"Now, keep on yer shirt, Pat, and don't make no outcry. My friends can
get here's easy as yours, so just take it quiet. All you gotta do is
take that remark back you just uttered. I ain't yella, and you gotta
say so. Then you hand over those fifteen bones, and I'm yer man."
It was incredible that Pat should have succumbed, but he did. Perhaps
he was none too sure of his friends in the bushes. Certainly the time
was getting short and he was in a hurry to get to his job on the
Highway. Also he had no mind for being discovered or interrupted. At
any rate with a hoarse little laugh of pretended courage he put his
hand in his baggy pocket and pulled out the bills.
"You win, Kid," he admitted, "I guess you're all white. Anything to
please the baby and get down to biz. Now, sonny, put that gun away, it
don't look well. Besides, I--got another." He put his hand
insinuatingly to his hip pocket with a grin, but Billy's grin answered
back: "That's all right, pard. I'll just keep this one awhile then. You don't
need two. Now, what's wanted?"
Pat edged away from the boy and measured him with his eye. The moon was
coming up and Billy loomed large in the darkness. There was a
determined set to his firm young shoulders, a lithe alertness about his
build, and a fine glint in his eye. Pat was really a coward. Besides,
Pat was getting nervous. The hidden telephone had called him several
times already. He could hear even now in imagination its faint click in
the moss. The last message had said that the car had passed the state
line and would soon be coming to the last point of communication. After
that it was the mountain highway straight to Pleasant View, nothing to
hinder. It was not a time to waste in discussion. Pat dropped to an
ingratiating whine.
"Come along then, Kid. Yes, bring your wheel. We'll want it. Down this
way, just over the tracks, so, see? We want you to fall off that there
wheel an' sprawl in the road like you had caught yer wheel on the track
an' it had skidded, see? Try her now, and just lay there like you was
off your feed."
Billy slung himself across his wheel, gave a cursory glance at the
landscape, took a running slide over the tracks with a swift pedal or
two and slumped in a heap, lying motionless as the dead. He couldn't
have done it more effectively if he had practised for a week. Pat
caught his breath and stooped over anxiously. He didn't want a death at
the start. He wouldn't care to be responsible for a concussion of the
brain or anything like that. Besides, he couldn't waste time fooling
with a fool kid when the real thing might be along any minute. He
glanced anxiously up the broad white ribbon of a road that gleamed now
in the moonlight, and then pulling out his pocket flash, flooded it
swiftly over Billy's upturned freckled face that lay there still as
death without the flicker of an eyelash. The man was panic-stricken. He
stooped lower, put out a tentative finger, turned his flash full in the
boy's face again, and was just about to call to his helpers for aid
when Billy opened a large eye and solemnly winked.