“Peter, please take this fighting squaw to the house and lock her up somewhere. Then come back here. I want to have a talk with you before I go,” he said hardly. “I can handle this vermin, but I leave the squaw to you.” “As you like,” Peter’s voice was noncommittal. “Come, Nevada.” Rawley had expected some outburst from her, some bitter reply to his taunt. But she went away with Peter and spoke no word to any one. So Rawley pulled off his necktie and tied Young Jess’s hands behind him, and made himself a smoke while he waited Peter’s return. “I’ll git you, and I’ll git you right!” gritted Young Jess, when Rawley had his cigarette going. “You better kill me now, or you’ll see the day you’ll be begging me to kill yuh. I’ll ketch yuh and take yuh back in the mine, an’ I’ll--” He amused himself for some minutes, making up the programme of his revenge. He would finish, he decided, by building a bed of powder kegs and placing Rawley full length upon it, with a ten-foot fuse spitted just before Young Jess bade him good-by. “You ought to have lived fifty years ago,” Rawley commented indifferently, and blew smoke in his face. “Why don’t yuh squeal for that old buzzard of a dad? Maybe he could help yuh out, right now.” Young Jess, having just made up his mind to shout for Old Jess to come, shut his mouth so hard his teeth clicked like a dog cracking a bone. “Any fool can plan the things he’d _like_ to do,” Rawley taunted. “What counts is the fact that you’re on your back, right now, and that I put you there--and you with a gun in your hands! I could kick you in the slats and make you howl like a kicked pup. I could drive your teeth in, so you’d feed yourself in the back of your head the rest of your life! Don’t talk to _me_--about what you’d like to do! I’m liable to experiment on yuh, just to see how it works.” Then Peter returned, and further social amenities were postponed to some future meeting. CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN “YOU TELL HOOVER I SAID SO!”