Part 14 (1/2)

”I'll stop your clock right then if you do,” threatened Big Bill with a scowl.

Dud had been busy stamping out the camp-fire while Holway was driving the horses into the brush.

”Mebbe you had better get the camp things behind them big rocks,” Macy conceded.

Even as he spoke there came the crack of a revolver almost at the entrance to the draw.

One of the men swore softly. The gimlet eyes of the old miner fastened on the spot where in another moment his hoped-for rescuers would appear.

A man staggered drunkenly into view. He reeled halfway across the mouth of the draw and stopped. His eyes, questing dully, fell upon the camp.

He stared, as if doubtful whether they had played him false, then lurched toward the waiting group.

”Lost, and all in,” Holway said in a whisper to Dud.

The other man nodded. Neither of them made a move toward the stranger, who stopped in front of their camp and looked with glazed eyes from one to another. His face was drawn and haggard and lined. Extreme exhaustion showed in every movement. He babbled incoherently.

”Seven--eighteen--ninety-nine. 'Atta-boy,” he said thickly.

”Don't you see he's starving and out of his head?” snapped Holt brusquely. ”Get him grub, _p.r.o.nto_.”

The old man rose and moved toward the suffering man. ”Come, pard. Tha'

's all right. Sit down right here and go to it, as the old sayin' is.”

He led the man to a place beside Big Bill and made him sit down. ”Better light a fire, boys, and get some coffee on. Don't give him too much solid grub at first.”

The famished man ate what was given him and clamored for more.

”Coming up soon, pardner,” Holt told him soothingly. ”Now tell us howcome you to get lost.”

The man nodded gravely. ”Hit that line low, Gord. Hit 'er low. Only three yards to gain.”

”Plumb bughouse,” commented Dud, chewing tobacco stolidly.

”Out of his head--that's all. He'll be right enough after he's fed up and had a good sleep. But right now he's sure some Exhibit A. Look at the bones sticking through his cheeks,” Big Bill commented.

”Come, Old-Timer. Get down in your collar to it. Once more now. Don't lie down on the job. All together now.” The stranger clucked to an imaginary horse and made a motion of lifting with his hands.

”Looks like his hawss bogged down in Fifty-Mile Swamp,” suggested Holt.

”Looks like,” agreed Dud.

The old miner said no more. But his eyes narrowed to s.h.i.+ning slits. If this man had come through Fifty-Mile Swamp he must have started from the river. That probably meant that he had come from Kusiak. He was a young man, talking the jargon of a college football player. Without doubt he was, in the old phrasing of the North, a chechako. His clothing, though much soiled and torn, had been good. His voice held the inflections of the cultured world.

Gideon Holt's sly brain moved keenly to the possibility that he could put a name to this human derelict they had picked up. He began to see it as more than a possibility, as even a probability, at least as a fifty-fifty chance. A sardonic grin hovered about the corners of his grim mouth. It would be a strange freak of irony if Wally Selfridge, to prevent a meeting between him and the Government land agent, had sent him a hundred miles into the wilderness to save the life of Gordon Elliot and so had brought about the meeting that otherwise would never have taken place.

CHAPTER X

THE RAH-RAH BOY FUNCTIONS