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The Bells of San Juan

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Title: The Bells of San Juan

Author: Jackson Gregory

Illustrator: Frank Tenney Johnson


        
Release date: March 22, 2005 [eBook #15438]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN

A Novel

by

JACKSON GREGORY

Author of _Judith of Blue Lake Ranch_, _The Joyous Trouble Maker_,
_Man to Man_, etc.

Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson

New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers

1919







[Frontispiece: Having come closer he reined in his horse, stared at her
a moment in surprised wonderment. . .]




TO

RODERICK NORTON GREGORY




CONTENTS


FOREWORD--THE BELLS

CHAPTER

     I.  THE BELLS RING
    II.  THE SHERIFF OF SAN JUAN
   III.  A MAN'S BOOTS
    IV.  AT THE BANKER'S HOME
     V.  IN THE DARKNESS OF THE PATIO
    VI.  A RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT
   VII.  IN THE HOME OF CLIFF-DWELLERS
  VIII.  JIM GALLOWAY'S GAME
    IX.  YOUNG PAGE COMES TO TOWN
     X.  A BRIBE AND A THREAT
    XI.  THE FIGHT AT LA CASA BLANCA
   XII.  WAVERING IN THE BALANCE
  XIII.  CONCEALMENT
   XIV.  A FREE MAN
    XV.  THE KING'S PALACE
   XVI.  THE MEXICAN FROM MEXICO
  XVII.  A STACK OF GOLD PIECES
 XVIII.  DESIRE OUTWEIGHS DISCRETION
   XIX.  DEADLOCK
    XX.  FLUFF AND BLACK BILL
   XXI.  A CRISIS
  XXII.  THE BEGINNING OF THE END
 XXIII.  THE STRONG HAND OF GALLOWAY
  XXIV.  IN THE OPEN
   XXV.  THE BATTLE IN THE ARROYO
  XXVI.  THE BELLS RING




ILLUSTRATIONS

Having come closer he reined in his horse, stared at her a moment in
surprised wonderment . . . .  Frontispiece

Then came the second meeting with Jim Galloway

"Come, and I'll share my secret with you"

On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's posse





FOREWORD

THE BELLS

He who has not heard the bells of San Juan has a journey yet to make.
He who has not set foot upon the dusty road which is the one street of
San Juan, at times the most silent and deserted of thoroughfares, at
other times a mad and turbulent lane between sun-dried adobe walls, may
yet learn something of man and his hopes, desires, fears and ruder
passions from a pin-point upon the great southwestern map.

The street runs due north and south, pointing like a compass to the
flat gray desert in the one direction, and in the other to the broken
hills swept up into the San Juan mountains.  At the northern end, that
is toward the more inviting mountains, is the old Mission.  To right
and left of the whitewashed corridors in a straggling garden of
pear-trees and olives and yellow roses are two rude arches made of
seasoned cedar.  From the top cross-beam of each hang three bells.

They have their history, these bells of San Juan, and the biggest with
its deep, mellow voice, the smallest with its golden chimes, seem to be
chanting it when they ring.  Each swinging tongue has its tale to tell,
a tale of old Spain, of Spanish galleons and Spanish gentlemen
adventurers, of gentle-voiced priests and sombre-eyed Indians, of
conquest, revolt, intrigue, and sudden death.  When a baby is born in
San Juan, a rarer occurrence than a strong man's death, the littlest of
the bells upon the western arch laughs while it calls to all to
hearken; when a man is killed, the angry-toned bell pendant from the
eastern arch shouts out the word to go billowing across the stretches
of sage and greasewood and gama-grass; if one of the later-day frame
buildings bursts into flame, Ignacio Chavez warns the town with a
strident clamor, tugging frantically; be it wedding or discovery of
gold or returns from the county elections, the bell-ringer cunningly
makes the bells talk.

Out on the desert a man might stop and listen, forming his surmise as
the sounds surged to meet him through the heat and silence.  He might
smile, if he knew San Juan, as he caught the jubilant message tapped
swiftly out of the bronze bell which had come, men said, with Coronado;
he might sigh at the lugubrious, slow-swelling voice of the big bell
which had come hitherward long ago with the retinue of Marco de Niza,
wondering what old friend or enemy, perchance, had at last closed his
ears to all of Ignacio Chavez's music.  Or, at a sudden fury of
clanging, the man far out on the desert might hurry on, goading his
burro impatiently, to know what great event had occurred in the old
adobe town of San Juan.

It is three hundred and fifty years and more since the six bells of San
Juan came into the new world to toll across that land of quiet mystery
which is the southwest.  It is a hundred years since an
all-but-forgotten priest, Francisco Calderón, found them in various
devastated mission churches, assembled them, and set them chiming in
the old garden.  There, among the pear-trees and olives and yellow
roses, they still cast their shadows in sun and moonlight, in silence,
and in echoing chimes.




CHAPTER I

THE BELLS RING

Ignacio Chavez, Mexican that he styled himself, Indian that the
community deemed him, or "breed" of badly mixed blood that he probably
was, made his loitering way along the street toward the Mission.  A
thin, yellowish-brown _cigarita_ dangling from his lips, his wide,
dilapidated conical hat tilted to the left side of his head in a
listless sort of concession to the westering sun, he was, as was
customary with him, utterly at peace.  Ten minutes ago he had had
twenty cents; two minutes after the acquisition of his elusive wealth
he had exchanged the two dimes for whiskey at the Casa Blanca; the
remaining eight minutes of the ten he required to make his way, as he
naively put it, "between hell and heaven."

For from a corner of the peaceful old Mission garden at one end of the
long street one might catch a glimpse of the Casa Blanca at the other
end sprawling in the sun; between the two sturdy walled buildings had
the town strung itself as it grew.  As old a relic as the church itself
was La Casa Blanca, and since San Juan could remember, in all matters
antipodal to the religious calm of the padres' monument.  Deep-shaded
doorways let into the three-feet-thick earthen walls, waxed floors,
green tables, and bar and cool looking-glasses . . . a place which
invited, lured, held, and frequently enough finally damned.

San Juan, in the languid philosophy of Ignacio Chavez, was what you
will.  It epitomized the universe.  You had everything here which the
soul of man might covet.  Never having dwelt elsewhere since his mother
bore him here upon the rim of the desert and with the San Juan
mountains so near that, Ignacio Chavez pridefully knew, a man standing
upon the Mesa Alta might hear the ringing of his bells, he experienced
a pitying contempt for all those other spots in the world which were so
plainly less favored.  What do you wish, señor?  Fine warm days?  You
have them here.  Nice cool nights for sound slumber?  Right here in San
Juan, _amigo mío_.  A desert across which the eye may run without
stopping until it be tired, a wonderful desert whereon at dawn and dusk
God weaves all of the alluring soft mists of mystery?  Shaded cañons at
noonday with water and birds and flowers?  Behold the mountains.
Everything desirable, in short.  That there might be men who desired
the splash of waves, the sheen of wet beaches, the boom of surf, did
not suggest itself to one who had never seen the ocean.  So, then, San
Juan was "what you will."  A man may fix his eye upon the little
Mission cross which is always pointing to heaven and God; or he may
pass through the shaded doors of the Casa Blanca, which, men say, give
pathway into hell the shortest way.

Ignacio, having meditatively enjoyed his whiskey and listened smilingly
to the tinkle of a mandolin in the _patio_ under a grape-vine arbor,
had rolled his cigarette and turned his back square upon the
devil . . . of whom he had no longer anything to ask.  As he went out
he stopped in the doorway long enough to rub his back against a corner
of the wall and to strike a match.  Then, almost inaudibly humming the
mandolin air, he slouched out into the burning street.

For twenty years he had striven with the weeds in the Mission garden,
and no man during that time dared say which had had the best of it,
Ignacio Chavez or the interloping alfileria and purslane.  In the
matters of a vast leisureliness and tumbling along the easiest way they
resembled each other, these two avowed enemies.  For twenty years he
had looked upon the bells as his own, had filled his eye with them day
after day, had thought the first thing in the morning to see that they
were there, regarding them as solicitously in the rare rainy weather as
his old mother regarded her few mongrel chicks.  Twenty full years, and
yet Ignacio Chavez was not more than thirty years old, or thirty-five,
perhaps.  He did not know, no one cared.

He was on his way to attack with his bare brown hands some of the weeds
which were spilling over into the walk which led through the garden and
to the priest's house.  As a matter of fact he had awakened with this
purpose in mind, had gone his lazy way all day fully purposing to give
it his attention, and had at last arrived upon the scene.  The front
gate had finally broken, the upper hinge worn out; Ignacio carefully
set the ramshackly wooden affair back against the fence, thinking how
one of these days he would repair it.  Then he went between the bigger
pear-tree and the _lluvia de oro_ which his own hands had planted
here, and stood with legs well apart considering the three bells upon
the easterly arch.

"_Que hay, amigos_?" he greeted them.  "Do you know what I am going to
do for you some fine day?  I will build a little roof over you that
runs down both ways to shut out the water when it rains.  It will make
you hoarse, too much wet."

That was one of the few dreams of Ignacio's life; one day he was going
to make a little roof over each arch.  But to-day he merely regarded
affectionately the Captain . . . that was the biggest of the
bells . . . the Dancer, second in size, and Lolita, the smallest upon
this arch.  Then he sighed and turned toward the other arch across the
garden to see how it was with the Little One, La Golondrina, and
Ignacio Chavez.  For it was only fair that at least one of the six
should bear his name.

Changing his direction thus, moving directly toward the dropping sun,
he shifted his hat well over his eyes and so was constrained to note
how the weeds were asserting themselves with renewed insolence.  He
muttered a soft "_maldito_!" at them which might have been mistaken
for a caress and determined upon a merciless campaign of extermination
just as soon as he could have fitted a new handle to his hoe.  Then he
paused in front of the Mission steps and lifted his hat, made an
elegant bow, and smiled in his own inimitable, remarkably fascinating
way.  For, under the ragged brim, his eyes had caught a glimpse of a
pretty pair of patent-leather slippers, a prettier pair of
black-stockinged ankles, and the hem of a white starched skirt.

Nowhere are there eyes like the eyes of old Mexico.  Deep and soft and
soulful, though the man himself may have a soul like a bit of charred
leather; velvety and tender, though they may belong to an out-and-out
cutthroat; expressive, eloquent even, though they are the eyes of a
peon with no mind to speak of; night-black, and like the night filled
with mystery.  Ignacio Chavez lifted such eyes to the eyes of the girl
who had been watching him and spontaneously gave her the last iota of
his ready admiration.

"It is a fine day, señorita," he told her, displaying two glistening
rows of superb teeth friendliwise.  "And the garden . . .  _Ah, que hay
más bonito en todo el mundo_?  You like it, no?"

It was slow music when Ignacio Chavez spoke, all liquid sounds and
tender cadences.  When he had cursed the weeds it was like love-making.
A _d_ in his mouth became a softened _th_; from the lips of such as
the bell-ringer of San Juan the snapping Gringo oath comes
metamorphosed into a gentle "Gah-tham!"  The girl, to whom the speech
of Chavez was something as new and strange as the face of the earth
about her, regarded him with grave, curious eyes.

She was seated against the Mission wall upon the little bench which no
one but Ignacio guessed was to be painted green one of these fine days,
a bronze-haired, gray-eyed girl in white skirt and waist, and with a
wide panama hat caught between her clasped hands and her knee.  For a
moment she was perhaps wondering how to take him; then with a
suddenness that had been all unheralded in her former gravity, she
smiled.  With lips and eyes together as though she accepted his
friendship.  Ignacio's own smile broadened and he nodded his delight.

"It is truly beautiful here," she admitted, and had Ignacio possessed a
tithe of that sympathetic comprehension which his eyes lied about he
would have detected a little note of eagerness in her voice, would have
guessed that she was lonely and craved human companionship.  "I have
been sitting here an hour or two.  You are not going to send me away,
are you?"

