“Of course not.” Howard was thinking. Then he stared at Curtin. “He may carry the outfit wrapped up in his tent. Did the rags look as though tools might be inside of them?”
“Might. They looked bulky enough.”
The fellows occupied themselves for quite a while with their own thoughts.
Curtin finally broke the silence. “I’m almost positive that he’s no government spy and no crow for bandits. He impressed me as being a bit cracked up.”
“Aw, let him stay, for hell’s sake. I’m sick of this twaddle about that mug,” Dobbs said. “We’ve nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Curtin began to explain. “I think we ought to worry. Fact is, he followed me. First he asked me right out if he might come with me to my camp. I said no, he could not. Then he just came trailing after me. For two miles I didn’t mind; then I halted and let him come up. So I said to him, said I: ‘Listen here, you mug, don’t you make me sore. It may cost you dear. I don’t butt into your racket, so you’d better not nose into mine, and we might still be friends. I can talk the other way round just as well, if you get what I mean, and believe me, you hick, I can tackle any guy your size, so you better lay off me if you know what’s healthy for you. And now go to hell or heaven, what do I care?’”
“And what did he say to that?” Howard and Dobbs asked at the same time.
“He said that he didn’t mean to bother me at all, and that he only wanted to be in the company of a white man for a few days because he hadn’t met an American for months, and that he was about to go nuts roaming about the Sierra and seeing only Indians and never hearing a word but corrupt Spanish, and that he wanted to sit for a few nights with a white man by the fire, have a smoke together, and a danm talk, and that was all. To this I said that I didn’t feel like swallowing his chatter and that I wanted to be alone. I think he doesn’t know that I’m not alone up here. I think he has the idea that I’m camping single-handed.”
“Where do you think he is right now?” Dobbs asked.
“Do you think he followed you?” Howard wanted to know.
“I took good care to go ‘way round and look for ground that the burros couldn’t easily leave stamped with their tracks. I even crawled with the animals through long stretches of brush to get the mug off my trail. But, hell, whenever I got a chance to shoot a glance back at him from a higher point of the mountains, I could see that he was coming along all right. Seems he has got a good nose. If I’d been all by myself, I could have thrown him off the trail easily, but with three burros on your hands it couldn’t be done. It’s only a matter of time, for if he means to find me he sure will. No way out. There’s only one question to settle right now.”
“What question?” Dobbs asked.
“What are we going to do with him if he shows up one of these days? We couldn’t very well work the mine any longer with him around for a watch-dog.”
Howard stirred the fire and said: “Hard to tell what to do. If he were an Indian from the valley or from the village below, it wouldn’t matter a bit. An Indian doesn’t stay. He goes back to his village, to his family. It’s different with such a guy. He will smell us out. He won’t be so dumb as not to ask himself why three white men are camping up here for months. We can’t tell him that we’re here on a vacation. We might tell him that we’ve committed a couple of murders and are hiding out. But suppose he’s the wrong kind; he’ll go back after a while and set a company of federal troops after us. If they get you, and the officer in command is in a hurry to return to his jane, he orders his soldiers to shoot you like a sick dog. They shoot you while you are trying to escape. You can’t prove afterwards that they were mistaken, because they bury you right where you drop, and before that they make you dig a hole to spend your time in until the trumpets call you to check up the register of your sins.”
“Tell us all this later,” Dobbs broke in. “We’ve got other worries now. I move that we tell him to check out the minute he pops up, and say to him in a straightforward manner that if we see him around here just once more, we’ll fill his belly up with plums hard enough for him to digest.”
Howard was against such a measure. “That would be foolish. He’d sit around for an hour, play the innocent, and then go down to the nearest town and put the mounted police on our track. Then what? What do the police know about us? We might be escaped convicts, or rebels against the government, or bandits. The police would be here in no time if that guy told them we’ve got stolen treasure with us. Once the police are here, even if they didn’t find anything, we couldn’t stay any longer and we couldn’t take home with us what we have.”
“All right,” Dobbs said, “then there’s nothing else to do but pull the trigger the very minute he comes. Or we might hang him. Then there’ll be peace again.”
