The Fifth Ace Part 3

"Thanks," she drawled, her hand moving to rest lightly on her hip.

"Have you a few more old scores to settle to-day, with that tin Juggernaut of yours?"

A shadow had fallen across the dazzling white of the road, but neither noted it. The girl stood straight as a sapling, smiling up fearlessly into the twisted, sardonic face thrust close to hers.

"You mean that yellow dog I ran over yesterday?" The semblance of mirth was gone from his voice. "The fool wouldn't move quick enough, and if anyone stands in my way I get them, sooner or later. You're a little queen, Billie, and you've been lording it over the roughnecks around here so long that you think you can set your heel on the neck of the universe. A little cave-man stuff would be good for you, my dear."

"You being the cave-man?" Her clear laughter rang out scornfully.

"You aren't very well acquainted with us around here, Mr. Wiley, or you'd realize that it isn't right healthy to appoint yourself to office in these parts. The road is still clear, but you might find it barred with something you couldn't run down if you don't move quick."

"You little she-cat!" He sprang forward and seized the wrist which swung at her side. "You'll take a ride with me, do you hear? And you'll come now, or I'll pick you up and carry----"

He got no farther. Something caught him sidewise and whirled him headlong into the bushes, and a very calm, very resolute voice sounded in almost forgotten tones.

"You'll pick yourself up first, Starr Wiley, and come back for more if you want it. You know what's coming to you!"

Billie started in sheer amazement. There before her, sprung from nowhere, was her companion of yesterday, the smug young man who had wanted to play the chaperon, and who had seemed surprised and shocked when she revealed her ident.i.ty. Her eyes blazed.

"How come you to b.u.t.t in on this little argument?" There was an ominous note in her slow drawl. "No one asked you to sit in, Senor Duenna, I'm playing my own hand. You durn fool, don't you see I had the coyote covered all the time?"

Her hand moved from the hip pocket of her khaki skirt and he saw the glint of the sun upon a small but business-like, blunt-nosed revolver.

Kearn Thode stepped back, his face crimson at the name she had dubbed him as well as at the unexpectedness of her attack, and at that moment Starr Wiley leaped, snarling, from the undergrowth.

The girl stood fascinated. She had seen many rough-and-tumble fights in the history of Limasito, but the clean-cut scientific way the two lean, lithe, well-matched figures sprang to combat thrilled her.

Wiley was the heavier of the two, but indolence and dissipation had softened him and Thode was in the pink of condition. After the first blind onslaught he steadied himself and parried, waiting for the opening his opponent's uncontrolled rage would give him. It was soon forthcoming; a side-stepped lunge left Wiley's pallid face exposed and Thode caught him fairly on the point of the jaw. He shot across the road, crumpled into the ditch and lay quivering and still, as his victim of the day before.

Panting, Thode turned to the girl.

"I am sorry," he said stiffly. "I didn't mean to b.u.t.t in on your game, but, having started, I had to finish."

She seemed not to have heard. Her eyes were shining and a little spot of clear rose showed in her cheeks as she held out her hand.

"A good, clean knock-out!" she cried. "I wish Dad could have seen it.

You're some fighter, Mr.----?"

"Duenna," he supplied grimly. "Do you wish me to leave you here with him now, or shall I wait until he comes to, and see if he wants a fresh deal?"

She laughed merrily.

"Wiley won't be looking for anything but home and a stiff drink of hooch when he gets back to the world," she remarked. "I reckon he's in for quite a siesta."

"We can't very well leave him there." Thode spoke reflectively. "Last time, he had a buckboard and I dumped him back into it. The team took him home, all right, but you can't very well expect that of a motor."

Billie eyed him curiously.

"But you've only just come, and he hasn't driven any team around here."

"We've met before." Thode's face had darkened and his tone was terse.

"His car's drawn well up on the side of the road. I'll just put him in it and he can find his way when he wakes."

The girl watched as he hauled the limp body out of the ditch and thrust it unceremoniously into the seat behind the wheel. Wiley stirred, grunted and then slumped forward, his head resting upon his arms.

