"Vangie?" His fingers slid along the line of her jaw, under her ear, and pushed into her hair, insistent and yet gentle. His fingers and palm cupped the back of her head, enmeshed in her hair, and drew her slowly but unresistingly forward until their lips touched.

    It was a long kiss but not a violent one. She wanted to reach up and put her arms around him, but she held back, afraid of being too easy, boring him, or scaring him away. When at last they separated, she whispered, "It wouldn't be the first saddle I've known, Gabe."

    His voice more hoarse than usual, he said, "Did I ask you?"

    "No. But I wanted you to know."

    "Neither one of us wants to waste time on a greenhorn," he said, drawing her close again. This time her arms reached up and wrapped around him.

CHAPTER TEN

    The Mint hulked on its hilltop in the light of the evening sun.

    At the window of their new hotel room Gabe stood sizing it up like a trainer of circus animals peering through the bars at a tiger he isn't sure he can handle.

    Vangie was out somewhere acquiring capital. The sun was about to go down, which seemed the best time of day for her enterprising ventures-just after suppertime when people were a bit sleepy, slow-moving, and not too sensitive around the pockets.

    He had resigned himself to sponging off her. It would only be for a few days more. He needed the time to set things up and check things out. Without Vangie he'd have had to get a job or start rolling drunks, and he didn't want to waste the time.

    He'd been busy enough the past several days. He'd walked up and down the hills, wandered the city, studied and thought and observed and pondered. He'd spent a lot of time around the neighborhood of the Mint, studying it from all sides and making inquiries. He picked up bits and pieces of vital information like the number of privies, the fact that it had been built in 1854, and the rumor that one of the guards had a girl friend on Pacific Street as well as a wife in Chinatown. He'd been talking a tough line, particularly where Vangie was concerned, but privately he wasn't sure he could crack it. It was a hell of a forbidding building, that Mint.

    Still, the thought of home kept him going. Home, Twill, and Vangie, too-he could hardly back down now; he'd look like a fool in her eyes.

    He pulled out his snap-lid watch-Twill's gift-and say it was almost time to go down and meet Vangie at their daily meeting place at Front and Jackson. He began to poke around the hotel room to make sure they hadn't left any possessions behind. Not that there was much to leave. He'd bought a new set of clothes, including a heavy pea jacket to ward off the impressively cold fog that rolled in even more frequently than Vangie had allowed it did. He had also accumulated a spare set of underwear and a few pairs of socks, but they were all wadded into the pockets of the big pea jacket along with his knuckle-duster and the rest of the oddments he'd carried faithfully ever since he'd left civilization. With one last look out the window at the Mint, he left the room to meet up with Vangie.

    She was waiting for him at the corner, looking as pert, feisty and cheerful as ever. "Look what I found," she said, drawing him back into the alley mouth to show him her treasure.

    It was a silver-plated whisky flask. "Not bad," he said, looking at it as she held it up for him.

    "I thought you'd like it. It's a present," she said. She twisted the top to open it, and fired a shot that plugged a hole into the wall next to Gabe's head.

    A little later, in another hotel room, when she was a bit calmer, she said, "I just don't know why people walk around with things like that in their pockets. It ought to be against the law. It's making me very nervous."

    Gabe, who had taken charge of the flask, was sitting on the bed examining it. "Well, sometimes," he said, distracted by the intricacy of the thing, "it's handy to carry a gun that doesn't look like a gun."

    "Well it isn't handy for me," she said with a melodramatic shudder. "What else is going to blow up in my fingers?"

    Gabe nodded over the flask. It hald five .25-caliber rounds loaded through the bottom and fired through the top, when the lid was turned counterclockwise. Very ingenious.

    "Gabe?"

    "Huh? Oh." He put the flask down on the bed and got to his feet. "Well, let's see. You can find guns built into snuffboxes, into pipes, or most anything that can be made of metal and small enough to carry in your pocket."

    "What is civilization coming to?"

    He grinned at her. "Maybe you better just take wallets from now on."

    "Someday," she said bitterly, "a wallet will turn out to be a revolver in disguise."

    "Well," he said, "you could always change your ways."

    "What?"

    "Turn over a new leaf," he explained. "Mend the error of your ways."

    She said, "You mean go straight?"

    "Sure."

    She made a face, to show she was not amused. "If you can't be serious," she said, "there's no point talking about it."

    "Stick to wallets," he told her. "You'll be okay." He gestured toward the flask, lying so innocently on the bed. "Mind if I keep that?"

    "Well, I don't want it, believe me."

    "Thanks," he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

    Promptly at the start of visiting hours Vangie and Gabe took a guided tour of the Mint.

    She knew it was the only way to persuade him of the impossibility of his idea. Nobody had ever robbed the United States Mint. Nobody in his right mind would dare.

    It was a fortress, the Mint, surrounded by a high wall. A guide assembled the visitors at the front gates, which were high wrought-iron affairs you couldn't break down with a five-ton battering ram.

    The view from the courtyard inside the high wall was like what the inside view of a prison must be. Stone and masonry thirty feet high surrounded the whole thing. The pair of armed guards at the gate looked as if they'd rather stomp you than eat.

    "This branch of the United States Mint opened for business in April of Eighteen and Fifty-four," the guide announced in a pompous voice that made his double chins wobble. "The Government established the Mint here for the purpose of minting gold coinage, because this is where the gold is, haw haw. Now the coins we stamp here are almost exclusively eagles and double eagles, which as you folks know is ten and twenty dollar coins. Now and then we stamp an issue of five-dollar half eagles, but it don't happen very often here. So if you find a half eagle with our stamp on it maybe you want to hang onto it. They as rare as a pair of clean socks around a bunkhouse, haw haw."

    Vangie saw that Gabe's beetled glance was fixed on the gateway behind them. It was open and a wagon came in-DORALDO MINE, SONORA-drawn by the customary dozens of mules and surrounded by the customary outriders, who looked like displaced members of Genghis Khan's palace guard. The knot of tourists followed the guide toward the front door but Gabe hung back, watching the wagon as it went along the side of the main building and stopped by a loading platform where uniformed sentries hulked.

    She tugged at Gabe's sleeve. "Come on."