Ignacio looked properly horrified.

"If I saw an angel here in the garden, señorita," he exclaimed, "would
I say _zape_ to it?  No, no, señorita; here you shall stay a thousand
years if you wish.  I swear it."

He was all sincerity; Ignacio Chavez would no sooner think of being
rude to a beautiful young woman than of crying "Scat!" to an angel.
But as to staying here a thousand years . . . she glanced through the
tangle of the garden to the tiny graveyard and shook her head.

"You have just come to San Juan?" he asked.  "To-day?"

"Yes," she told him.  "On the stage at noon."

"You have friends here?"

Again she shook her head.

"Ah," said Ignacio.  He straightened for a brief instant and she could
see how the chest under his shirt inflated.  "A tourist.  You have
heard of this garden, maybe?  And the bells?  So you travelled across
the desert to see?"

The third time she shook her head.

"I have come to live here," she returned quietly.

"But not all alone, señorita!"

"Yes."  She smiled at him again.  "All alone."

"Mother of God!" he said within himself.  And presently to her: "I did
not see the stage come to-day; in San Juan one takes his siesta at that
hour.  And it is not often that the stage brings new people from the
railroad."

In some subtle way he had made of his explanation an apology.  While
his slow brown fingers rolled a cigarette he stared away through the
garden and across the desert with an expression half melancholy, half
merely meditative, which made the girl wonder what his thoughts were.
When she came to know him better she would know too that at times like
this he was not thinking at all.

"I believe this is the most profoundly peaceful place in the world,"
she said quietly, half listlessly setting into words the impression
which had clung about her throughout the long, still day.  "It is like
a strange dream-town, one sees no one moving about, hears nothing.  It
is just a little sad, isn't it?"

He had followed her until the end, comprehending.  But sad?  How that?
It was just as it should be; to ears which had never been filled with
the noises or rushing trains and cars and all of the traffic of a city,
what sadness could there be in the very natural calm of the rim of the
desert?  Having no satisfactory reply to make, Ignacio merely muttered,
"Si, señorita," somewhat helplessly and let it go with that.

"Tell me," she continued, sitting up a little and seeming to throw off
the oppressively heavy spell of her environment, "who are the important
people hereabouts?"

_La gente_?  Oh, Ignacio knew them well, all of them!  There was Señor
Engle, to begin with.  The banker of whom no doubt she had heard?  He
owned a big _residencia_ just yonder; you could catch the gleam of its
white walls through a clump of cottonwoods, withdrawn aloofly from San
Juan's street.  Many men worked for him; he had big cattle and sheep
ranches throughout the county; he paid well and loaned out much money.
Also he had a beautiful wife and a truly marvellously beautiful
daughter.  And horses such as one could not look upon elsewhere.  Then
there was Señor Nortone, as Ignacio pronounced him; a sincere friend of
Ignacio Chavez and a man fearless and true and extravagantly to be
admired, who, it appeared, was the sheriff.  Not a family man; he was
too young yet.  But soon; oh, one could see!  It would be Ignacio who
would ring the bells for the wedding when Roderico Nortone married
himself with the daughter of the banker.

"He is what you call a gunman, isn't he?" asked the girl, interested.
"I heard two of the men on the stage talking of him.  They called him
Roddy Norton; he is the one, isn't he?"

_Seguro_; sure, he was the one.  A gunman?  Ignacio shrugged.  He was
sheriff, and what must a sheriff be if not a gunman?

"On the stage," continued the girl, "was a man they called Doc; and
another named Galloway.  They are San Juan men, are they not?"

Ignacio lifted his brows a shade disdainfully.  They were both San Juan
citizens, but obviously not to his liking.  Jim Galloway was a big man,
yes; but of _la gente_, never!  The señorita should look the other way
when he passed.  He owned the Casa Blanca; that was enough to ticket
him, and Ignacio passed quickly to _el señor doctor_.  Oh, he was
smart and did much good to the sick; but the poor Mexican who called
him for a bedridden wife must first sell something and show the money.

Beyond these it appeared that the enviable class of San Juan consisted
of the padre José, who was at present and much of the time away
visiting the poor and sick throughout the countryside; Julius Struve,
who owned and operated the local hotel, one of the lesser luminaries,
though a portly gentleman with an amiable wife; the Porters, who had a
farm off to the northwest and whose connection to San Juan lay in the
fact that an old maid daughter taught the school here; various other
individuals and family groups to be disposed of with a word and a
careless wave of a cigarette.  Already for the fair stranger Ignacio
had skimmed the cream of the cream.

The girl sighed, as though her question had been no idle one and his
reply had disappointed her.  For a moment her brows gathered slightly
into a frown that was like a faint shadow; then she smiled again
brightly, a quick smile which seemed more at home in her eyes than the
frown had been.

Ignacio glanced from her to the weeds, then, squinting his eyes, at the
sun.  There was ample time, it would be cooler presently.  So,
describing a respectful arc about her, he approached the Mission wall,
slipped into the shade, and eased himself in characteristic indolence
against the white-washed adobe.  She appeared willing to talk with him;
well, then, what pleasanter way to spend an afternoon?  She sought to
learn this and that of a land new to her; who to explain more knowingly
than Ignacio Chavez?  After a little he would pluck some of the newly
opened yellow rosebuds for her, making her a little speech about
herself and budding flowers.  He would even, perhaps, show her his
bells, let her hear just the suspicion of a note from each. . . .

A sharp sound came to her abruptly out of the utter stillness but meant
nothing to her.  She saw a flock of pigeons rise above the roofs of the
more distant houses, circle, swerve, and disappear beyond the
cottonwoods.  She noted that Ignacio was no longer leaning lazily
against the wall; he had stiffened, his mouth was a little open,
breathless, his attitude that of one listening expectantly, his eyes
squinting as they had been just now when he fronted the sun.  Then came
the second sound, a repetition of the first, sharp, in some way
sinister.  Then another and another and another, until she lost count;
a man's voice crying out strangely, muffled.  Indistinct, seeming to
come from afar.

It was an incongruous, almost a humorous, thing to see the sun-warmed
passivity of Ignacio Chavez metamorphosed in a flash into activity.  He
muttered something, leaped away from the Mission wall, dashed through
the tangle of the garden, and raced like a madman to the eastern arch.
With both hands he grasped the dangling bell-ropes, with all of his
might he set them clanging and shouting and clamoring until the
reverberation smote her ears and set the blood tingling strangely
through her.  She had seen the look upon his face. . . .

Suddenly she knew that those little sharp sounds had been the rattle of
pistol-shots.  She sprang to her feet, her eyes widening.  Now all was
quiet save for the boom and roar of the bells.  The pigeons were
circling high in the clear sky, were coming back. . . .  She went
quickly the way Ignacio had gone, calling out to him:

"What is it?"

He seemed all unmoved now as he made his bells cry out for him; it was
for him to be calm while they trembled with the event which surely they
must understand.

"It is a man dead," he told her as his right hand called upon the
Captain for a volume of sound from his bronze throat.  "You will see.
And there will be more work for Roderico Nortone!"  He sighed and shook
his head, and for a moment spoke softly with his jangling bells.  "And
some day," he continued quietly, "it will be Roderico's time, _no_?
And I will ring the bells for him, and the Captain and the Dancer and
Lolita, they will all put tears into men's eyes.  But first, Santa
Maria! let it be that I ring the others for him when he marries himself
with the banker's daughter."

"A man dead?" the girl repeated, unwilling to grasp fully.

"You will see," returned Ignacio.




CHAPTER II

THE SHERIFF OF SAN JUAN

The girl in the old Mission garden stood staring at Ignacio Chavez a
long time, seeming compelled by a force greater than her own to watch
him tugging and jerking at his bells.  Plainly enough she understood
that this was an alarm being sounded; a man dead through violence, and
the bell-ringer stirring the town with it.  But when presently he let
two of the ropes slip out of his hands and began a slow, mournful
tolling of the Captain alone, she shuddered a little and withdrew.

That it might be merely a case of a man wounded, even badly, did not
once suggest itself to her.  Ignacio had spoken as one who knew, in
full confidence and with finality.  She should see!  She returned to
the little bench which one day was to be a bright green, and sat down.
She could see that again the pigeons were circling excitedly; that from
the baking street little puffs of dust arose to hang idly in the still
air as though they were painted upon the clear canvas of the sky.  She
heard the voices of men, faint, quick sounds against the tolling of the
bell.  Then suddenly all was very still once more; Ignacio had allowed
the Captain to resume his silent brooding, and came to her.

"I must go to see who it is," he apologized.  "Then I will know better
how to ring for him.  The sheepman from Las Palmas, I bet you.  For did
I not see when just now I passed the Casa Blanca that he was a little
drunk with Señor Galloway's whiskey?  And does not every one know he
sold many sheep and that means much money these days?  Si, señorita; it
will be the sheepman from Las Palmas."

He was gone, slouching along again and in no haste now that he had
fulfilled his first duty.  What haste could there possibly be since,
sheepman from Las Palmas or another, he was dead and therefore must
wait upon Ignacio Chavez's pleasure?  Somehow she gleaned this thought
from his manner and therefore did not speak as she watched him depart.

That portion of the street which she could see from her bench was
empty, the dust settling, thinning, disappearing.  Farther down toward
the Casa Blanca she could imagine the little knots of men asking one
another what had happened and how; the chief actor in this fragment of
human drama she could picture lying inert, uncaring that it was for him
that a bell had tolled and would toll again, that men congregated
curiously.

In a little while Ignacio would return, shuffling, smoking a dangling
cigarette, his hat cocked against the sun; he would give her full
particulars and then return to his bell. . . .  She had come to San
Juan to make a home here, to become a part of it, to make it a portion
of her.  To arrive upon a day like this was no pleasant omen; it was
too dreadfully like taking a room in a house only to hear the life
rattling out of a man beyond a partition.  She was suddenly averse to
hearing Ignacio's details; there came a quick desire to set her back to
the town whose silence on the heels of uproar crushed her.  Rising
hastily, she hurried down the weed-bordered walk, out at the broken
gate, and turned toward the mountains.  One glance down the street as
she crossed it showed her what she had expected: a knot of men at the
door of the Casa Blanca, another small group at a window, evidently
taking stock of a broken window-pane.

The sun, angry and red, was hanging low over a distant line of hills,
the flat lands were already drawing about them a thin, faintly colorful
haze.  She had put on her hat and, like Ignacio, had set it a little to
the side of her head, feeling her cheeks burning when the direct rays
found them.  The fine, loose soil was sifting into her low slippers
before she had gone a score of paces.  When she came back she would
unpack her trunk and get out a sensible pair of boots.  No doubt she
was dressed ridiculously, but then the heat had tempted her. . . .

A curious matter presented itself to her.  In the little groups upon
the street she had not seen a single woman.  Were there none in San
Juan?  Was this some strange, altogether masculine, community into
which she had stumbled?  Then she remembered how the bell-ringer had
mentioned Mrs. Engle, the banker's wife, and his daughter and Mrs.
Struve and others.  Besides all this she had a letter to Mrs. Engle
which she was going to present this evening. . . .

She was thinking of anything in the world but of a tragedy not yet
grown cold, so near her that for a little it had seemed to embrace her.
Now it was almost as though it had not occurred.  The world was all
unchanged about her, the town somnolent.  She had shuddered as Ignacio
played upon his bell; but the shudder was rather from the bell's
resonant eloquence than from any more vital cause.  A man she had never
seen, whose name even she did not know, had been shot by another man
unknown to her; she had heard only the shots, she had seen nothing.
True, she had heard also a voice crying out, but she sensed that it had
been the voice of an onlooker.  She felt ashamed that the episode did
not move her more.

