The blue of the eastern horizon grew shallower, changing to a cold thin gray which warmed slowly to the straw color of tempering steel. The tramp, watching the sky, shook his clenched fist at the dawn. "You, up there!" he growled. "You didn't give me a square deal when I was down and out that time--in Sonora. I had to crawl to it alone. But I'll show you that I'm bigger than you. I'm goin' back to the tenderfoot and see him through if I swing pole-high for it."
It was light when the tramp had arrived at the water-hole. He crept behind a sharp dip in the hummocks. The crest of his hiding-place was covered with brush. It was a natural rifle-pit affording him seclusion and shelter.
With the sun came the faint thud of hoofs as two riders came warily up to the water-hole. One dismounted and stooped over Winthrop. The other sat his horse, silent, vigilant, saturnine.
"Say, where's your pal, that there Overland Red guy?" asked the constable, shaking Winthrop awake and glaring at him with a bleared and baleful eye.
The man on the horse frowned, considering, in the light of his experience as a successful and still living two-gun man, that such tactics were rather crude.
The Easterner sat up, coughed and blinked in the dawn. "Where is what? Why, good-morning! You're up early." And his eye swept the empty camp. So Overland Red had deserted him, after all. He might have expected as much. "I haven't any 'pal,' as you can see. I'm out here studying insect life, as I told you I would be, yesterday. You needn't shake me any more. I'm awake. I can't say that I'm exactly pleased with my first specimen."
"Oh! I'm a specimen, am I? I'm a insect, hey? Well, you're crooked, and you just talk up quick or the calaboose for yours!"
"No. I beg your pardon--but, no. You are in no condition, this morning, to talk with a gentleman. However, you are my guest. Have a cigar?"
The horseman's eyes twinkled. He admired the young Easterner's coolness. Not so the constable.
"See here, you swindlin' tin-horn shell-shover, you cough up where Overland Red is or there'll be somethin' doin'. You doped that booze yesterday, but you can't throw no bluff like that to-day."
Much to the constable's surprise he found himself sitting on Winthrop's blankets and one of his eyes felt as though some one had begun to stitch it up quickly with coarse thread.