The woman heard Hank come in the rear door of the shack and she found that she was suddenly frightened. She did not know for sure if the man she had served with a meal an hour or more back was indeed a law officer. But she remembered the hard look to his eyes and the set of his Indian mouth. She remembered his questions and searched over them in her mind. And as she heard Hank moving around behind her, putting something heavy down on the floor and sighing with the effort, she dare not turn to look at him.
Glancing out of the window, she saw that the man under the tree hadn’t stirred. She wondered if he was sleeping, but she had an uneasy feeling that those dark eyes had not moved from the door of her shack. She trembled to think what would have happened if her hired man had come to the front door.
Finally, driven by a morbid fascination, she turned and looked at once at his right hand with its missing thumb, then lifted them to gaze at the deep scar down the side of his face. His pale dead eyes lifted and met hers.
He pointed to the filled gunny-sack he had placed on the floor. “One of the diggers brought in a steer. I got a cut from him. Twenty dollars.”
She tried to stop her voice trembling as she said: “That was high.”
“The way things are, he could of asked twice that. It bein’ you, he said twenty dollars.”
“I’ll give you the money.”
She went to the blanket-cubicle in which she slept and fetched the money. He stood waiting, motionless. When she handed him the money, her hand touched his briefly and she could not suppress a shudder at the contact. He did not appear to notice, but turned at once and headed for the front door.
“No,” she said urgently.
He stopped and turned slowly. “Huh?”
“Not that way. Go out the rear.’
He cocked his head, suddenly tense, stiff with the wariness that is natural to a man who has lived in danger. His flat gaze held her.
“Why?” he asked.
She hesitated. She did not want any trouble. At last she was starting to make money. She wanted no more trouble.
“There was a man here, asking for you,” she said at last and, though the expression on his face did not alter, she felt the reaction to the news to him.
“Should that mean something to me?” he asked with false mildness.
“He described you.”
“What was he like?”
“He was a federal marshal.”
He frowned, puzzled and worried.
“A tall dark hombre. Face like an Indian.”
“That could be him.”
He went to the window, cautiously lifting back the print curtain. He saw McAllister’s prone figure and let out a long sigh.
When he turned bads to the woman, his mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. “What made you think he was a lawman?”
“Isn’t he?”
“If he is, I’m the president of the United States.” But he made no attempt to go out the front way. Soft as a cat he walked to the rear door and remarked before he went out, “You want to duck trouble, tell him I wasn’t here.”
She watched him walk quickly into the rocks and ran back to the front window to look at McAllister. Her heart leapt in alarm when she saw that he was no longer there.
Dix, once he was under cover and out of earshot of McAllister, broke into a run. He worked his way along a ledge above the workings and did not climb down till he was a half-mile down-gulch. Here he found two miners at work. He whistled them and they came at once from their labors and joined him in their little leanto. The three of them squatted and Dix said, grinning: “Found any gold?”
One man, with a broken nose and large yellow teeth said: “What if we did?”
Dix sobered quickly. “Trouble,” he said. “The Malcolm marshal’s here.”
The second man, thickset and bearded, said: “How the hell?”
“The bastard smells trouble.”
“Did any more diggers come through today?”
“Must have rid in on his lonesome.”
They looked at him in awe, unbelieving.
The bearded man said caustically: “So - what does this make us?”
With a little heat Dix said: “It could make us dead men. I know this jasper. I reckon we don’t wait for word from the boss. We clean up what we can tonight and get out.”
“Christ,” the man with the broken nose said, “they’s Indians out there.”
Dix said: “There’ll be eight of us. All well-armed. The Indians ain’t born that can stop us.”
The bearded one said: “All for one Goddam marshal? Knock the sonovabitch off and take our time about the other.”
Dix thought it over and didn’t like it. “See here,” he said, “you ever know me turn yellow?”
Broken-nose said: “Can’t say I have.”
“Then for Gawd’s sake listen and give your ass a chance.” He talked. He put all he had into what he said and they listened to him. He had the ear of the boss and he had to be listened to. By the time he finished, he had them convinced. There was enough gold in the camp to make the venture worthwhile. The boys had kept their ears and eyes open and knew a good many men who had reasonable amounts of gold cached away already. The gulch was rich. If they managed to stay here there would be even better pickings later. But gold in the hand was worth gold in the other man’s pocket anyday. The other two nodded. “Besides,” Dix ended, “working for the woman, I seen and heard some useful stuff.”
They started listing names, they fixed times, then the two men went back to work and Dix stretched out on their blankets and slept. He wasn’t going to put his head outside this shebang till it was good and dark.