With revulsion plainly marked in his face, Jode Lenning leaped back from the outstretched hand and the roll of bills as he would from a coiled rattlesnake.
“Squeamish, eh?” jeered Shoup, his eyes two points of light and boring into Lenning’s brain. “You’ve got a lot of cause, after the way you’ve acted, to get on your high horse with me.”
“You’re a plain thief!” gasped Lenning.
“Very plain,” sneered the other; “you’re worse, Lenning, only it’s not so plain.”
Lenning jumped at Shoup with clenched fists.
“What do you mean by that sort of talk?” he demanded chokingly.
“Don’t think you can scare me, Jode. You can’t. If you want a tussle, don’t think for a minute that you’d have the easy end of it. I know you better than anybody else does—better even than your fool of an uncle, who let you pull the wool over his eyes for so long. You’re a coward. When you saw the money in that old woman’s hand bag, you wanted it just as much as I did, only you didn’t have the nerve to take it. Well, I had the nerve; and I was so clever about it that she’ll never know it’s gone until she wants to pay a bill. Now get a grip on yourself and don’t act like a blooming idiot.”
Lenning shivered slightly. The gleaming eyes of his companion were still boring into his brain, and somehow they robbed him of all desire to resent with his fists the hard words Shoup had spoken.
20
“It seems to me as though, if you’re bound to steal, you could pick out some one else for a victim,” Lenning grumbled. “That poor old woman—I can see her face now, with that lock of gray hair falling down from under that rusty old hat and—and—oh, it makes me sick just to think of it!”
He turned away in gloomy protest. Shoup laughed.
“Fine!” said he. “I didn’t know, Jode, that there was so much maudlin sentiment wrapped up in you. How do you know the old lady is so poor, eh? You can’t always judge from appearances. The biggest miser I ever knew—an old curmudgeon that looked like a tramp, had more than a hundred thousand in the bank. There’s two hundred in this roll, and it will stake us until luck begins coming our way.”
The first shock of disgust had passed and Lenning began to take a little interest in his friend’s recent achievement.
“You didn’t lose that morocco case at all, eh?” he asked.
“Not at all; that was merely an excuse for me to go back to the stage and pull off my little play.”
“Suppose I had gone with you to help hunt for the case?”
“I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.”
“Well, how did you manage it?”
“Easy. The old lady was still on the front seat, and when she saw me coming she brightened up a lot. She wanted to know why I was coming back, and I told her that I had lost something in the trail and had come back to look for it. The hand bag lay on the seat beside her. I leaned over the side of the wagon, and began to talk. I called her attention to the wall of the cañon, pointing out a queer formation of the rocks, with my left hand,
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 and, with my right, opening the bag and taking out the money. She never suspected a thing. It was about the easiest job I ever pulled off.”
The shameless steps which he had followed in committing the robbery were recited by Shoup without a shadow of feeling or regret; on the contrary, there was a boasting note in his voice, as though he had accomplished something of which he was proud.
“You’re—you’re a coyote!” muttered Lenning.
“I’m a fox, Jode,” laughed Shoup, “and a slick one, believe me. You couldn’t have turned a trick like that without bungling.”
“I’d as soon think of stealing pennies out of a blind man’s cup. That dope has killed your conscience. I don’t believe you have a heart in you—when you’re under the influence of that fiendish stuff.”
“Oh, cut that out!” grunted Shoup. “We’ve made a raise and we’re going to use the money. We need it—you know we need it. Come on. We’ll see how quick we can get into Ophir and out again. We’ll hire horses and ride to the gulch. It won’t do for us to stay long in the town.”
They started again, Lenning dragging along, moodily thoughtful. His thoughts, whatever they were, must have been far from pleasant. Shoup, abnormally keen while under the spell of the slow poison, seemed to know what his companion was thinking about.
“You’re asking yourself, Jode,” said he jestingly, “how you ever happened to fall so low as to be a friend of mine. You were pretty well down yourself before we got into each other’s company this last time. While you’re thinking what a conscienceless wretch I am, let your mind circle about yourself. What have you got to be proud of?”
22
“Nothing,” snarled Jode.
“That is correct. If we can pick our bone with Merriwell, we’ll both feel a whole lot better; when that’s finished, we’ll clear out of this country and make a long jump to Frisco. That’s the town! We can do big things there.”
“What sort of things?” queried Lenning suspiciously.
