“How are you, Jim Nabours?” said he quietly. He dropped both his hands to his own saddle horn.
“You have broke your word, Mr. McMasters,” said he. “You are in a risky place right now.”
“I come with my hands up,” said McMasters. “I’m in no more risk than you are. But I am going back with you to your own camp.”
“No! We want no truck with you.” Then a sense of the proprieties coming to him, he added, “You’re counting too damn much on what you done down at the Red. No one ast you.”
“Look at my horse,” said McMasters quietly. “He’s a Fishhook, isn’t he? Yes. And I have been back of this herd or alongside of it for three hundred and fifty miles. You know that you got my letter, and you seem to have followed my advice. You’ve done very well by it. You’d have done a lot better if I’d been with you before you tried that crossing.”
“Well, we put you out of our camp oncet. We meant it. We hain’t held no trial sence then. I haven’t ast you in, no time.”
“Yes; but you don’t seem to be able to keep me out. I’ll ride this country the way I like, and not even Texans can keep me from it. I have come now because I think you need me again, and need me very much.”
He told his news. The features of Nabours changed as he listened.
“My God!” said he. Then, suspicion dominant again: “But you was traveling with them people. You went right from us to them. Now here you’re back.”
“I need travel with them no more. I have got what I was after. I know who killed my father and Miss Lockhart’s father. I am coming into your camp, and I am going to talk with Miss Lockhart.”
“She sont you out oncet. We tried you. She won’t talk to you—no, not even after what you done. She’s never mentioned your name about that.” Nabours still sat looking at him uneasily. “Besides, my men won’t let you in again.”
“No? I have been in your camp more than once since you first put me out.”
“No? Jim, who killed that man near the women’s carts the night of the big run on the Colorado?”
“I don’t know who killed him; I only know he was dead.”
“Well, that man was after the trunk you thought that I had stolen. Rudabaugh wants that trunk. He sent his boldest man after it that night. I was a little ahead of him, that was all. You know what happened to him. Now you know who did it. Yes, you might say I stole Miss Lockhart’s trunk and put it in my wagon. But I stole it from Rudabaugh, not from her. What I said at the trial was true. Theft from her—why, good Heavens!”