“Not until I’ve paid you out in full, you devils,” said MacGregor quietly. “I’ll give you an hour of living hell for every prod you’ve given me, you poor cur.” Joey approached him and unhooked the traces from his harness with an air that told how well he was accustomed to such threats. “Must call it a day, Shanty,” he said, loosening the straps that bound MacGregor’s hands so the forearms were free while the upper arms remained bound tightly to his sides. “Old pit’s full o’ smoke.” In bored sort of fashion he kicked MacGregor into the creek. “To your stable, jackass. Day’s done.” MacGregor, tripped by the traps about his ankles, fell full length in the water, floundered across, and crawled miserably out of sight behind the skin front of the smaller dugout. Moir and his two henchmen watched him, jeering and laughing. At a sign the two on the other side of the creek came across and drew close to their chief. “And now, old son,” snarled Moir, swinging around on Reivers like a flash, “now, you slick waster—now we’ll attend to ’ee.” CHAPTER XXXIX—JAMES MACGREGOR’S STORY The three men moved forward until they were within arm’s reach of Reivers, and stood regarding him with open grins on their hairy faces. Reivers, reading the import of their grins, knew that they were bent upon enjoying themselves at his expense, and tried swiftly to guess what form their amusement might take. If it were only horse-play he would be able to continue in the helpless character he had assumed. If it were to be rougher than that, if they set out to break him in real earnest, he feared that his acting was at an end. Even for the sake of the gold that he was after he would hardly be able to submit, humbly and helplessly as became a drunken squaw-man, to their efforts to make a wreck of him. He calculated his chances of coming through alive if the situation developed to this extreme, and decided that the odds were a trifle too heavy against him. The element of surprise would be on his side, but his right shoulder still was weak from the old bullet-wound. With his terrible ability to use his feet he calculated that he could drop Moir and Tammy with broken bones as they rushed him. To do that he would have to drop to his back, and Joey, the third man, wore a long skinning-knife on his hip. No, if he began to fight he would never get what he had come after. He wiped his mouth furtively and swayed from the knees up. “I want some hooch, mister, that’s what I want,” he whined shakily. “You promised you’d give me a drink when we got here, you know you did. Haven’t had a drop since morning. I wouldn’t ‘a’ come if I’d known you were going to treat me like this.” Then he did the best acting of his life. He jumped sideways and shuddered; he frantically plucked imaginary bugs off his coat sleeve; he stepped high as if stepping over something on the ground; his eyes and face muscles worked spasmodically.