“They must ‘a’ blew the dam up.  Them shots we heard!” one ventured without spirit.

“Who blew it up?” demanded one of the Jackpot men belligerently.  “If you say we did, you’re a liar.”

He was speaking the truth so far as he knew.  The man who had been through the waters did not take up the challenge.  Officers in the army say that men will not fight on an empty stomach, and his was very empty.

“I’ll remember this, Hart,” Doble said, and his face was a thing ill to look upon.  The lips were drawn back so that his big teeth were bared like tusks.  The eyes were yellow with malignity.

“Y’betcha!  The boys’ll look after that, Dug,” retorted Bob lightly.  “Every time you hook yore heel over the bar rail at the Gusher, you’ll know they’re laughin’ at you up their sleeves.  Sure, you’ll remember it.”

“Some day I’ll make yore whole damned outfit sorry for this,” the big hook-nosed man threatened blackly.  “No livin’ man can laugh at me and get away with it.”

“I’m laughin’ at you, Dug.  We all are.  Wish you could see yoreself as we see you.  A little water takes a lot o’ tuck outa some men who are feelin’ real biggity.”

Byington, at this moment, sauntered into the assembly.  He looked around in simulated surprise.  “Must be bath night over at you-all’s camp, Dug.  You look kinda drookid yore own self, as you might say.”

Doble swore savagely.  He pointed with a shaking finger at Sanders, who was standing silently in the background.  “Tha’s the man who’s responsible for this.  Think I don’t know?  That jail bird!  That convict!  That killer!” His voice trembled with fury.  “You’d never a-thought of it in a thousand years, Hart.  Nor you, Buck, you old fathead.  Wait.  Tha’s what I say.  Wait.  It’ll be me or him one day.  Soon, too.”

The paroled man said nothing, but no words could have been more effective than the silence of this lean, powerful man with the close-clamped jaw whose hard eyes watched his enemy so steadily.  He gave out an impression of great vitality and reserve force.  Even these hired thugs, dull and unimaginative though they were, understood that he was dangerous beyond most fighting men.  A laugh snapped the tension.  The Jackpot engineer pointed to a figure emerging from the arroyo.  The man who came dejectedly into view was large and fat and dripping.  He was weeping curses and trying to pick cactus burrs from his anatomy.  Dismal groans punctuated his profanity.

“It stranded me right on top of a big prickly pear,” he complained.  “I like never to ‘a’ got off, and a million spines are stickin’ into me.”

Bob whooped.  “Look who’s among us.  If it ain’t our old friend Ad Miller, the human pincushion.  Seein’ as he drapped in, we’ll collect him right now and find out if the sheriff ain’t lookin’ for him to take a trip on the choo-choo cars.”

The fat convict looked to Doble in vain for help.  His friend was staring at the ground sourly in a huge disgust at life and all that it contained.  Miller limped painfully to the Jackpot in front of Hart.  Two days later he took the train back to the penitentiary.  Emerson Crawford made it a point to see to that.