"Yes, if a chinook blows up Kettlebelly Valley--there ain't no other
way. The manna days is all gone by."
"There's another way. This is an old worked-out mine we're in, the Lost
Ledge Mine."
"She's worked out, right enough. There never was nothin' but a few
stringers of gold--they soon petered out."
"When the men who were working this mine pulled out they left a lot of
heavy truck behind," Carney continued. "There's a forge, coal, tools,
and, what I'm thinking of, half a dozen sets of horse snowshoes back
there. I could put a set of those snowshoes on the buckskin and make
Bucking Horse in three or four days. He wore them down in the Cour
d'Alene."
"If you had the grub," Dave snapped; "where're you goin' to get that?"
"Half of what you've got would keep me up that long on short rations."
"And what about me--where do I come in on givin' you half my grub?"
"The other half would keep you alive till I could bring a rescue party
on snowshoes and dog-train." Dave sucked at his pipe, pondering this
proposition in silence; then he said, as if having made up his mind to
do a generous act: "I'll cut the cards with you--your bronch agin half
my chuck. If you win you can try this fool trick, if I win the bronch
is mine to do the same thing, or use him to keep us both alive till a
chinook blows up."
From an inside pocket of his coat he brought forth a pack of cards, and
slid them apart, fan-shaped, on the corner of his blanket.
Carney was almost startled into a betrayal. On the backs of the cards
winged _seven blue doves_. It was the pack that had been stolen from
Seth Long's pocket, and the man that sat behind them was the murderer
of Seth Long, Carney knew. Yes, it was the same pack; there was the same
slight variation of the wings. In a second Carney had mastered himself.
"I guess it's fair," he said hesitatingly; "let me think it over--I'm
fond of that little cuss, but I guess a man's life comes first."
He sat looking into the fire thinking, and if Dave had been a mind
reader the gun in his belt would have covered Carney for the latter was
thinking, "There are three aces in that pack and the fourth is in my
pocket."
Then he spoke, shifting closer to the blanket on which the other sat:
"I'll cut!"
"Draw a card, then," Dave commanded, touching the strung-out pack.
Carney could see the acute-angled wings of the middle dove on a card; he
turned it up--it was the ace of diamonds.
"Some draw!" Dave declared. Then he deftly flipped over the ace of
spades, adding: "Horse and horse, Bulldog; draw agin."
"Shuffle and spread-eagle them again, for luck," Carney suggested.
Dave gathered the cards, gave them a riffle, and swept them along the
blanket in a tenuous stream.
Carney edged closer to the ribbon of blue-doved cards; and the owner of
them, a sneer on his lips, craned his head and shoulders forward in a
gambler's eagerness.
Intensity, too, seemed to claim Bulldog; he rested his elbows on his
knees and scanned the cards as if he hesitated over the risk. There, a
little to the right, he discovered the third ace, the only one in the
pack. If he turned that Dave could not tie him again. He knew that the
minute he turned over that card the cave-man would know that he had been
double-crossed in his sure thing; his gun would be thrust into Carney's
face; perhaps--once a killer always a killer--he would not hesitate but
would kill.
So Carney let his right hand hover carelessly a little beyond the ace,
while his left crept closer to Dave's right wrist.
"Why don't you draw your card?" Dave snarled. "What're you----"
Carney's right hand flopped over the ace of clubs, and in the same split
second his left closed like the jaws of a vise on Dave's wrist.
"Turn over a card with your left hand, quick!" he commanded.
Dave, as if in the act of obeying, reached for his gun with the left
hand, but a twist of the imprisoned wrist, almost tearing his arm from
the shoulder socket, turned him on his back, and his gun was whisked
from its pigskin pocket by Carney.
Then Bulldog released the wrist and commanded: "Draw that card, quick,
or I'll plug you; then we'll talk!"