“Nobody’d believe such a thing.”

“Folks are ready to believe ’most anything about you.  Your wife would believe it.  Ain’t Las Palmas in her name, and don’t she give you so much a month to spend?  If them ain’t facts, you lied to me.”

“Yes!” Urbina supplemented.  “I can swear to all that.  And I can swear also that you knew about those calves the other day.”

“What!” Ed started.

“Why not?  We were together; your own people saw us.  Well, then, if you would steal your wife’s horses, why would you not steal your neighbor’s cattle?  The relatives of poor Pino Garza—­God rest his soul!—­will bear me out.  I have arranged for that.  Suppose I tell the jury that there were three of us in that pasture of yours, instead of two?  What then?  I would be lonely in prison without a good compadre to bear me company.”  Urbina grinned in evil triumph.

“This is the damnedest outrage I ever heard of,” gasped “Young Ed.”  “It’s a fairy story—­”

“Prove it,” chuckled Lewis.  “The prosecuting attorney’d eat it up, Ed. It sounds kind of crazy, but you can’t ask Adolfo to take to the brush and live like a javelin just for your sake, when you could square him with a word.”

There was a moment or two of silence, during which the visitors watched the face of the man whose weakness they both knew.  At last Ed Austin ventured to say, apologetically: 

“I’m willing to do almost anything to help Adolfo, but—­they’ll make a liar of me if I take the stand.  Isn’t there some other way out?”

“I don’t know of any,” said Lewis.

“Money’ll square anything,” Ed urged, hopefully, whereupon Urbina waved his cigarette and nodded.

“This Ricardo Guzman is the cause of it all.  He is a bad man.”

“No doubt of that,” Lewis agreed.  “He’s got more enemies than I have.  If he was out of the way there wouldn’t be nothin’ to this case, and the country’d be a heap better off, too.”

“What about that other witness?” Ed queried.

“If Ricardo were gone—­if something should happen to him”—­ Urbina’s wicked face darkened—­“there would be no other witness.  I would see to that.”

The color receded from Ed Austin’s purple cheeks, and he rose abruptly.  “This is getting too strong for me,” he cried.  “I won’t listen to this sort of talk.  I won’t be implicated in any such doings.”

“Nobody’s goin’ to implicate you,” Tad told him.  “Adolfo wants to keep you out of trouble.  There’s plenty of people on both sides of the river that don’t like Guzman any better’n we do.  Me an’ Adolfo was talkin’ it over on the way up.”