As, earlier in the afternoon, she had been drawn from the heat of her
room at Struve's hotel by the shade to be found in the Mission garden,
so now did a long, wavering line of cottonwoods beckon to her.  In
files which turned eastward or westward here and there only to come
back to the general northerly trend, they indicated where an arroyo
writhed down, tortured serpent-wise, from the mountains.  Through their
foliage she had glimpsed the Engle home.  She expected to find running
water under their shade, that and an attendant coolness.

But the arroyo proved to be dry and hot, a gash in the dry bosom of the
earth, its bottom strewn with smooth pebbles and sand and a very
sparse, unattractive vegetation, stunted and harsh.  And it was almost
as hot here as on San Juan's street; into the shade crept the
heat-waves of the dry, scorched air.

Led by the line of cottonwoods she found a little path and followed it,
experiencing a vague relief to have the town at her back.  She knew
that distances deceived the eye in this bleak land, and yet she thought
that before dark she could reach the hills, where perhaps there were a
few languid flowers and pools, and return just tired enough to eat and
go to sleep.  She rather thought that she would postpone her call on
the Engles until to-morrow.

"It's mañana-land, after all," she told herself with a quick smile.

Half an hour later she found a spot where the trees stood in a denser
growth, looking greener, more vigorous . . . less thirsty.  She could
fancy the great roots, questing far downward through the layers of dry
soil, thrusting themselves almost with a human, passionate eagerness
into the water they had found.  Here she threw herself down, lying upon
her back, gazing up through the branches and leaves.

Never until now had she known the meaning of utter stillness.  She saw
a bird, a poor brown, unkempt little being; it had no song to offer the
silence, and in a little flew away listlessly.  She had seen a rabbit,
a big, gaunt, uncomely wretch, disappearing silently among the clumps
of brush.

Her spirit, essentially bright and happy, had striven hard with a new
form of weariness all day.  Not only was she coming into another land
than that which she knew and understood, she was entering another phase
of her life.  She had chosen voluntarily, without advice or suggestion;
she had had her reasons and they had seemed sufficient; they were still
sufficient.  She had chosen wisely; she held to that, her judgment
untroubled.  But that stubbornly recurrent sense that with the old
landmarks she had abandoned the old life, that both in physical fact
and in spiritual and mental actuality she was at the threshold of an
unguessed, essentially different life, was disquieting.  There is no
getting away from an old basic truth that a man's life is so strongly
influenced as almost to be moulded by his environment; there was
uneasiness in the thought that here one's existence might grow to
resemble his habitat, taking on the gray tone and monotony and bleak
barrenness of this sun-smitten land.

Yielding a little already to the command laid upon breathing nature
hereabouts, she was lying still, her hands lax, her thoughts taking
unto themselves something of the character of the listless, songless
brown bird's flight.  She had come here to-day following in the
footsteps of other men and a few women.  Her own selection of San Juan
was explicable; the thing to wonder at was what had given the hardihood
to the first men to stop here and make houses and then homes?  Later
she would know; the one magic word of the desert lands: water.  For San
Juan, standing midway between the railroad and the more tempting lands
beyond the mountains, had found birth because here was a mud-hole for
cradle; down under the sand were fortuitous layers of impervious clay
cupping to hold much sweet water.

The slow tolling of a bell came billowing out through the silence.  The
girl sat up.  It was the Captain.  Never, it seemed to her, had she
heard anything so mournful.  Ignacio had informed himself concerning
all details and had returned to the garden at the Mission.  The man was
dead, then.  There could be no doubt as one listened to the measured
sorrowing of the big bell.

She got to her feet and, walking swiftly, moved on, still farther from
San Juan.  The act was without premeditation; her whole being was
insistent upon it.  She wondered if it was the sheepman from Las
Palmas; if he had, perhaps, a wife and children.  Then she stopped
suddenly; a new thought had come to her.  Strange, inexplicable even,
it had not suggested itself before.  She wondered who the other man
was, the man who had done the killing.  And what had happened to him?
Had he fled?  Had other men grappled with him, disarmed him, made of
him a prisoner to answer for what he had done?  What had been his
motive, what passion had actuated him Surely not just the greed for
gold which the bell-ringer had suggested!  What sort of creature was he
who, in cold, calculating blood could murder a man for a handful of
money?

There was nothing to answer unless she could catch the thought of
Ignacio Chavez in the ringing of his bell.  She moved on again,
hurrying.

Following the arroyo, she had come to the first of the little, smooth
hills, the lomas as the men on the stage had named them.  Through them
the dry watercourse wriggled, carrying its green pennons along its
marge.  She went up gentle slopes mantled with bleached grass which
directly under her eyes was white in the glare of the sun.  But the sun
was very low now, very fierce and red, an angry god going down in
temporary defeat, but defiant to the last, filled with threat for
to-morrow; at a little distance he tinged the world with his own fiery
hue.  The far western uplands cut the great disk squarely in two; down
slipped the half wafer until it seemed that just a bright signal-fire
was kindled upon the ridge.  And as that faded from her eyes the slow
sobbing of the swinging bell was like a wail for the death of the day.

She had removed her hat, fancying that already the earth was throwing
off its heat, that a little coolness and freshness was coming down to
meet her from the mountains.  She turned her eyes toward them and it
was then, just after the sunset, that she saw a man riding toward her.
He was still far off when she first glimpsed him, just cresting one of
the higher hills, so that for him the sun had not yet set.  For she
caught the glint of light flaming back from the silver chasings of his
bridle and from the barrel of the gun across the hollow of his left
arm.  She did not believe that he had seen her in the shadow of the
cottonwoods.

If she went on she must meet him presently.  She glanced back over her
shoulder, noting how far she had come from the town.  It was very still
again; the bell had ceased its complaint; the hoofs of the approaching
horse seemed shod with felt, falling upon felt.  She swung about and
walked back toward San Juan.

A little later she heard the man's voice, calling.  Clearly to her,
since there was no one else.  Why should he call to her?  She gave no
sign of having heard, but walked on a trifle faster.  She sensed that
he was galloping down upon her; still in the loose sand the hoof-beats
were muffled.  Then when he called a second time she stopped and turned
and waited.

A splendid big fellow he was, she noted as he came on, riding a
splendid big horse.  Man and beast seemed to belong to the desert; had
it not been for the glint of the sun she realized now, she probably
would not have distinguished their distant forms from the land across
which they had moved.  The horse was a darkish, dull gray; the man,
boots, corduroy breeches, soft shirt, and hat, was garbed in gray or so
covered with the dust of travel as to seem so.

"What in the world are you doing way out here?" he called to her.  And
then having come closer he reined in his horse, stared at her a moment
in surprised wonderment, swept off his hat and said, a shade awkwardly:
"I beg pardon.  I thought you were some one else."

For her wide hat was again drooping about her face, and he had had just
the form of her and the white skirt and waist to judge by.

"It is all right," she said lightly.  "I imagined that you had made a
mistake."

It was something of a victory over herself to have succeeded in
speaking thus carelessly.  For there had been the impulse, a temptation
almost, just to stare back at the man as he had stared at her and in
silence.  Not only was the type physically magnificent; to her it was,
like everything about her, new.  And that which had held her at first
was his eyes.  For it is not the part of youth to be stern-eyed; and
while this man could not be more than midway between twenty and thirty,
his eyes had already acquired the trick of being hard, steely,
suggesting relentlessness, stern and quick.  Tall, lean-bodied, with
big calloused hands, as brown as an Indian, hair and eyes were
uncompromisingly black.  He belonged to the southwestern wastes.

These things she noted, and that his face was drawn and weary, that
about his left hand was tied a handkerchief, hinting at a minor cut,
that his horse looked as travel-worn as himself.

"One doesn't see strangers often around San Juan," he explained.  "As
for a girl . . .  Well, I never made a mistake like this before.  I'll
have to look out."  The muscles of the tired face softened a little,
into his eyes came a quick light that was good to see, for an instant
masking their habitual sternness.  "If you'll excuse me again, and if
you don't know a whole lot about this country . . ."  He paused to
measure her sweepingly, seemed satisfied, and concluded:  "I wouldn't
go out all alone like this; especially after sundown.  We're a rather
tough lot, you know.  Good-by."

He lifted his hat again, loosened his horse's reins, and passed by her.
Just as she had expected, just as she had desired.  And yet, with his
dusty back turned upon her, she experienced a sudden return of her
loneliness.  Would she ever look into the eyes of a friend again?
Could she ever actually accomplish what she had set out to accomplish;
make San Juan a home?

Her eyes followed him, frankly admiring now; so she might have looked
at any other of nature's triumphant creations.  Then, before he had
gone a score of yards, she saw how a little tightening of his horse's
reins had brought the big brute down from a swinging gallop to a dead
standstill.  The bell was tolling again.

Again he was calling to her, again, swinging about, he had ridden to
her side.  Now his voice like his eyes, was ominously stern.

"Who is it?" he demanded.

"I don't know," she told him, marvelling at the look on his face.  His
emotion was purely one of anger, mounting anger that a man was dead?
"The man who rings the bells told me that he thought it must be a
sheepman from Las Palmas.  He went to see. . . .  I didn't wait. . . ."

Nor did this man wait now.  Again he had wheeled; now he was racing
along the arroyo, urging a tired horse that he might lose no
unnecessary handful of moments.  And as he went she heard him curse
savagely under his breath and knew that he had forgotten her in the
thoughts which had been released by the dull booming of a bell.




CHAPTER III

A MAN'S BOOTS

In the bar at the Casa Blanca, a long, wide room, low-ceilinged and
with cool, sprinkled floor, a score of men had congregated.  For the
most part they were silent, content to look at the signs left by the
recent shooting and to have what scraps of explanation were vouchsafed
them.  And these were meagre enough.  The man who had done the shooting
was sullen and self-contained.  The dead man . . . it was the sheepman
from Las Palmas . . . lay in an adjoining card-room, stark under the
blanket which the large hands of Jim Galloway had drawn over him.

When the clatter of hoofs rang out in the street a couple of men went
to the door.  Coming back, "It is the sheriff," they said.

Roderick Norton, entering swiftly, his spurs dragging and jangling,
swept the faces in the room with eyes which had in them none of that
human glint of good-will which the girl at the arroyo had glimpsed in
them.  Again they were steely, angry, bespeaking both threat and
suspicion.

"Who is it this time?" he demanded sharply.

"Bisbee, from Las Palmas," they told him.

"Who did it?" came the quick question.  And then, before an answer
could come, his voice ringing with the anger in it: "Antone or Kid
Rickard?  Which one?"

He had shifted his rifle so that it was caught up under his left arm.
His right hand, frank and unhidden, rested upon the butt of the
heavy-caliber revolver sagging from his belt.  Standing just within the
room, he had stepped to one side of the doorway so that the wall was at
his back.

"It was the Kid," some one answered, and was continuing, "He says it
was self-defense . . ." when Norton cut in bluntly:

"Was Galloway here when it happened?"

"Yes."

"Where's Galloway now?"

It was noteworthy that he asked for Jim Galloway rather than for Kid
Rickard.

"In there," they told him, indicating a second card-room adjoining that
in which the Las Palmas sheepman lay.  Rod Norton, again glancing
sharply across the faces confronting him, went to the closed door and
set his hand to the knob.  But Jim Galloway, having desired privacy
just now, had locked the door.  Norton struck it sharply, commanding:

"Open up, Galloway.  It's Norton."

There came the low mutter of a voice hasty and with the quality of
stern exhortation, the snap of the lock, and the door was jerked open.
Norton's eyes, probing into every square foot of the chamber, took
stock of Jim Galloway, and beyond him of Kid Rickard, slouching forward
in a chair and rolling a cigarette.