"He'll do." Billie gave the unconscious figure a last contemptuous glance. "I like the way you play when you do get into a little game, and unless you want the whole town to be calling you 'Mr. Duenna'

inside of three days, you'd better tell me your name."

He complied, and quite naturally they swung off down the road together.

Thode stole a glance at her in utter bewilderment. A girl who could watch a fight without timidity or squeamishness but in impartial, impersonal joy of the conflict was unique in his experience. She had been angry, contemptuous of them both; would she as heartily have congratulated his adversary, had the tables been turned?

"You are still angry with me for my interference, Miss----?" he began, but she stopped him with a gesture.

"I've been just 'Billie' to all Limasito since the first well was spudded in; you don't want the boys to think you're putting notions into my head, do you?" She smiled, frankly. "I hated you because I'd bragged to you that I could take care of myself and n.o.body would molest me in these parts, and then you had to come along just when it looked as though I was a maiden in distress. You see, I hadn't reckoned on Wiley showing yellow; we don't have many like him in Limasito; at least not long."

"If I thought you a maiden in distress, I proved to be a very superfluous knight-errant," he retorted. "You were well able to take care of yourself, so your boast was no idle one."

"Dad taught me that," she responded simply. "He runs the Blue Chip on the square, but there are times when an extra ace appears in the show-down, and then it isn't a question of who produced it, but which one is quickest on the draw. Five aces never grew in a straight deck, and I sometimes think I can see the fifth ace in an hombre's eye. I saw it in Senor Wiley's."

"I'm going to look in at the Blue Chip, if I may." Thode sheered the topic away from his late antagonist, and Billie followed his lead.

"Of course you must," she said cordially. "You'll find the whole works going; monte, Fairbank, stud and blackjack. There's roulette and c.r.a.ps, too, but it's mostly the women who go after them."

"And you--do you play?" He could not forebear the question.

"Dad says there never was a good bartender yet who drank." Billie grimaced. "He even stopped me being mascot; it always raised a riot.

It isn't the winning hand or the stakes themselves that I care for, it's the fun of the game, but Dad says gambling is a poor game for women. They never count the odds they stack up against, and when they over-play, they're bad losers. You'll like Dad, Mr. Thode; he's the whitest hombre that ever crossed the Rio."

Secretly, Thode was beginning to think that he should. The girl was an anomaly and he was curious to see what manner of man her idol was and learn how he had kept her so singularly free from the dross of his world and managed to hold so unswervingly before her the real stakes of the game, truth and honor and a high heart.

When he left her at the side door of the Blue Chip, the young engineer held her hand for an appreciable moment longer than the occasion demanded.

"I'm coming to-night," he announced. "Will you--will I see you?"

"In the patio," she dimpled swiftly. "Buena suerte!"

"Good luck!" The phrase echoed in his brain, but oddly enough his thoughts did not go forward to the hot, crowded, smoke-hung card-room, or the girl waiting in the cool, fragrant darkness of the inner court, but instead there arose before his mental eyes the vision of a petrified wooden cross beside a gla.s.sy pool, and mingled incongruously with it, the face of Starr Wiley, distorted as he had last seen it, with the bruised lips twisted into a mocking leer. Would the lightly expressed wish of Gentleman Geoff's Billie prove a presage of victory in the great game they two were playing?

CHAPTER III

THE COMING OF EL NEGRITO

When he entered the Blue Chip that night, Thode found play already in full blast. The tables were crowded, smoke hung in low-banked clouds below the flaring oil lamps, and the glittering bar at the far end of the room was phalanxed three deep by a jostling, good-natured throng.

Soft-footed, wooden-faced Chinese mozos glided about, and the whining monotone of the croupier came from a distant corner.

The scene was not an unfamiliar one to the young engineer, but he glanced about him with quickened interest. The walls of the huge room, like the exterior, were painted a garish blue, the floor bare but scrubbed clean, and the chairs and tables had been obviously selected with a view to utility and strength rather than ornamentation. No attempt had been made to render the place attractive and in this Gentleman Geoff's psychology was sound; Limasito wanted its play, like its liquor, without frills.