“I am taking a chance that Vidal Nunez is at Galloway’s right now,” he told the hotel keeper.  “I am going to get him if he is.  I want you to watch the back end of the Casa Blanca and see that he doesn’t slip out that way.  A shotgun is what you want.  Blow the head off any man who doesn’t stop when you tell him to.  Is Tom Cutter in his room yet?”

While Struve, wasting neither time nor words, went to see, Norton unbuttoned his shirt, removed the thirty-eight-caliber revolver from the holster slung under his left arm, whirled the cylinder, and kept the gun in his left hand.  In a moment Struve had returned, the deputy at his heels.

“What’s this about Vidal being here?” Cutter asked sharply.

Norton explained briefly and as briefly gave Tom Cutter his orders.  While Struve mounted guard at the rear, Cutter was to look out for the front of the building.

“Going in alone, are you, Rod?” Cutter shook his head.  “If Vidal is in there, and Galloway and the Kid and Antone are all on the job, the chances are there’s going to be something happen.  Better let me come in along with you.”

But Norton, his mouth grown set and grim and chary of words, shook his head.  Followed by Struve and Cutter he was outside in the darkness five minutes after he had entered the hotel.

Struve, a shotgun in his hands, took his place twenty steps from the back door of the Casa Blanca, his restless eyes sweeping back and forth continually, taking stock of door and window; a lamp burning in a rear room cast its light out through a window whose shade was less than half drawn.  Tom Cutter, accustomed to acting swiftly upon his superior’s suggestions, listened wordlessly to the few whispered instructions, nodded, and did as he was told, effacing himself in the shadows at the corner of the building, prepared when the time came to spring out into the street whence he could command the front and one side of the Casa Blanca.  Norton, before leaving Cutter, had drawn the heavy gun from the holster swinging at his belt.

“It’s some time since we’ve had any two-handed shooting to do, Tommy,” he said as his lean fingers curved to the familiar grip of the Colt 45.  “But I guess we haven’t forgotten how.  Now, stick tight until you hear things wake up.”

He was gone, turning back to the rear of the house, passing close to Struve, going on to the northeast corner, slipping quietly about it, moving like a shadow along the eastern wall.  Here were two windows, both looking into the long barroom, both with their shades drawn down tight.

At the first window Norton paused, listening.  From within came a man’s voice, the Kid’s, in his ugly snarl of a laugh, evil and reckless and defiant, that and the clink of a bottle-neck against a glass.  Norton, his body pressed against the wall, stood still, waiting for other voices, for Galloway’s, for Vidal Nunez’s.  But after Kid Rickard’s jarring mirth it was strangely still in the Casa Blanca; no noise of clicking chips bespeaking a poker game, no loud-voiced babble, no sound of a man walking across the bare floor.