"Hello, Norton," said Galloway tonelessly.  "Glad you showed up.
There's been trouble."

A heavy man above the waist-line, thick-shouldered, with large head and
bull throat, his muscular torso tapered down to clean-lined hips, his
legs of no greater girth than those of the lean-bodied man confronting
him, his feet small in glove-fitting boots.  His eyes, prominent and
full and a clear brown, were a shade too innocent.  Chin, jaw, and
mouth, the latter full-lipped, were those of strength, smashing power,
and a natural cruelty.  He was the one man to be found in San Juan who
was dressed as the rather fastidiously inclined business men dress in
the cities.

"Another man down, Galloway," said Norton with an ominous sternness.
"And in your place. . .  How long do you think that you can keep out
from under?"

His meaning was plain enough; the men behind him in the barroom
listened in attitudes which, varying in other matters, were alike in
their tenseness.  Galloway, however, staring stonily with eyes not
unlike polished agate, so cold and steady were they, gave no sign of
taking offense.

"You and I never were friends, Rod Norton," he said, unmoved.  "Still
that's no reason you should jump me for trouble.  Answering your
question, I expect to keep out from under just as long as two things
remain as they are: first, as long as I play the game square and in the
open, next, as long as an overgrown boy holds down the job of sheriff
in San Juan."

In Norton's eyes was blazing hatred, in Galloway's mere steady,
unwinking boldness.

"You saw the killing?" the sheriff asked curtly.

"Yes," said Galloway.

"The Kid there did it?"

For the first time the man slouching forward in the chair lifted his
head.  Had a stranger looked in at that moment, curious to see him who
had just committed homicide . . . or murder . . . he must have
experienced a positive shock.  Sullen-eyed, sullen-lipped, the
man-killer could not yet have seen the last of his teens.  A thin wisp
of straw-colored hair across a low, atavistic forehead, unhealthy,
yellowish skin, with pale, lack-lustre, faded blue eyes, he looked evil
and vicious and cruel.  One looking from him to Jim Galloway would have
suspected that one could be as inhuman as the other, but with the
difference that that which was but means to an end with Galloway would
be end in itself to Kid Rickard.  Something of the primal savage shone
in the pale fires of his eyes.

"Yes," retorted the Kid, his surly voice little better than a snarl.
"I got him and be damned to him!"

"Bad luck cursing a dead man, Rickard," said Norton coldly.  "What did
you kill him for?"

Kid Rickard's tongue ran back and forth between his colorless lips
before he replied.

"He tried to get me first," he said defiantly.

"Who saw the shooting?"

"Jim Galloway.  And Antone."

Rod Norton grunted his disgust with the situation.

"Give me your gun," he commanded tersely.

The Kid frowned.  Galloway cleared his throat.  Rickard's eyes went to
him swiftly.  Then he got to his feet, jerked a thirty-eight-caliber
revolver from the hip pocket of his overalls and held it out,
surrendering it reluctantly.  Norton "broke" it, ejecting the
cartridges into his palm.  Not an empty shell among them; the Kid had
slipped in a fresh shell for every exploded one.

"How many times did you shoot?"

"I don't know.  Two or three, I guess. . . .  Damn it, do you imagine a
man counts 'em?"

"What were you and Galloway doing alone in here with the door locked?"

Galloway cut in sharply:

"I didn't want any more trouble; I was afraid somebody . . ."

"Shut up, will you?" cried the sheriff fiercely.  "I'll give you all
the chance you want to talk pretty soon.  Answer me, Rickard."

"I told him to lock me up somewhere until you or Tom Cutter come," said
the Kid slowly.  "I was afraid somebody might jump me for what I done.
I didn't want no more trouble."

Norton turned briefly to the crowded room behind him.

"Anybody know where Cutter is?" he asked.

It appeared that every one knew.  Tom Cutter, Rod Norton's deputy, had
gone in the early morning to Mesa Verde, and would probably return in
the cool of the evening.  Frowning, Norton made the best of the
situation, and to gain his purpose called four men out of the crowd.

"I want you boys to do me a favor," he said.

"Antone, come here."

The short, squat half-breed standing behind the bar lifted his heavy
black brows, demanding:

"_Y porqué_?  What am I to do?"

"As you are told," Norton snapped at him.  "Benny, you and Dick walk
down the street with Antone; you other boys walk down the other way
with Rickard.  If they haven't had all the chance to talk together
already that they want, don't give them any more opportunity.  Step up,
Rickard."

The Kid sulked, but under the look the sheriff turned on him came
forward and went out, his whole attitude remaining one of defiance.
Antone, his swart face as expressionless as a piece of mahogany,
hesitated, glanced at Galloway, shrugged, and did as Rickard had done,
going out between his two guards.  The men remaining in the barroom
were watching their sheriff expectantly.  He swung about upon Galloway.

"Now," he said quickly, "who fired the first shot.  Galloway?"

Galloway smiled, went to his bar, poured himself a glass of whiskey,
and standing there, the glass twisting slowly in his fingers, stared
back innocently at his interrogator.

"Trying the case already, Judge Norton?" he inquired equably.

"Will you answer?" Norton said coolly.

"Sure."  Galloway kept his look steady upon the sheriff's, and into the
innocence of his eyes there came a veiled insolence.  "Bisbee shot
first."

"Where was he standing?"

Galloway pointed.

"Right there."  The spot indicated was about three or four feet from
where Norton stood, near the second card-room door.

"Where was the Kid?"

"Over there."  Again Galloway pointed.  "Clean across the room, where
the chair is tumbled over against the table."

"How many times did Bisbee shoot?"

Galloway seemed to be trying to remember.  He drank his whiskey slowly,
reached over the bar for a cigar, and answered:

"Twice or three times."

"How many times did Rickard shoot?"

"I'm not sure.  I'd say about the same; two or three times."

"Where was Antone standing?"

"Behind the bar; down at the far end, nearest the door."

"Where were you?"

"Leaning against the bar, talking to Antone."

"What were you talking about?"

This question came quicker, sharper than the others, as though
calculated to startle Galloway into a quick answer.  But the proprietor
of the Casa Blanca was lighting his cigar and took his time.  When he
looked up, his eyes told Norton that he had understood any danger which
might lie under a question so simple in the seeming.  His eyes were
smiling contemptuously, but there was a faint flush in his cheeks.

"I don't remember," he replied at last.  "Some trifle.  The shooting,
coming suddenly that way . . .

"What started the ruction?"

"Bisbee had been drinking a little.  He seemed to be in the devil's own
temper.  He had asked the Kid to have a drink with him, and Rickard
refused.  He had his drink alone and then invited the Kid again.
Rickard told him to go to hell.  Bisbee started to walk across the room
as though he was going to the card-room.  Then he grabbed his gun and
whirled and started shooting."

"Missing every time, of course?"

Galloway nodded.

"You'll remember I said he was carrying enough of a load to make his
aim bad."

Norton asked half a dozen further questions and then said abruptly:

"That's all.  As you go out will you tell the boys to send Antone in?"

Again a hint of color crept slowly, dully, into Galloway's cheeks.

"You're going pretty far, Rod Norton," he said tonelessly.

"You're damned right I am!" cried Norton ringingly.  "And I am going a
lot further, Jim Galloway, before I get through, and you can bet all of
your blue chips on it.  I want Antone in here and I want you outside!
Do I get what I want or not?"

Galloway stood motionless, his cigar clamped tight in his big square
teeth.  Then he shrugged and went to the door.

"If I am standing a good deal off of you," he muttered, hanging on his
heel just before he passed out, "it's because I am as strong as any man
in the county to see the law brought into San Juan.  And"--for the
first time yielding outwardly to a display of the emotion riding him,
he spat out venomously and tauntingly--"and we'd have had the law here
long ago had we had a couple of men in the boots of the Nortons, father
and son!"

Rod Norton's face went a flaming red with anger, his hand grew white
upon the butt of the gun at his side.

"Some day, Jim Galloway," he said steadily, "I'll get you just as sure
as you got Billy Norton!"

Galloway laughed and went out.

To Antone, Norton put the identical questions he had asked of Galloway,
receiving virtually the same replies.  Seeking the one opportunity
suggesting itself into tricking the bartender, he asked at the end:

"Just before the shooting, when you and Galloway were talking and he
told you that Bisbee was looking for trouble, why weren't you ready to
grab him when he went for his gun?"

Antone was giving his replies as guardedly as Galloway had done.  He
took his time now.

"Because," he began finally, "I do not belief when Señor Galloway speak
that . . ."

His eyes had been roving from Norton's, going here and there about the
room.  Suddenly a startled look came into them and he snapped his mouth
shut.

"Go on," prompted the sheriff.

"I don't remember," grunted Antone.  "I forget what Señor Galloway say,
what I say.  Bisbee say: 'Have a drink.'  The Kid say: 'Go to hell.'
Bisbee shoot, one, two, three, like that.  I forget what we talk about."

Norton turned slowly and looked whither Antone had been looking when he
cut his own words off so sharply.  The man upon whom his eyes rested
longest was a creased-faced Mexican, Vidal Nuñez, who now stood, head
down, making a cigarette.

"That's all, Antone," Norton said.  "Send the Kid in."

The Kid came, still sullen but swaggering a little, his hat cocked
jauntily to one side, the yellow wisp of hair in his faded eyes.  And
he in turn questioned, gave such answers as the two had given before
him.

Now for the first time the sheriff, stepping across the room, looked
for such evidence as flying lead might have left for him.  In the wall
just behind the spot where Bisbee had stood were two bullet holes.
Going to the far end of the room where the chair leaned against the
table, he found that a pane of glass in the window opening upon the
street had been broken.  There were no bullet marks upon wall or
woodwork.

"Bisbee shot two or three times, did he?" he cried, wheeling on the
Kid.  "And missed every time?  And all the bullets went through the one
hole in the window, I suppose?"

The Kid shrugged insolently.

"I didn't watch 'em," he returned briefly.

Galloway and Antone were allowed to come again into the room, and of
Galloway, quite as though no hot word had passed between them, Norton
asked quietly:

"Bisbee had a lot of money on him.  What happened to it?"

"In there."  Galloway nodded toward the card-room whose door had
remained closed.  "In his pocket."

A few of the morbid followed as the sheriff went into the little room.
Already most of the men had seen and had no further curiosity.  Norton
drew the blanket away, noted the wounds, three of them, two at the base
of the throat and one just above the left eye.  Then, going through the
sheepman's pockets, he brought out a handful of coins.  A few gold,
most of them silver dollars and half-dollars, in all a little over
fifty dollars.

The dead man lay across two tables drawn together, his booted feet
sticking out stolidly beyond the bed still too short to accommodate his
length of body.  Norton's eyes rested on the man's boots longer than
upon the cold face.  Then, stepping back to the door so that all in the
barroom might catch the significance of his words, he said sharply:

"How many men of you know where Bisbee always carried his money when he
was on his way to bank?"

"In his boots!" answered two voices together.

"Come this way, boys.  Take a look at his boots, will you?"

And as they crowded about the table, sensing some new development,
Galloway pushing well to the fore, Norton's vibrant voice rang out:

"It was a clean job getting him, and a clean job telling the story of
how it happened.  But there wasn't overmuch time and in the rush. . . .
Tell me, Jim Galloway, how does it happen that the right boot is on the
left foot?"




CHAPTER IV

AT THE BANKER'S HOME

Rod Norton made no arrest.  Leaving the card-room abruptly he signalled
to Julius Struve, the hotel keeper, to follow him.  In the morning
Struve, in his official capacity as coroner, would demand a verdict.
Having long been in strong sympathy with the sheriff he was to be
looked to now for a frank prediction of the inquest's result.  And,
very thoughtful about it all, he gravely agreed with Norton; the
coroner's jury, taking the evidence offered by Jim Galloway, Kid
Rickard, and Antone, would bring in a verdict of justifiable homicide.

