"That's where you're wrong. One is enough. We used to be good friends, but those days are past. None of us can keep a man from being a durned fool if he wants to be one. Nor a scoundrel. You've got the bit in your teeth and I reckon you'll go till there is a smash. But you better understand this. When you choose Soapy Stone's, crowd to run with that cuts out me and other decent folks. If they have sent you here to get me mixed up in their deviltry you go back and tell them there's nothing doing." "Won't have a thing to do with them. Is that it?" "Not till the call comes for citizens to get together and run them out of the country. Or to put them behind bars. Or to string them to a cottonwood. Then I'll be on the job." He stood there quiet and easy, the look in his steady eyes piercing Curly's ironic smile as a summer sun does mackerel clouds in a clear sky. Not many men would have had the courage to send that message to Soapy and his outfit. For Stone was not only a man killer, but a mean one at that. Since he had come back from the penitentiary he had been lying pretty low, but he brought down from the old days a record that chilled the blood. Curly sloughed his foolishness and came to the point. "You're on, Slats. I'm making that call to you now." The eyes of the two men fastened. Those of Flandrau had quit dancing and were steady as the sun in a blue sky. Surprise, doubt, wonder, relief filled in turn the face of the other man. "I'm listening, Curly." His friend told him the whole story from the beginning, just as he had been used to do in the old days. And Davis heard it without a word, taking the tale in quietly with a grim look settling, on his face. "So he aims to play traitor to young Cullison. The thing is damnable." "He means to shut Sam's mouth for good and all. That is what he has been playing for from the start, to get even with Luck. He and his gang will get away with the haul and they will leave Sam dead on the scene of the hold-up. There will be some shooting, and it will be figured the boy was hit by one of the train crew. Nothing could be easier." "If it worked out right." "Couldn't help working out right. That's why Soapy didn't let me in on the proposition. To get rid of one would be no great trouble, but two--well, that's different. Besides, I could tell he was not sure of me. Now he aims to put me on the stand and prove by me that Sam and he had a quarrel and parted company mighty sore at each other hardly a week before the hold-up. He'll have an alibi too to show he couldn't have been in it. You'll see." "You wouldn't think a white man could take a revenge like that on his enemy. It's an awful thing to do in cold blood."