“Two-Gun Tom of Texas,” says he to Tom Mulligan, “speak!”
“Blood and Death,” says Pete Wilson, making his voice deep.
“Blood, death, and fire!” says Bob Jones.
There was a solemn pause for a minute, and then I says, according to rule and regulation:
“And what says Dead-Shot Squint, the Terror of the Plains?”
He was very serious while one might have counted ten breaths, and then he pulled his jack-knife from his pocket and whet it on the palm of his hand, and tried its point on his thumb, and replied:
“He says death, and seals it with a vow!”
That vow was a mighty solemn thing, and we always felt it so. It wasn't the kind of a thing you would ever let small kids or girls know about. First you all sat down in a circle, with your feet together, and rolled up the sleeve of your left arm. Then the knife was passed around, and each drew blood out of his left arm. Then each one got as much blood out of the next fellow's arm as he could, in his mouth, and all swallowed simultaneous, to show you were going into the thing to the death and no turning back. Next we signed our names in a ring, using blood mixed with gunpowder. But not on paper, mind you. We signed 'em on parchment. First and last, that parchment was a good deal of trouble. If you think skinning a squirrel or a rat to get his hide for parchment is an easy trick, just try it. Let alone catching them being no snap. But Squint, he was Captain, and he was stern on parchment, for it makes an oath more legal, and all the old-time outlaws wouldn't look at anything else. But we got a pretty good supply ahead by saving all the dead cats and things like that we could find, and unless you know likely places to look it would surprise you how many dead cats there are in the world.
We were in the Horse Thieves' Cave, about a mile from town. It had really been used for that, way back before the war. There was a gang pretended to be honest settlers like everybody else. But they used to steal horses and hide them out in there. When they had a dozen or so of them they'd take 'em over to the Mississippi River, which was about thirty miles west, some night, and raft 'em down stream and sell 'em at Cairo or St. Louis. That went on for years, but along in the fifties, my grandfather said, when _he_ was a kid, a couple was hung, and the remainder got across the river and went west. The cave was up on the side of a hill in the woods, and forgotten about except by a few old-timers. The door-beams had rotted and fallen down, and the sand and dirt had slid down over the mouth of it, and vines and bushes grown up. No one would have guessed there was any cave there at all. But the dogs got to digging around there one afternoon when the Dalton Gang was meeting in the woods, and uncovered part of those door beams. We dug some more and opened her up. It took a lot of work to clean her out, but she was as good as new when we got done with her. We never told any one, and the vines and bushes were so thick you could hunt a year and never find the opening. It isn't every bunch of kids get a real Horse Thieves' Cave ready-made like that, right from the hands of Providence, as you might say. Pete Wilson used to brag and say his grand-dad was one of those horse-thieves. It made the rest of us feel kind of meek for a time, because none of us could claim any honour or grandeur like that in our families. But my grand-dad, who has a terrible long memory about the early days, said it wasn't so; so far as he could recollect Pete's grand-dad never had any ambition above shoats and chickens.