"Later on we'll get 'em, Roddy . . . mebbe," he said finally.  "But not
now.  If you pulled the Kid it would just be running up the county
expense all for nothing."

The sheriff left him in silence and leading his horse went the few
steps to the hotel.  Ignacio Chavez appearing opportunely Norton gave
his animal into the breed's custody; Ignacio, accustomed to doing odd
jobs for el Señor Roderico Nortone, and to the occasional half dollars
resulting from such transactions, led the big gray away while the
sheriff entered the hotel.  It had been a day of hard riding and scanty
meals, and he was hungry.

Bright and new and conspicuous, a gold-lettered sign at Struve's
doorway caught his eye and caused him to remember the wounded left hand
which had been paining him considerably through the long hot day.  The
sign bore the name of Dr. V. D. Page with the words Physician and
Surgeon; in blue pencilled letters upon the practitioner's card,
affixed to the brass chain suspending the sign, were the further words:
"Room 5, Struve's Hotel."

The sheriff went to Room 5.  It was at the front of the building, upon
the ground floor.  The door opened almost immediately when he rapped.
Confronting him was the girl he had encountered at the arroyo.  He
lifted his hat, looked beyond her, and said simply:

"I was looking for Dr. Page.  Is he in now?"

"Yes," she told him gravely.  "Come in, please."

He stepped across the threshold, his eyes trained to quick observation
of details taking in at a glance all there was to be seen.  The room
showed all signs of a fresh unpacking, the one table and two chairs
piled high with odds and ends.  For the most part the miscellany
consisted of big, fat books, bundles of towels and fresh white napkins,
rubber-stoppered bottles of varicolored contents, and black leather
cases, no doubt containing a surgeon's instruments.  Through an open
door giving entrance to the adjoining room he noted further signs of
unpacking with a marked difference in the character of the litter; the
girl stepped quickly to this door, shutting out the vision of a
helter-skelter of feminine apparel.

"It is your hand?" she asked, as in most thoroughly matter of fact
fashion she put out her own for it.  "Let me see it."

But for a moment he bestowed upon her merely a slow look of question.

"You don't mean that you are Dr. Page?" he asked.  Then, believing that
he understood: "You're the nurse?"

"Is a physician's life in San Juan likely to be so filled with his
duties that he must bring a nurse with him?" she countered.  "Yes, I am
Dr. Page."

He noted that she was as defiant about the matter as the Kid had been
about the killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas; plainly she had foreseen
that the type of man-animal inhabiting this out-of-the-way corner of
the world would be likely to wonder at her hardihood and, perhaps, to
jeer.

"I came to-day," she explained in the same matter-of-fact way.
"Consequently you will pardon the looks of things.  But I am one of the
kind that believes in hanging out a shingle first, getting details
arranged next.  Now may I see the hand?"

"It's hardly anything."  He lifted it now for her inspection.  "Just a
slight cut, you know.  But it's showing signs of infection.  A little
antiseptic . . ."

She took his fingers into hers and bent over the wound.  He noted two
things, now: what strong hands she had, shapely, with sensitive fingers
ignorant of rings; how richly alive and warmly colored her hair was,
full of little waves and curls.

She had nothing to say while she treated him.  Over an alcohol lamp she
heated some water; in a bowl, brought from the adjoining room, she
cleansed the hand thoroughly.  Then the application of the final
antiseptic, a bit of absorbent cotton, a winding of surgeon's tape
about a bit of gauze, and the thing was done.  Only at the end did she
say:

"It's a peculiar cut . . . not a knife cut, is it?"

"No," he answered humorously.  "Did it on a piece of lead. . . .  How
much is it, Doctor?"

"Two dollars," she told him, busied with the drying of her own hands.
"Better let me look at it again in the morning if it pains you."

He laid two silver dollars in her palm, hesitated a moment and then
went out.

"She's got the nerve," was his thoughtful estimate as he went to his
corner table in the dining-room.  "But I don't believe she is going to
last long in San Juan. . . .  Funny she should come to a place like
this, anyhow. . . .  Wonder what the V stands for?"

At any rate the hand had been skilfully treated and bandaged; he nodded
at it approvingly.  Then, with his meal set before him, he divided his
thoughts pretty evenly between the girl and the recent shooting at the
Casa Blanca.  The sense was strong upon him as it had been many a time
that before very long either Rod Norton or Jim Galloway would lie as
the sheepman from Las Palmas was lying, while the other might watch his
sunrises and sunsets with a strange, new emotion of security.

The sheriff, who had not eaten for twelve hours, was beginning his meal
when the newest stranger in San Juan came into the dining-room.  She
had arranged her lustrous copper-brown hair becomingly, and looked
fresh and cool and pretty.  Norton approved of her with his keen eyes
while he watched her go to her place at a table across the room.  As
she sat down, giving no sign of having noted him, her back toward him,
he continued to observe and to admire her slender, perfect figure and
the strong, sensitive hands busied with her napkin.

A slovenly, half-grown Indian girl, Anita, the cook's daughter, came in
from the kitchen, directed the slumbrous eyes of her race upon the
sheriff who fitted well in a woman's eye, and went to serve the single
other late diner.  Norton caught a fleeting view of V. D. Page's throat
and cheek as she turned slightly in speaking with Anita.  As the
serving-maid withdrew Norton rose to his feet and crossed the room to
the far table.

"May I bring my things over and eat with you?" he asked when he stood
looking down on her and she had lifted her eyes curiously to his.  "If
you've come to stay you can't go on forever not knowing anybody here,
you know.  Since you've got to know us sooner or later why not begin to
get acquainted?  Here and now and with me?  I'm Roderick Norton."

One must have had far less discernment than she not to have felt
instinctively that the great bulk of human conventions would shrivel
and vanish before they could come this far across the desert lands.
Besides, the man standing over her looked straight and honestly into
her eyes and for a little she glimpsed again the youth of him veiled by
the sternness his life had set into his soul and upon his face.

"It is kind of you to have pity upon me in my isolation," she answered
lightly and without hesitation.  "And, to tell the truth, I never was
so terribly lonesome in all my life."

He made two trips back and forth to bring his plate and coffee cup and
auxiliary sauce dishes and plated silver, while she wondered idly that
he did not instruct the Indian girl to perform the service for him.
Even then she half formulated the thought that it was much more natural
for this man to do for himself what he wanted than for him to sit down
to be waited upon.  A small matter, no doubt; but then mountains are
made up of small particles and character of just such small
characteristics as this.

During the half hour which they spent together over their meal they got
to know each other rather better than chance acquaintances are likely
to do in so brief a time.  For from the moment of Norton's coming to
her table the bars were down between them.  She was plainly eager to
supplement Ignacio Chavez's information of "_la gente_" of San Juan
and its surrounding country, evincing a curiosity which he readily
understood to be based upon the necessities of her profession.  In
return for all that he told her she sketchily spoke of her own plans,
very vague plans, to be sure, she admitted with one of her quick, gay
smiles.  She had come prepared to accept what she found, she was
playing no game of hide-and-seek with her destiny, but had wandered
thus far from the former limits of her existence to meet life half way,
hoping to do good for others, a little imperiously determined to
achieve her own measure of success and happiness.

From the beginning each was ready, perhaps more than ready, to like the
other.  Her eyes, whether they smiled or grew suddenly grave, pleased
him; always were they fearless.  He sensed that beneath the external
soft beauty of a very lovely young woman there was a spirit of
hardihood in every sense worthy of the success which she had planned
bare-handed to make for herself, and in the man's estimation no quality
stood higher than a superb independence.  On her part, there was first
a definite surprise, then a glow of satisfaction that in this virile
arm of the law there was nothing of the blusterer.  She set him down as
a quiet gentleman first, as a sheriff next.  She enjoyed his low,
good-humored laugh and laughed back with him, even while she
experienced again the unaccustomed thrill at the sheer physical bigness
of him, the essentially masculine strength of a hardy son of the
southwestern outdoors.  Not once had he referred to the affair at the
Casa Blanca or to his part in it; not a question did she ask him
concerning it.  He told himself that so utterly human, so perfectly
feminine a being as she must be burning with curiosity; she marvelled
that he could think, speak of anything else.  When together they rose
from the table they were alike prepared, should circumstance so direct,
to be friends.

She was going now to call upon the Engles.  She had told him that she
had a letter to Mrs. Engle from a common friend in Richmond.

"I don't want to appear to be riding too hard on your trail," he smiled
at her.  "But I was planning dropping in on the Engles myself this
evening.  They're friends of mine, you know."

She laughed, and as they left the hotel, propounded a riddle for him to
answer: Should Mr. Norton introduce her to Mrs. Engle so that she might
present her letter, or, after the letter was presented, should Mrs.
Engle introduce her to Mr. Norton?

It did not suggest itself to her until they had passed from the street,
through the cottonwoods and into the splendid living-room of the Engle
home, that her escort was not dressed as she had imagined all civilized
mankind dressed for a call.  Walking through the primitive town his
boots and soft shirt and travel-soiled hat had been in too perfect
keeping with the environment for her to be more than pleasurably
conscious of them.

At the Engles', however, his garb struck her for a moment of the first
shock of contrast, as almost grotesquely out of place.

At the broad front door Norton had rapped.  The desultory striking of a
piano's keys ceased abruptly, a girl's voice crying eagerly: "It's
Roddy!" hinted at the identity of the listless player, a door flung
open flooded the broad entrance hall with light.  And then the outer
door framed banker Engle's daughter, a mere girl in her middle teens,
fair-haired, fair-skinned, fluffy-skirted, her eyes bright with
expectation, her two hands held out offering themselves in doubled
greetings.  But, having seen the unexpected guest at the sheriff's
side, the bright-haired girl paused for a brief moment of uncertainty
upon the threshold, her hands falling to her sides.

"Hello, Florrie," Norton was saying quietly.  "I have brought a caller
for your mother.  Miss Engle, Miss Page."

"How do you do, Miss Page?" Florrie replied, regaining her poise and
giving one of her hands to each of the callers, the abandon of her
first appearance gone in a flash to be replaced by a vague hint of
stiffness.  "Mama will be so glad to see you.  Do come in."

She turned and led the way down the wide, deep hall and into the
living-room, a chamber which boldly defied one to remember that he was
still upon the rim of the desert.  In one swift glance the newcomer to
San Juan was offered a picture in which the tall, carelessly clad form
of the sheriff became incongruous; she wondered that he remained at his
ease as he so obviously did.  Yonder was a grand piano, a silver chased
vase upon a wall bracket over it holding three long-stemmed, red roses;
a heavy, massive-topped table strewn comfortably and invitingly with
books and magazines; an exquisite rug and one painting upon the far
wall, an original seascape suggestive of Waugh at his best; excellent
leather-upholstered chairs luxuriously inviting, and at once homelike
and rich.  Just rising from one of these chairs drawn up to the table
reading-lamp, a book still in his hand, was Mr. Engle, while Mrs.
Engle, as fair as her daughter, just beginning to grow stout in
lavendar, came forward smilingly.

"Back again, Roddy?"  She gave him a plump hand, patted his lean brown
fingers after her motherly fashion, and came to where the girl had
stopped just within the door.

"Virginia Page, aren't you?  As if any one in the world would have to
tell me who _you_ were!  You are your mother all over, child; did you
know it?  Oh, kiss me, kiss me, my dear, for your mother's sake, and
save your hand-shakes for strangers."

Virginia, taken utterly by surprise as Mrs. Engle's arms closed warmly
about her, grew rosy with pleasure; the dreary loneliness of a long day
was gone with a kiss and a hug.

"I didn't know . . . ." she began haltingly, only to be cut short by
Mrs. Engle crying to her husband:

"It's Virginia Page, John.  Wouldn't you have known her anywhere?"

