Keen eyed and watchful as Blackie was he failed to see a man who never lost sight of him or of the stage until it rolled out of the mining camp through the early morning. The man, unusually tall, wearing black shaggy chaps, grey soft shirt and neck-handkerchief and a large black hat, kept the stage in view from around the corner of the wood shed standing back of the superintendent's cabin. Then, swinging up to the back of a rangy granite-coloured roan, he turned into the road.
"We're playing to win this time, Comet," he said softly. "And, as we said all along, Blackie's the capper for their game. Shake a foot, Comet, old boy. Maybe at the end of a hard day's work we'll look in on ... her."
When, an hour later, the stage made its brief stop in Miller's Flat to take on mail bags Blackie was leaning out smoking a cigar and looking about him alertly. A lounger near the post-office door turned to watch in great seeming idleness. His eyes met the bartender's for a second and he nodded casually.
"How's everything?" he asked in the customary inconsequential manner of casual acquaintanceship.
"Fine," said Blackie in a tone of equal casualness. "Couldn't be better."
The stranger slouched on his way, climbed into the saddle of the horse he had left by the door, and rode off.... And Buck Thornton, from the bend in the road where he had halted Comet under a big live oak tree, noted how the horseman rode on his spurs when once he had passed from the sight of the stage driver.
"Taking the Red Cañon trail," he marked with satisfaction. "Carrying the word to Broderick and Pollard that there's been no slip-up and that the box is really aboard. And now.... Shake a foot, Comet; here's where we put one over on Blackie."
The man who had passed the time of day with the saloon man had disappeared over a ridge and out of sight; Thornton consequently rode swiftly to overtake the stage. Before the four running horses had drawn the creaking wagon after them a half mile Hap Smith stopped his horses in answer to the shout from behind him and stared over his shoulder wonderingly.
"What the hell ..." he began. And then with a shade of relief in his tone and yet half hesitatingly, the frown still on his face as Thornton rode close up, "It's you, is it? I thought for a minute...."