startled buckskin.  Like a lightning gleam slashing through the dark he saw Dade’s plan, and played his own part unhesitatingly.

Two movements he made while the buckskin sat back upon his haunches and gathered his muscles for a forward spring.  The first was to lean and send a downward sweep of the dagger across the rope by which Shorty was leading the horse, and the second was a backward lunge that drove the knife deep into the bared throat of the Captain, stunned into momentary inaction by the suddenness of Dade’s assault.