John Engle, courteous, urbane, a pleasant-featured man with grave,
kindly eyes and a rather large, firm-lipped mouth nodded to Norton and
gave Virginia his hand cordially.

"I must be satisfied with a hand-shake, Miss Page," he said in a deep,
pleasant voice, "but I refuse to be a mere stranger.  We are immensely
glad to have you with us. . . .  Mother, can't you see we have most
thoroughly mystified her; swooping down on her like this without giving
her an inkling of how and why we expected her?"

Roderick Norton and Florrie Engle had drawn a little apart; Virginia,
with her back to them during the greeting of Mrs. and Mr. Engle, had no
way of knowing whether the withdrawal had been by mutually spontaneous
desire or whether the initiative had been the sheriff's or Miss
Engle's.  Not that it mattered or concerned her in any slightest
particular.

In her hand was the note of introduction she had brought from Mrs. Seth
Morgan; evidently both its services and those of Roderick Norton might
be dispensed with in the matter of her being presented.

"Of course," Mrs. Engle was saying.  An arm about the girl's slim
waist, she drew her to a big leather couch.  "Marian never does things
by halves, my dear; you know that, don't you?  That's a letter she gave
you for me?  Well, she wrote me another, so I know all about you.  And,
if you are willing to accept the relationship with out-of-the-world
folks, we're sort of cousins!"

Virginia Page flushed vividly.  She had known all along that her mother
had been a distant relative of Mrs. Engle, but she had had no desire,
no thought of employing that very faint tie as an argument for being
accepted by the banker's family.  She did not care to come here like
the proverbial poor relation.

"You are very kind," she said quietly, her lips smiling while her eyes
were grave.  "But I don't want you to feel that I have been building on
the fact of kinship; I just wanted to be friends if you liked me, not
because you felt it your duty. . . ."

Engle, who had come, dragging his chair after him, to join them,
laughed amusedly.

"Answering your question, Mrs. Engle," he chuckled, "I'd certainly know
her for Virginia Page!  When we come to know her better maybe she will
allow us to call her Cousin Virginia?  In the meantime, to play safe, I
suppose that to us she'd better be just Dr. Page?"

"John is as full of nonsense after banking hours," explained Mrs.
Engle, still affectionately patting Virginia's hand, "as he is crammed
with business from nine until four.  Which makes life with him
possible; it's like having two husbands, makes for variety and so saves
me from flirting with other men.  Now, tell us all about yourself."

Virginia, who had been a little stiff-muscled until now, leaned back
among the cushions unconscious of a half sigh of content and of her
relaxation.  During the long day San Juan had sought to frighten, to
repel her.  Now it was making ample amends: first the companionable
society of Rod Norton, then this simple, hearty welcome.  She returned
the pressure of Mrs. Engle's soft, warm hands in sheer gratitude.

After that they chatted lightly, Engle gradually withdrawing from the
conversation and secretly watching the girl keenly, studying her play
of expression, seeking, according to his habit, to make his guarded
estimate of a new factor in his household.  From Virginia's face his
eyes went swiftly now and then to his daughter's, animated in her
tête-à-tête with the sheriff.  Once, when Virginia turned unexpectedly,
she caught the hint of a troubled frown in his eyes.

Broad double doors in the west wall of the living-room gave entrance to
the patio.  The doors were open now to the slowly freshening night air,
and from where she sat Virginia Page had a glimpse of a charming court,
an orange-tree heavy with fruit and blossom, red and yellow roses, a
sleeping fountain whose still water reflected star-shine and the lamp
in its niche under a grape-vine arbor.  When Norton and Florence Engle
strolled out into the inviting patio Engle, breaking his silence,
leaned forward and dominated the conversation.

Virginia had been doing the major part of the talking, answering
questions about Mrs. Engle's girlhood home, telling something of
herself.  Now John Engle, reminding his wife that their guest must be
consumed with curiosity about her new environment, sought to interest
her in this and that, in and about San Juan.

"There was a killing this afternoon," he admitted quietly.  "No doubt
you know of it and have been shocked by it, and perhaps on account of
it have a little misjudged San Juan.  We are not all cutthroats here,
by any manner of means; I think I might almost say that the rough
element is in the minority.  We are in a state of transition, like all
other frontier settlements.  The railroad, though it doesn't come
closer than the little tank station where you took the stage this
morning, has touched our lives out here.  A railroad brings civilizing
influences; but the first thing it does is to induct a surging tide of
forces contending against law and order.  Pioneers," and he smiled his
slow, grave, tolerant smile, "are as often as not tumultuous-blooded
and self-sufficient, and prone to kick over the established traces.
We've got that class to deal with . . . and that boy, Rod Norton, with
his job cut out for him, is getting results.  He's the biggest man
right now, not only in the country, but in this end of the state."

Continuing he told her something of the sheriff.  Young Norton, having
returned from college some three years before to live the only life
possible to one of his blood, had become manager of his father's ranch
in and beyond the San Juan mountains.  At the time Billy Norton was the
county sheriff and had his hands full.  Rumor said that he had promised
himself to "get" a certain man; Engle admitted that that man was Jim
Galloway of the Casa Blanca.  But either Galloway or a tool of
Galloway's or some other man had "gotten" Billy Norton, shooting him
down in his own cabin and from the back, putting a shotgun charge of
buckshot into his brain.

It had occurred shortly after Roderick Norton's return, shortly before
the expiration of Billy Norton's term of office.  Rod Norton, putting
another man in his place on the ranch, had buried his father and then
had asked of the county his election to the place made empty by his
father's death.  Though he was young, men believed in him.  The
election returns gave him his place by a crushing majority.

"And he has done good work," concluded Engle thoughtfully.  "Because of
what he has done, because he does not make an arrest until he has his
evidence and then drives hard to a certain conviction, he has come to
be called Dead-sure Norton and to be respected everywhere, and feared
more than a little.  Until now it has become virtually a two-man fight.
Rod Norton against Jim Galloway. . . ."

"John," interposed Mrs. Engle, "aren't you giving Virginia rather a
sombre side of things?"

"Maybe I am," he agreed.  "But this killing of the Las Palmas man in
broad daylight has come pretty close to filling my mind.  Who's going
to be next?"  His eyes went swiftly toward the patio, taking stock of
the two figures there.  Then he shrugged, went to the table for a cigar
and returned smiling to inform Virginia of life on the desert and in
the valleys beyond the mountains, of scattering attempts at reclamation
and irrigation, of how one made towns of sun-dried mud, of where the
adobe soil itself was found, drifted over with sand in the shade of the
cottonwoods.

But Mrs. Engle's sigh, while her husband spoke of black mud and straw,
testified that her thoughts still clung about those events and
possibilities which she herself had asked him to avoid; her eyes
wandered to the tall, rudely garbed figure dimly seen in the patio.
Virginia, recalling Jim Galloway as she had seen him on the stage,
heavy-bodied, narrow-hipped, masterful alike in carriage and the look
of the prominent eyes, glanced with Mrs. Engle toward Rod Norton.  He
was laughing at something passing between him and Florence, and for the
moment appeared utterly boyish.  Were it not for the grim reminder of
the forty-five-caliber revolver which the nature of his sworn duties
did not allow of his laying aside even upon a night like this, it would
have been easy to forget that he was all that which the one word
sheriff connotes in a land like that about San Juan.

"Can't get away from it, can we?"  Engle having caught the look in the
two women's eyes, broke off abruptly in what he was saying, and now sat
studying his cigar with frowning eyes.  "Man against man, and the whole
county knows it, one employing whatever criminal's tools slip into his
hands, the other fighting fair and in the open.  Man against man and in
a death grapple just because they are the men they are, with one backed
up by a hang-dog crowd like Kid Rickard and Antone, and the other
playing virtually a lone hand.  What's the end going to be?"

Virginia thought of Ignacio Chavez.  He, had he been here, would have
answered:

"In the end there will be the ringing of the bells for a man dead.  You
will see!  Which one?  _Quien sabe_!  The bells will ring."




CHAPTER V

IN THE DARKNESS OF THE PATIO

Through the silence of the outer night, as though actually Ignacio
Chavez were prophesying, came billowing the slow beating of the deep
mourning bell.  Mrs. Engle sighed; Engle frowned; Virginia sat rigid,
at once disturbed and oppressed.

"How can you stand that terrible bell?" she cried softly.  "I should
think that it would drive you mad!  How long does he ring it?"

"Once every hour until midnight," answered Engle, his face once more
placid as he withdrew his look from the patio and transferred it to his
cigar.  And then, with a half smile: "There are many San Juans; there
is, in all the wide world, but one San Juan of the Bells.  You would
not take our distinction from us?  Now that you are to become of San
Juan you must, like the rest of us, take a pride in San Juan's bells.
Which you will do soon or late; perhaps just as soon as you come to
know something of their separate and collective histories."

"Tell her, John," suggested Mrs. Engle, again obviously anxious to
dispel the more lugubrious and tragic atmospheres of the evening with
any chance talk which might offer itself.

"Let her wait until Ignacio can tell her," laughed Engle.  "No one else
can tell it so well, and certainly no one else has an equal pride or
even an equal right in the matter."

But, though he refused to take up the colorful theme of the biographies
of the Captain, the Dancer, Lolita, and the rest, John Engle began to
speak lightly upon an associated topic, first asking the girl if she
knew with what ceremony the old Western bells had been cast; when she
shook her head and while the slow throbbing beat of the Captain still
insisted through the night's silences, he explained that doubtless all
six of Ignacio Chavez's bells had taken form under the calm gaze of
high priests of old Spain.  For legend had it that all six were from
their beginnings destined for the new missions to be scattered
broadcast throughout a new land, to ring out word of God to heathen
ears.  Bells meant for such high service were never cast without grave
religious service and sacrifice.  Through the darkness of long-dead
centuries the girl's stimulated fancies followed the man's words; she
visualized the great glowing caldrons in which the fusing metals grew
red and an intolerable white; saw men and women draw near, proud
blue-blooded grandees on one hand, and the lowly on the other, with one
thought; saw the maidens and ladies from the courtyards of the King's
palace as they removed golden bracelets and necklaces from white arms
and throats, so that the red and yellow gold might go with their
prayers into the molten metals, enriching them, while those whose
poverty was great, but whose devotion was greater, offered what little
silver ornaments they could.  Carved silver vases, golden cups, minted
coins and cherished ornaments, all were offered generously and devoutly
until the blazing caldrons had mingled the Queen's girdle-clasps with a
bauble from the beggar girl.

"And in the end," smiled Engle, "there are no bells with the sweet tone
of old Mission bells, or with their soft eloquence."

While he was talking Ignacio Chavez had allowed the dangling rope to
slip from his hands so that the Captain rested quiet in the starshine.
Roderick and Florence were coming in through the wide patio door;
Norton was just saying that Florrie had promised to play something for
him when the front door knocker announced another visitor.  Florence
made a little disdainful face as though she guessed who it was; Engle
went to the door.

Even Virginia Page in this land of strangers knew who the man was.  For
she had seen enough of him to-day, on the stage across the weary miles
of desert, to remember him and to dislike him.  He was the man whom
Galloway and the stage-driver had called "Doc," the sole representative
of the medical fraternity in San Juan until her coming.  She disliked
him first vaguely and with purely feminine instinct; secondly because
of an air which he never laid aside of a serene consciousness of
self-superiority.  He had established himself in what he was pleased to
consider a community of nobodies, his inferiors intellectually and
culturally.  He was of that type of man-animal that lends itself to
fairly accurate cataloguing at the end of the first five minutes'
acquaintance.  The most striking of the physical attributes about his
person as he entered were his little mustache and neatly trimmed beard
and the diamond stick-pin in his tie.  Remove these articles and it
would have been difficult to distinguish him from countless thousands
of other inefficient and opinionated individuals.

