"Miss Thorne hired yuh, then?" he remarked in a non-committal voice which yet held no touch of friendliness. "Well, that's different. Where've yuh worked?"
"The last outfit was the Three-Circles in Texas." Buck named at random an outfit in the southern part of the state with which he was slightly acquainted. "Been in the army over two years, and just got my discharge."
"Texas?" repeated Lynch curtly. "How the devil do yuh happen to be lookin' for work here?"
"I'd heard Joe Bloss was foreman," explained Buck calmly. "We used to work together on the Three-Circles, and I knew he'd give me a job. When I found out in Paloma he'd gone, I took a chance an' rode out anyhow."
He bore the foreman's searching scrutiny very well, without a change of color or the quiver of an eyelash. Nevertheless he was not a little relieved when Lynch, with a brief comment about trying him out in the morning, moved around the table and sat down on a bunk to pull off his chaps. That sudden and complete bottling up of emotion had shown Buck how much more dangerous the man was than he had supposed, and he was pleased enough to come out of their first encounter so well.
With a barely perceptible sense of relaxing tension, the poker game was resumed, for which Buck was devoutly thankful. Throughout the interruption he had not forgotten his hand, which was by far the best he had held that evening. He played it and the succeeding ones so well that when the game ended he had managed to break even.
Ten minutes later the lights were out, and the silence of the bunk-house was broken only by the regular breathing of eight men, or the occasional creak of some one shifting his position in the narrow bunk. Having no blankets--a deficiency he meant to remedy if he could get off long enough to-morrow to ride to Paloma Springs--Buck removed merely chaps and boots and stretched his long form on the corn-husk tick with a little sigh of weariness. Until this moment he had not realized how tired he was. But he had slept poorly on the train, and this, coupled with the heady air and the somewhat stirring events of the last few hours, dragged his eyelids shut almost as soon as his head struck the improvised pillow.
It seemed as if scarcely a moment had passed before he opened them again. But he knew that it must be several hours later, for it had been pitch-dark when he went to sleep, and now a square of moonlight lay across the floor under the southern window, bringing into faint relief the outlines of the long room.