It puzzled Andrew, but the big man ran on smoothly enough: "Lanning
ain't a popular name around here, you see? Suppose somebody was to come
around and say, 'Seen Lanning?' What could I say, if you was here? 'I've
got a Lanning here. I dunno but he's the one you want.' But suppose I
don't know anything except you're Jasper's nephew? Maybe you're related
on the mother's side. Eh?" He winked at Andrew. "You come along and
don't talk too much about names."
He led the way into the house and picked up one of the posters, which
lay on the floor.
"They've sent those through the mountains already?" asked Andrew
gloomily.
"Sure! These come down from Twin Falls. Now, a gent with special fine
eyes might find that you looked like the gent on this poster. But my
eyes are terrible bad mostly. Besides, I need to quicken up that fire."
He crumpled the poster and inserted it beneath the lid of his iron
stove. There was a rush and faint roar of the flame up the chimney as
the cardboard burned. "And now," said Hank Rainer, turning with a broad
smile, "I guess they ain't any reason why I should recognize you. You're
just a plain stranger comin' along and you stop over here for the night.
That all?"
Andrew had followed this involved reasoning with a rather bewildered
mind, but he smiled faintly in return. He was bothered, in a way, by the
extreme mental caution of this fellow. It was as if the keen-eyed
trapper were more interested in his own foolish little subterfuge than
in preserving Andrew. "Now, tell me, how is Jasper?"
"I've got to tell you one thing first. Dozier has raised the mountains,
and I could never cross 'em now."
"Going to turn back into the plains?"
"No. The ranges are wide enough, but they're a prison just the same.
I've got to get out of 'em now or stay a prisoner the rest of my life,
only to be trailed down in the end. No, I want to stay right here in
your cabin until the men are quieted down again and think I've slipped
away from 'em. Then I'll sneak over the summit and get away unnoticed."
"Man, man! Stay here? Why, they'll find you right off. I wonder you got
the nerve to sit there now with maybe ten men trailin' you to this
cabin. But that's up to you."
There was a certain careless calm about this that shook Andrew to his
center again. But he countered: "No, they won't look specially in
houses. Because they won't figure that any man would toss up that
reward. Five thousand is a pile of money."
"It sure is," agreed the other. He parted his red beard and looked up to
the ceiling. "Five thousand is a considerable pile, all in hard cash.
But mostly they hunt for this Andrew Lanning a dozen at a time. Well,
you divide five thousand by ten, and you've got only five hundred left.
That ain't enough to tempt a man to give up Lanning--so bad as
all that."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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