Virginia noted that both Mr. and Mrs. Engle shook hands with him if not
very cordially at least with good-humored toleration; that Florence
treated him to a stiff little nod; that Roderick Norton from across the
room greeted him coolly.

"Dr. Patten," Engle was saying, "this is our cousin, Virginia Page."

Dr. Patten acknowledged the introduction and sat down, turning to ask
"how Florrie was today?"  Virginia smiled, sensing a rebuke to herself
in his manner; to-day on the stage she had made it obvious even to him
that if she must speak with a stranger she would vastly prefer the talk
of the stage-driver than that of Dr. Caleb Patten.  When Florence,
replying briefly, turned to the piano Patten addressed Norton.

"What was our good sheriff doing to-day?" he asked banteringly, as
though the subject he chose were the most apt one imaginable for jest.
"Another man killed in broad daylight and no one to answer for it!  Why
don't you go get 'em, Roddy?"

Norton stared at him steadily and finally said soberly:

"When a disease has fastened itself upon the body of a community it
takes time to work a cure, Dr. Patten."

"But not much time to let the life out of a man like the chap from Las
Palmas!  Why, the man who did the shooting couldn't have done a nicer
job if he'd been a surgeon.  One bullet square through the carotid
artery . . .  That leads from the heart to the head," he explained as
though his listeners were children athirst for knowledge which he and
none other could impart.  "The cerebrum penetrated by a second. . . ."

What other technical elucidation might have followed was lost in a
thunderous crashing of the piano keys as Florence Engle strove to drown
the man's utterance and succeeded so well that for an instant he sat
gaping at her.

"I can't stand that man!" Florence said sharply to Norton, and though
the words did not travel across the room, Virginia was surprised that
even an individual so completely armored as Caleb Patten could fail to
grasp the girl's meaning.

When Florence had pounded her way through a noisy bit of "jazz," Caleb
Patten, with one of his host's cigars lighted, was leaning a little
forward in his chair, alert to seize the first opportunity of snatching
conversation by the throat.

"Kid Rickard admits killing Bisbee," he said to Norton.  "What are you
going to do about it?  The first thing I heard when I got in from a
professional call a little while ago was that Rickard was swaggering
around town, saying that you wouldn't gather him in because you were
afraid to."

The sheriff's face remained unmoved, though the others looked curiously
to him and back to Patten, who was easy and complacent and vaguely
irritating.

"I imagine you haven't seen Jim Galloway since you got in, have you?"
Norton returned quietly.

"No," said Patten.  "Why?  What has Galloway got to do with it?"

"Ask him.  He says Rickard killed Bisbee in self-defense."

"Oh," said Patten.  And then, shifting in his chair: "If Galloway says
so, I guess you are right in letting the Kid go."

And, a trifle hastily it struck Virginia, he switched talk into another
channel, telling of the case on which he had been out to-day, enlarging
upon its difficulties, with which, it appeared, he had been eminently
fitted to cope.  There was an amused twinkle in John Engle's eyes as he
listened.

"By the way, Patten," the banker observed when there came a pause,
"you've got a rival in town.  Had you heard?"

"What do you mean?" asked the physician.

"When I introduced you just now to our Cousin Virginia, I should have
told you; she is Dr. Page, M.D."

Again Patten said "Oh," but this time in a tone which through its plain
implication put a sudden flash into Virginia's eyes.  As he looked
toward her there was a half sneer upon the lips which his scanty growth
of beard and mustache failed to hide.  Had he gone on to say, "A
_lady_ doctor, eh?" and laughed, the case would not have been altered.

"It seems so funny for a girl to be a doctor," said Florence, for the
first time referring in any way to Virginia since she had flown to the
door, expecting Norton alone.  Even now she did not look toward her
kinswoman.

John Engle replied, speaking crisply.  But just what he said Virginia
did not know.  For suddenly her whole attention was withdrawn from the
conversation, fixed and held by something moving in the patio.  First
she had noted a slight change in Rod Norton's eyes, saw them grow keen
and watchful, noted that they had turned toward the door opening into
the little court where the fountain was, where the wall-lamp threw its
rays wanly among the shrubs and through the grape-arbor.  He had seen
something move out there; from where she sat she could look the way he
looked and mark how a clump of rose-bushes had been disturbed and now
stood motionless again in the quiet night.

Wondering, she looked again to Norton.  His eyes told nothing now save
that they were keen and watchful.  Whether or not he knew what it was
so guardedly stirring in the patio, whether he, like herself, had
merely seen the gently agitated leaves of the bushes, she could not
guess.  She started when Engle addressed some trifling remark to her;
while she evaded the direct answer she was fully conscious of the
sheriff's eyes steady upon her.  He, no doubt, was wondering what she
had seen.

It was only a moment later when Norton rose and went to Mrs. Engle,
telling her briefly that he had had a day of it, in the saddle since
dawn, wishing her good night.  He shook hands with Engle, nodded to
Patten, and coming to Virginia said lightly, but, she thought, with an
almost sternly serious look in his eyes:

"We're all hoping you like San Juan, Miss Page.  And you will, too, if
the desert stillness doesn't get on your nerves.  But then silence
isn't such a bad thing after all, is it?  Good night."

She understood his meaning and, though a thrill of excitement ran
through her blood, answered laughingly:

"Shall a woman learn from the desert?  Have I been such a chatter-box,
Mrs. Engle, that I am to be admonished at the beginning to study to
hold my tongue?"

Florence looked at her curiously, turned toward Norton, and then went
with him to the door.  For a moment their voices came in a murmur down
the hallway; then Norton had gone and Florence returned slowly to the
living-room.

Again Virginia looked out into the patio.  Never a twig stirred now;
all was as quiet as the sleeping fountain, as silent and mystery-filled
as the desert itself.  Had Roderick Norton seen more than she?  Did he
know who had been out there?  Was here the beginning of some further
sinister outgrowth of the lawlessness of Kid Rickard? of the animosity
of Jim Galloway?  Was she presently to see Norton himself slipping into
the patio from the other side, was she again to hear the rattle of
pistol-shots?  He had asked that she say nothing; she had
unhesitatingly given him her promise.  Had she so unquestioningly done
as he had requested because he was the sheriff who represented the law?
or because he was Roderick Norton who stood for fine, upstanding
manhood? . . .  Again she felt Florence Engle's eyes fixed upon her.

"Florence is prepared at the beginning to dislike me," she thought.
"Why?  Just because I walked with him from the hotel?"

In the heat of an argument with Mrs. Engle there came an interruption.
The banker's wife was insisting that Virginia "do the only sensible
thing in the world," that she accept a home under the Engle roof,
occupying the room already made ready for her.  Virginia, warmed by the
cordial invitation, while deeply grateful, felt that she had no right
to accept.  She had come to San Juan to make her own way; she had no
claim upon the hospitality of her kinswoman, certainly no such claim as
was implied now.  Besides, there was Elmer Page.  Her brother was
coming to join her to-morrow or the next day, and as soon as it could
be arranged they would take a house all by themselves, or if that
proved impossible, would have a suite at the hotel.  At the moment when
it seemed that a deadlock had come between Mrs. Engle's eagerness to
mother her cousin's daughter and Virginia's inborn sense of
independence, the interruption came.

It arrived in the form of a boy of ten or twelve, a ragged, scantily
clothed, swarthy youngster, rubbing a great toe against a bare leg
while from the front door he announced that Ignacio Chavez was sick,
that he had eaten something _muy malo_, that he had pains and that he
prayed that the doctor cure him.

Patten grunted his disgust.

"Tell him to wait," he said briefly.  And, in explanation to the
others: "There's nothing the matter with him.  I saw him on the street
just before I came.  And wasn't he ringing his bell not fifteen minutes
ago?"

But the boy had not completed his message.  Ignacio was sick and did
not wish to die, and so had sent him to ask the Miss Lady Doctor to
come to him.  Virginia rose swiftly.

"You see," she said to Mrs. Engle, "what a nuisance it would be if I
lived with you?  May I come to see you to-morrow?"

While she said good night Engle got his hat.

"I'll go with you," he said.  "But, like Patten, I don't believe there
is much the matter with Chavez.  Maybe he thinks he'll get a free drink
of whiskey."

"You see again," laughed Virginia from the doorway, "what it would be
like, Mrs. Engle; if every time I had to make a call and Mr. Engle
deemed it necessary to go with me . . .  I'd have to split my fees with
him at the very least!  And I don't believe that I could afford to do
that."

"You could give me all that Ignacio pays you," chuckled Engle, "and
never miss it!"

The boy waited for them and, when they came out into the starlight,
flitted on ahead of them.  At the cottonwoods a man stepped out to meet
them.

"Hello," said Engle, "it's Norton."

"I sent the boy for Miss Page," said Norton quickly.  "I had to have a
word with her immediately.  And I'm glad that you came, Engle.  I want
a favor of you; a mighty big favor of Miss Page."

The boy had passed on through the shadows and now was to be seen on the
street.

"I guess you know you can count on me, Rod," said Engle quietly.  "What
now?"

"I want you, when you go back to the house, to say that you have
learned that Miss Page likes horseback riding; then send a horse for
her to the hotel stable, so that if she likes she can have it in the
early morning.  And say nothing about my having sent the boy."

Engle did not answer immediately.  He and Virginia stood trying to see
the sheriff's features through the darkness.  He had spoken quietly
enough and yet there was an odd new note in his voice; it was easy to
imagine how the muscles about his lean jaw had tensed, how his eyes
were again the hard eyes of a man who saw his fight before him.

"I can trust you, John," continued Norton quickly.  "I can trust
Ignacio Chavez; I can trust Julius Struve.  And, if you want it in
words of one syllable, I cannot trust Caleb Patten!"

"Hm," said Engle.  "I think you're mistaken there, my boy."

"Maybe," returned Norton.  "But I can't afford right now to take any
unnecessary chances.  Further," and in the gloom they saw his shoulders
lifted in a shrug, "I am trusting Miss Page because I've got to!  Which
may not sound pretty, but which is the truth."

"Of course I'll do what you ask," Engle said.  "Is there anything else?"

"No.  Just go on with Miss Page to see Ignacio.  He will pretend to be
doubled up with pain and will tell his story of the tinned meat he ate
for supper.  Then you can see her to the hotel and go back home,
sending the horse over right away.  Then she will ride with me to see a
man who is hurt . . . or she will not, and I'll have to take a chance
on Patten."

"Who is it?" demanded Engle sharply.

"It's Brocky Lane," returned Norton, and again his voice told of rigid
muscles and hard eyes.  "He's hurt bad, John.  And, if we're to do him
any good we'd better be about it."

Engle said nothing.  But the slow, deep breath he drew into his lungs
could not have been more eloquent of his emotion had it been expelled
in a curse.

"I'll slip around the back way to the hotel," said Norton.  "I'll be
ready when Miss Page comes in.  Good night, John."

Silently, without awaiting promise or protest from the girl, he was
gone into the deeper shadows of the cottonwoods.




CHAPTER VI

A RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT

Ignacio Chavez, because thus he could be of service to _el señor_
Roderico Nortone whom he admired vastly and loved like a brother, drew
to the dregs upon his fine Latin talent, doubled up and otherwise
contorted and twisted his lithe body until the sweat stood out upon his
forehead.  His groans would have done ample justice to the occasion had
he been dying.

Virginia treated him sparingly to a harmless potion she had secured at
her room on the way, put the bottle into the hands of Ignacio's
withered and anxious old mother, informed the half dozen Indian
onlookers that she had arrived in time and that the bell-ringer would
live, and then was impatient to go with Engle to Struve's hotel.  Here
Engle left her to return to his home and to send the saddle-horse he
had promised Norton.

