“I'm plenty big; but you're older than I thought.”
“Too old for what you want of me. The girl told me what that was.”
“Not too old to be made what I want.”
And his hands passed through a significant gesture of molding the empty air. The boy met his eye dauntlessly.
“I suppose,” he said, “that I've a pretty small chance of getting away.”
“Just about none, Pierre. Come here.”
Pierre stepped closer and looked down the hall into another room. There, about a table, sat the five grimmest riders of the mountain-desert that he had ever seen. They were such men as one could judge at a glance, and Pierre made that instinctive motion for his six-gun. “The girl,” Jim Boone was saying, “kept you pretty busy tryin' to make a break, and if she could do anything maybe you'd have a pile of trouble with one of them guardin' you. But if I'd had a good look at you, lad, I'd never have let Jack take the job of guardin' you.”
“Thanks,” answered Pierre dryly.
“You got reason; I can see that. Here's the point, Pierre. I know young men because I can remember pretty close what I was at your age. I wasn't any ladies' lap dog, at that, but time and older men molded me the way I'm going to mold you. Understand?”
Pierre was nerved for many things, but the last word made him stir. It roused in him a red-tinged desire to get through the forest of black beard at the throat of Boone and dim the glitter of those keen eyes. It brought him also another thought.
Two great tasks lay before him: the burial of his father and the avenging of him on McGurk. As to the one, he knew it would be childish madness for him to attempt to bury his father in Morgantown with only his single hand to hold back the powers of the law or the friends of the notorious Diaz and crippled Hurley.
And for the other, it was even more vain to imagine that through his own unaided power he could strike down a figure of such almost legendary terror as McGurk. The bondage of the gang might be a terrible thing through the future, but the present need blinded him to what might come.
He said: “Suppose I stop raising questions or making a fight, but give you my hand and call myself a member—”
“Of the family? Exactly. If you did that I'd know it was because you were wantin' something, Pierre, eh?”
“Two things.”
“Lad, I like this way of talk. One—two—you hit quick like a two-gun man. Well, I'm used to paying high for what I get. What's up?” “The first—”
“Wait. Can I help you out by myself, or do you need the gang?”
“The gang.”
“Then come, and I'll put it up to them. You first.”
It was equally courtesy and caution, and Pierre smiled faintly as he went first through the door. He stood in a moment under the eyes of five silent men.
The booming voice of Jim Boone pronounced: “This is Pierre. He'll be one of us if he can get the gang to do two things. I ask you, will you hear him for me, and then pass on whether or not you try his game?”
They nodded. There were no greetings to acknowledge the introduction. They waited, eyeing the youth with distrust.
Pierre eyed them in turn, and then he spoke directly to big Dick Wilbur.
“Here's the first: I want to bury a man in Morgantown and I need help to do it.”
Black Gandil snarled: “You heard me, boys; blood to start with. Who's the man you want us to put out?”
“He's dead—my father.”
They came up straight in their chairs like trained actors rising to a stage crisis. The snarl straightened on the lips of Black Morgan Gandil.
“He's lying in his house a few miles out of Morgantown. As he died he told me that he wanted to be buried in a corner plot in the Morgantown graveyard. He'd seen the place and counted it for his a good many years because he said the grass grew quicker there than any other place, after the snow went.”
“A damned good reason,” said Garry Patterson. As the idea stuck more deeply into his imagination he smashed his fist down on the table so that the crockery on it danced. “A damned good reason, say I!”
“Who's your father?” asked Dick Wilbur, who eyed Pierre more critically but with less enmity than the rest.
“Martin Ryder.”
“A ringer!” cried Bud Mansie, and he leaned forward alertly. “You remember what I said, Jim?”
“Shut up. Pierre, talk soft and talk quick. We all know Mart Ryder had only two sons and you're not either of them.”
The Northerner grew stiff and as his face grew pale the red mark where the stone had struck his forehead stood out like a danger signal.
He said slowly: “I'm his son, but not by the mother of those two.”
“Was he married twice?”
Pierre was paler still, and there was an uneasy twitching of his right hand which every man understood.
