“I’ve been thinkin’ about that,” Booth said. “And I believe this feller is plannin’ to wait us out as long as we stay here, so we’re gonna have to take a chance to ride out in the middle of the night. He’s got himself a camp close by, and he won’t stay away from here long enough to let us get the horses packed up, ready to ride, before he’ll be back to see us leavin’. I say, hell, let’s stay right here for a couple more days and let him get used to seein’ those horses in the corral every mornin’ after he’s laid awake all night keepin’ his eye on ’em. I’m willin’ to bet he gets pretty doggone sleepy, tryin’ to watch us day and night. I’ll bet he thinks, if we’re fixin’ to leave, we’ll most likely start out in the mornin’. After a couple nights, he’s gonna figure our horses are gonna be there in the mornin’, so he can get a little sleep. That’s gonna be the night we slip outta here and head for Helena. We’ve got a place to go to in Helena where we can stay while we wait to see if Hawk shows up.”

Jesse looked surprised. “Is that so? Where’s that?”

“The Capital City Saloon,” Booth crowed, “owned and operated by Mutt Crocker.” He waited for Jesse’s reaction. He wasn’t disappointed.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jesse swore. “That’s right. I forgot all about that. That is where Mutt went—Helena, Montana—to open a saloon.”

“Financed by a gunpoint loan from the First Bank of Wyomin’,” Booth reminded him. It had been a source of envy by the Corbin brothers when Mutt pulled off one of the biggest bank holdups in Wyoming history after he left them. Mutt had ridden with Booth and Jesse until he decided he wanted to be the boss of his own gang. There had really been no hard feelings when he left because Mutt was getting a little long in the tooth to continue riding with them. He was older than Tater. If things didn’t go like he planned, they figured he’d eventually want to come back. But it didn’t happen. He made that one big bank job and decided it enough to retire from the bank business. “Helena ain’t but about twenty-five or thirty miles from here,” Booth continued. “We can drive our horses hard all night, without stoppin’. It’ll be a different game in a town. He ain’t gonna be able to hide in the bushes and pick us off one at a time.”