“Wait a minute,” said Trainor. “I don’t keep up with you. I’m a Russian trapper, you say? Well, Haines, I guess I’ll get my laugh out of you without waiting until tomorrow.”
“Bah!” snapped Haines, suddenly in dead earnest. “You know what I mean. I mean that you’re the man who stayed with Bigot this winter. You must think I’m a fool not to see through it? You’re the man who wrote the letters.”
“Partner,” said Trainor softly, “something has happened to your head. What letters?”
“All right,” said Haines. “I was going to make a little proposition to you. But, if I can’t do that, I’ll turn around and go to Alice Cary in the morning and tell her what I suspect.”
“And that is?”
“Why, simply that you were marooned in a storm, found Joe’s cabin, had good reasons for wanting to stay quiet during a month or two, and so remained with him. While you were there, Joe tells you what a hard time he’s having keeping up his end of the correspondence with Alice. You offer to take a hand. He tells you about her. You get interested. He shows you her picture. You sit down and start writing love letters on your own account, you might say, and you let him copy them and sign his name.”
The narrative was so wonderfully faithful, so nearly exactly the truth, that Trainor was floored. He could neither laugh nor grow angry for an instant, and during that moment he knew that the ferret eyes of Haines had burrowed into his face and seen the truth in his confusion.
“By thunder!” cried Haines. “It is true, then. It’s more than a guess. I couldn’t believe it. But now I know that it’s true.”
Trainor ground his teeth. He had mistaken Larry’s assumption of certainty for the fact. Now he must pay the penalty.
“And what’s more,” went on Haines, thinking aloud now, “if you stayed all winter with Joe, you did have a reason for it. And, if there was a reason for you to stay there, maybe there’s a reason for other people to want you somewhere else, eh?” He was fairly rushing upon a complete discovery. “I think,” continued Haines, “that, if I were to telegraph to certain places in the States, they’d be pretty interested in a description of you, eh?”
Trainor meditated quickly. It was plain that Haines felt his first step in destroying Bigot’s influence with the girl must be to get rid of Joe’s new friend. No matter if he intended to leave the next day and never return again. Haines would not believe that, and straightway he would bring the powersof the law down upon the head of Trainor. But what could he do to checkmate the younger man?
“Haines,” he said, “you’d never find out anything in time to stop the wedding.”
Haines started. “You admit everything, then?”
“That’s not the point. I say you’ve started on the trail too late.”
“Not a bit too late.”
“What could you do? How could you stop things from going on the way they’ve started now?”
“Very easy. I get Joe Bigot and the girl together. Then I tell them that you have confessed, and I recount the whole story. Do you think that old pigheaded Bigot will have brains enough to laugh the story down? No, he’ll blurt out a confession of his own and leave Alice and me laughing at him.”
Jack Trainor saw that it was not more than the truth. Still he fought against that belief.
“You forget,” he said, “that Joe’s improving. Look at the nice little series of lies he’s just told today. And he was taken by surprise, at that. But now I’ll get him prepared for you. I’ll even work up his counter story.”
“No,” said Larry Haines. “You’ll do nothing like that.”
“No?”
“Certainly not. You and I, my friend, are coming to an understanding!”
“Impossible, Haines. I’m Bigot’s friend.”
“You are? You’ll be more my friend than you are his before I’m through with you.”
Trainor shrugged his shoulder. A slight chill was creeping over him. He could not estimate what strength the other might have in reserve.
“I can pay a high price,” went on Haines calmly.
“You can? Not high enough,” answered Jack.
“Good!” said Haines. “I’m glad to see that you’re not going to start by talking virtue and end up by talking dollars. I’d rather have the dollars talk from the first. It’s cheaper that way. I can begin, you see, by offering to keep away from the telegraph.”
“You start with that. What that means I can’t tell.”
“I’m not asking you to confess anything about that. I’m asking you simply to listen to reason after you’ve heard me state my terms. The first of them is that I won’t try to get the law on your shoulders. The second one is that I’ll give you a fat little stake for yourself. Understand?”
“A stake for myself and no jail,” said Trainor curtly. “That sounds good to me!”
“Now we’re beginning to talk business, eh?”
“Looks that way. How much of a stake, though?”
Haines hesitated. “A thousand…” he began.
Trainor laughed. “I thought we were going to talk business?” he said.
“How much do you want?”
“A pile more than a thousand.”
“Why should you get it?”
“Because I’m going to give you a signed confession telling you everything from the first.”
Haines jerked back his head and laughed softly to himself.
“I’ll boost it over a thousand, then,” he said. “Nobody has ever had to call me a miser.”
“How high above? Remember, you’re bidding for a wife.”
There was an angry snarl from the other at this implication, but he said no articulate word.
“I’ll make that two thousand dollars cold, my friend! Will that do you?”
“That’s about right. That gives me a little leeway.” He paused. “Suppose you give me a check for that right now?”
“Well, I can give you my note for it. Step into the hotel.”
“Come up to my room. I’ve got to get a room, and we can talk things over there, eh?”
Accordingly Larry Haines followed into the hotel where Jack secured a room and went up to it in the company of the other. There he sat down to the little table in the center of the room and took paper and pen and ink out of the drawer.
“Now,” he said, “I’ll sit here and watch you do it, and you sit right over there, opposite, and write out the confession. And, when you’re through with it, I’ll give you an I.O.U. Will that do?”
“Certainly,” said Trainor.
He stepped to the table, dragged up a chair, and stooped as though to sit down. Instead of lowering himself into the chair, however, he shot out his right fist. It landed high along the side of Larry’s head. The latter had seen the shadow of the arm dart out across the top of the table and had flinched. Even in that infinitely slight moment, he had been able to reach the gun that he wore concealed in his clothes, for, when he toppled to the floor and Jack rushed around the table to pick him up, he found that the long Colt was lying in the loose fingers of the fallen man. It was such a tribute to his speed that it sent the shivers again flying up Trainor’s back. Suppose it had been gunplay?
Chapter 10
If he felt any scruples, however, they were short-lived. He had, to be sure, tricked the man shamefully. But all things were fair, so it seemed, in combating one who did not hesitate to purchase a wife, and who, on the way to that end, thought nothing of buying the honor of another man. In the meantime, he had need for speed of hand rather than debates of conscience. Quickly he ripped up a sheet, and with the bands he bound Larry hand and foot and gagged him. All this he accomplished before the latter opened his eyes. The blow had landed just back of the temple where the skull is softest and thinnest and a great purple blur was beginning to show up where the hair did not cover it.