“Oh, something safe and profitable. I’m well acquainted, and the friends I have are the kind who’ll help a fellow when he’s down. They’ll take you in on my say-so, and, if you prove loyal to them, you’ll find that they will prove loyal to you, in fair weather or foul. We——”
Lenning cut into Shoup’s remarks with a sharp exclamation. “Duck!” he exclaimed; “get into the brush—quick!”
At this same moment, Lenning suited his action to the word and dove pell-mell into the chaparral beside the trail. Without understanding the reason for this sudden move, Shoup did likewise. The next moment, he heard a tramp of horses’ hoofs in the trail. Riders were coming, and Lenning had been crafty enough to understand that it was not well, after the robbery, for them to be seen in that part of the cañon.
Shoup chuckled. This meant, as he looked at it, that Lenning had accepted the situation and was eager to help his companion avoid the consequences.
Three horses came along at a gallop. Two of the horses had a wagon harness upon them. One of these animals was ridden by a flannel-shirted man, who was probably the stage driver. The third animal was a saddle horse, and was ridden by a young fellow with snapping black eyes and in cowboy rig. One horse in the stage team carried a wagon wheel lashed to its back.
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The horses and their riders flashed by the thicket where Lenning and Shoup lay concealed, and were quickly out of sight and hearing. Lenning crawled slowly back into the trail.
“If we hadn’t been quick,” said he, as Shoup joined him, “they’d have seen us.”
“But they didn’t,” answered Shoup, “so it’s nothing to worry over. What’s the cowboy along for?”
“Give it up. The cowboy was Barzy Blunt, of the Bar Z Ranch. Ever heard of him?”
“No, but there are several cowboys I never heard of, Jode. How has this fellow Blunt ever distinguished himself?”
“Well, when Merriwell first came to Ophir, Blunt got a grouch at him. Blunt is a cowboy athlete, but never had any special training. He thought Merriwell was a conceited Easterner, and made up his mind he’d take a few falls out of him. He tried it.”
“And made a failure, eh?”
“How did you know Blunt failed?”
“Guessed it. It takes a pretty good athlete to beat Merriwell at any sort of sport. But go on.”
“As you say, Blunt failed. Time after time he tried to best Merriwell, but was always beaten out. At last they became friends. There’s an old professor with Merriwell and his pals. They found him holed away in the Picketpost Mountains, holding down a gold ‘prospect.’ Merriwell helped the professor save the ‘prospect,’ and by and by it turned out that the man who had taken Blunt to raise had a grubstake interest in the professor’s claim. The man was dead, but his widow came in for the good thing. The syndicate that has the big gold mine in Ophir, I understand, have paid, or are going to pay, fifty thousand for the mine. That will put Barzy Blunt
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 on Easy Street, for everybody says half the purchase price will come to him when the widow is done with it.”
“Some fellows certainly have a habit of dropping into a good thing,” murmured Shoup.
“It wasn’t a habit with Blunt. He had about as hard a time getting along as any fellow you ever saw.”
“So he and Merriwell were enemies, and now they’re friends?”
“Yes.”
“Look out, Jode!” joked Shoup. “Maybe Merriwell will win you over before you have a chance to settle accounts with him.”
“No danger,” grunted Lenning. “Merriwell hasn’t any more use for me than I have for him. Merriwell wouldn’t wipe his feet on me, I reckon, and you can bet your last sou I wouldn’t give him a chance to try. He knows the sort of father I had, and that I’m headed wrong as a birthright, and will go wrong in spite of fate.”
“What a fellow inherits he can’t get away from,” declared Shoup. “Merriwell, it seems, understands that. When you know a thing’s true, what’s the use of trying to buck against it? We’re all born with a handicap of some sort in the race of life; we’ve got to win by doing the thing that comes easiest.”
This was the logic of a drugged conscience, of a fellow who was not himself at the very moment he brought up the argument. For a lad like Jode Lenning, already started on the downhill road, such a fellow was a dangerous companion.
“I don’t know whether you’ve got the right of that, or not,” said Lenning, “but I hope you haven’t. There are times when I want to turn over a leaf and be different—and never a time more than right now, since my uncle has kicked me out; but——” He hesitated.
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“But you want to hand Merriwell a testimonial of your kind regards before the leaf is turned, eh?” grinned Shoup.
“I’ll show him,” snapped Lenning, “that he had no business butting into my affairs.”
“We’ll both show him, Len. I can be of more help to you than you think. We’ll get horses in Ophir and ride for the gulch. After we’re through with our work there, we’ll clear out of this part of the country and pull off some big things.”
“I wish to thunder,” said Lenning, “that I could look into the future and see just what is going to happen.”
Had he been able to do that, Jode Lenning would probably have received the surprise of his life.