“Thank you!” said the voice; “you can slide on now.”

“And thank you for nothing,” said Bill, gathering up his reins.  “It’s the first time any of your kind had to throw down a tree to hold me up!”

“You’re lying, Bill!—­though you don’t know it,” said the voice cheerfully.  “Far from throwing down a tree to stop you, it was I sent word along the road to warn you from crashing down upon it, and sending you and your load to h-ll before your time!  Drive on!”

The angry Bill waited for no second comment, but laying his whip over the backs of his team, drove furiously forward.  So rapidly had the whole scene passed that the inside passengers knew nothing of it, and even those on the top of the coach roused from their stupor and inglorious inaction only to cling desperately to the terribly swaying coach as it thundered down the grade and try to keep their equilibrium.  Yet, furious as was their speed, Yuba Bill could not help noticing that the expressman from time to time cast a hurried glance behind him.  Bill knew that the young man had shown readiness and nerve in the attack, although both were hopeless; yet he was so much concerned at his set white face and compressed lips that when, at the end of three miles’ unabated speed, they galloped up to the first station, he seized the young man by the arm, and, as the clamor of the news they had brought rose around them, dragged him past the wondering crowd, caught a decanter from the bar, and, opening the door of a side room, pushed him into it and closed the door behind them.

“Look yar, Brice!  Stop it!  Quit it right thar!” he said emphatically, laying his large hand on the young fellow’s shoulder.  “Be a man!  You’ve shown you are one, green ez you are, for you had the sand in ye—­the clear grit to-night, yet you’d have been a dead man now, if I hadn’t stopped ye!  Man! you had no show from the beginning!  You’ve done your level best to save your treasure, and I’m your witness to the kempany, and proud of it, too!  So shet your head and—­and,” pouring out a glass of whiskey, “swaller that!”

But Brice waved him aside with burning eyes and dry lips.

“You don’t know it all, Bill!” he said, with a half choked voice.

“All what?”

“Swear that you’ll keep it a secret,” he said feverishly, gripping Bill’s arm in turn, “and I’ll tell you.”

“Go on!”

“The coach was robbed before that!”

“Wot yer say?” ejaculated Bill.

“The treasure—­a packet of greenbacks—­had been taken from the box before the gang stopped us!”

“The h-ll, you say!”

“Listen!  When you told me to hand down the box, I had an idea—­a d——­d fool one, perhaps—­of taking that package out and jumping from the coach with it.  I knew they would fire at me only; I might get away, but if they killed me, I’d have done only my duty, and nobody else would have got hurt.  But when I got to the box I found that the lock had been forced and the money was gone.  I managed to snap the lock again before I handed it down.  I thought they might discover it at once and chase us, but they didn’t.”