"You can ride, can't you, Virginia?" he had asked.

"Yes," she assured him.

"Then I'll send Persis around; she's the prettiest thing in horseflesh
you ever saw.  And the gamest.  And, Virginia . . ."

He hesitated.  "Well?" she asked.

"There's not a squarer, whiter man in the world than Rod Norton," he
said emphatically.  "Now good night and good luck, and be sure to drop
in on us to-morrow."

She watched him as he went swiftly down the street; then she turned
into the hotel and down the hall, which echoed to the click of her
heels, and to her room.  She had barely had time to change for her ride
and to glance at her "war bag" when a discreet knock sounded at her
door.  Going to the door she found that it was Julius Struve instead of
Norton.

"You are to come with me," said the hotel keeper softly.  "He is
waiting with the horses."

They passed through the dark dining-room, into the pitch black kitchen
and out at the rear of the house.  A moment Struve paused, listening.
Then, touching her sleeve, he hurried away into the night, going toward
the black line of cottonwoods, the girl keeping close to his heels.

At the dry arroyo Norton was waiting, holding two saddled horses.
Without a word he gave her his hand, saw her mounted, surrendered
Persis's jerking reins into her gauntletted grip and swung up to the
back of his own horse.  In another moment, and still in silence,
Virginia and Norton were riding away from San Juan, keeping in the
shadows of the trees, headed toward the mountains in the north.

And now suddenly Virginia found that she was giving herself over
utterly, unexpectedly to a keen, pulsing joy of life.  She had
surrendered into the sheriff's hands the little leather-case which
contained her emergency bottles and instruments; they had left San Juan
a couple of hundred yards behind, their horses were galloping; her
stirrup struck now and then against Norton's boot.  John Engle had not
been unduly extravagant in praise of the mare Persis; Virginia sensed
rather than saw clearly the perfect, beautiful creature which carried
her, delighted in the swinging gallop, drew into her soul something of
the serene glory of a starlit night on the desert.  The soft thud of
shod hoofs upon yielding soil was music to her, mingled as it came with
the creak of saddle leather, the jingle of bridle and spur-chains.  She
wondered if there had ever been so perfect a night, if she had ever
mounted so finely bred a saddle animal.

Far ahead the San Juan mountains lifted their serrated ridge of ebony.
On all other sides the flat-lands stretched out seeming to have no end,
suggesting to the fancy that they were kin in vastitude to the clear
expanse of the sky.  On all hands little wind-shaped ridges were like
crests of long waves in an ocean which had just now been stilled,
brooded over by the desert silence and the desert stars.

"I suppose," said Norton at last, "that it's up to me to explain."

"Then begin," said Virginia, "by telling me where we are going."

He swung up his arm, pointing.

"Yonder.  To the mountains.  We'll reach them in about two hours and a
half.  Then, in another two hours or so, we'll come to where Brocky is.
Way up on the flank of Mt. Temple.  It's going to be a long, hard
climb.  For you, at the end of a tiresome day. . . ."

"How about yourself?" she asked quickly, and he knew that she was
smiling at him through the dark.  "Unless you're made of iron I'm
almost inclined to believe that after your friend Brocky I'll have
another patient.  Who is he, by the way?"

"Brocky Lane?  I was going to tell you.  You saw something stirring in
the patio at Engle's?  I had seen it first; it was Ignacio who had
slipped in under the wide arch from the gardens at the rear of the
house.  He had been sent for me by Tom Cutter, my deputy.  Brocky Lane
is foreman of a big cattle-ranch lying just beyond the mountains; he is
also working with me and with Cutter, although until I've told you
nobody knows it but ourselves and John Engle. . . .  Before the night
is out you'll know rather a good deal about what is going on, Miss
Page," he added thoughtfully.

"More than you'd have been willing for me to know if circumstance
hadn't forced your hand?"

"Yes," he admitted coolly.  "To get anywhere we've had to sit tight on
the game we're playing.  But, from the word Cutter brings, poor old
Brocky is pretty hard hit, and I couldn't take any chances with his
life even though it means taking chances in another direction."

He might have been a shade less frank; and yet she liked him none the
less for giving her the truth bluntly.  He was but tacitly admitting
that he knew nothing of her; and yet in this case he would prefer to
call upon her than on Caleb Patten.

"No, I don't trust Patten," he continued, the chain of thought being
inevitable.  "Not that I'd call him crooked so much as a fool for Jim
Galloway to juggle with.  He talks too much."

"You wish me to say nothing of to-night's ride?"

"Absolutely nothing.  If you are missed before we get back Struve will
explain that you were called to see old Ramorez, a half-breed over
yonder toward Las Estrellas.  That is, provided we get back too late
for it to appear likely that you are just resting in your room or
getting things shipshape in your office.  That's why I am explaining
about Brocky."

"Since you represent the law in San Juan, Mr. Norton," she told him,
"since, further, Mr. Engle indorses all that you are doing, I believe
that I can go blindfolded a little.  I'd rather do that than have you
forced against your better judgment to place confidence in a stranger."

"That's fair of you," he said heartily.  "But there are certain matters
which you will have to be told.  Brocky Lane has been shot down by one
of Jim Galloway's crowd.  It was a coward's job done by a man who would
run a hundred miles rather than meet Brocky in the open.  And now the
thing which we don't want known is that Lane even so much as set foot
on Mt. Temple.  We don't want it known that he was anywhere but on Las
Cruces Rancho; that he was doing anything but give his time to his
duties as foreman there."

"In particular you don't want Jim Galloway to know?"

"In particular I don't want Jim Galloway to so much as suspect that
Brocky Lane or Tom Cutter or myself have any interest in Mt. Temple,"
he said emphatically.

"But if the man who shot him is one of Galloway's crowd, as you
say. . . ."

"He'll do no talking for a while.  After having seen Brocky drop he
took one chance and showed half of his cowardly carcass around a
boulder.  Whereupon Brocky, weak and sick and dizzy as he was, popped a
bullet into him."

She shuddered.

"Is there nothing but killing of men among you people?" she cried
sharply.  "First the sheepman from Las Palmas, then Brocky Lane, then
the man who shot him. . . ."

"Brocky didn't kill Moraga," Norton explained quietly.  "But he dropped
him and then made him throw down his gun and crawl out of the brush.
Then Tom Cutter gathered him in, took him across the county line, gave
him into the hands of Ben Roberts who is sheriff over there, and came
on to San Juan.  Roberts will simply hold Moraga on some trifling
charge, and see that he keeps his mouth shut until we are ready for him
to talk."

"Then Brocky Lane and Tom Cutter were together on Mt. Temple?"

"Near enough for Tom to hear the shooting."

They grew silent again.  Clearly Norton had done what explaining he
deemed necessary and was taking her no deeper into his confidences.
She told herself that he was right, that these were not merely his own
personal secrets, that as yet he would be unwise to trust a stranger
further than he was forced to.  And yet, unreasonably or not, she felt
a little hurt.  She had liked him from the beginning and from the
beginning she felt that in a case such as his she would have trusted to
intuition and have held back nothing.  But she refrained from voicing
the questions which none the less insisted upon presenting themselves
to her: What was the thing that had brought both Brocky Lane and Tom
Cutter to Mt. Temple?  What had they been seeking there in a wilderness
of crag and cliff?  Why was Roderick Norton so determined that Jim
Galloway should not so much as suspect that these men were watchful in
the mountains?  What sinister chain of circumstance had impelled
Moraga, who Norton said was Galloway's man, to shoot down the cattle
foreman?  And Galloway himself, what type of man must he be if all that
she had heard of him were true; what were his ambitions, his plans, his
power?

Before long Norton pointed out the shadowy form of Mt. Temple looming
ever vaster before them, its mass of rock, of wind-blown, wind-carved
peaks lifted in sombre defiance against the stars.  It brooded darkly
over the lower slopes, like an incubus it dominated the other spines
and ridges, its gorges filled with shadow and mystery, its precipices
making the sense reel dizzily.  And somewhere up there high against the
sky, alone, suffering, perhaps dying, a man had waited through the slow
hours, and still awaited their coming.  How slowly she and Norton were
riding, how heartless of her to have felt the thrill of pleasure which
had possessed her so utterly an hour ago!

Or less than an hour.  For now again, wandering out far across the open
lands, came the heavy mourning of the bell.

"How far can one hear it?" she asked, surprised that from so far its
ringing came so clearly.

"I don't know how many miles," he answered.  "We'll hear it from the
mountain.  I should have heard it to-day, long before I met you by the
arroyo, had I not been travelling through two big bands of Engle's
sheep."

Behind them San Juan drawn into the shadows of night but calling to
them in mellow-toned cadences of sorrow, before them the sombre canons
and iron flanks of Mt. Temple, and somewhere, still several hours away,
Brocky Lane lying helpless and perhaps hopeless; grim by day the earth
hereabouts was inscrutable by night, a mighty, primal sphinx,
lip-locked, spirit-crushing.  The man and girl riding swiftly side by
side felt in their different ways according to their different
characters and previous experience the mute command laid upon them, and
for the most part their lips were hushed.

There came the first slopes, the talus of strewn, broken,
disintegrating rock, and then the first of the cliffs.  Now the sheriff
rode in the fore and Virginia kept her frowning eyes always upon his
form leading the way.  They entered the broad mouth of a ravine, found
an uneven trail, were swallowed up by its utter and impenetrable
blackness.

"Give Persis her head," Norton advised her.  "She'll find her way and
follow me."

His voice, low-toned as it was, stabbed through the silence, startling
her, coming unexpectedly out of the void which had drawn him and his
horse gradually beyond the quest of her straining eyes.  She sighed,
sat back in her saddle, relaxed, and loosened her reins.

For an hour they climbed almost steadily, winding in and out.  Now,
high above the bed of the gorge, the darkness had thinned about them;
more than once the girl saw the clear-cut silhouette of man and beast
in front of her or swerving off to right or left.  When, after a long
time, he spoke again he was waiting for her to come up with him.  He
had dismounted, loosened the cinch of his saddle and tied his horse to
a stunted, twisted tree in a little flat.

"We have to go ahead on foot now," he told her as he put out his hand
to help her down.  And then as they stood side by side: "Tired much?"

"No," she answered.  "I was just in the mood to ride."

He took down the rope from her saddle strings, tied Persis, and, saying
briefly, "This way," again went on.  She kept her place almost at his
heels, now and again accepting the hand he offered as their way grew
steeper underfoot.  Half an hour ago she knew that they had swerved off
to the left, away from the deep gorge into whose mouth they had ridden
so far below; now she saw that they were once more drawing close to the
steep-walled cañon.  Its emptiness, black and sinister, lay between
them and a group of bare peaks which stood up like cathedral spires
against the sky.

"This would be simple enough in the daytime," Norton told her during
one of their brief pauses.  "In the dark it's another matter.  Not
tired out, are you?"

"No," she assured him the second time, although long ago she would have
been glad to throw herself down to rest, were their errand less urgent.

"We've got some pretty steep climbing ahead of us yet," he went on
quietly.  "You must be careful not to slip.  Oh," and he laughed
carelessly, "you'd stop before you got to the bottom, but then a drop
of even half a dozen feet is no joke here.  If you'll pardon me I'll
make sure for you."

With no further apology or explanation he slipped the end of a rope
about her waist, tying it in a hard knot.  Until now she had not even
known that he had brought a rope; now she wondered just how hazardous
was the hidden trail which they were travelling; if it were in truth
but the matter of half a dozen feet which she would fall if she
slipped?  He made the other end of the short tether fast about his own
body, said "Ready?" and again she followed him closely.

There came little flat spaces, then broken boulders to clamber over,
then steep, rugged climbs, when they grasped the rough rocks with both
hands and moved on with painful slowness.  It seemed to the girl that
they had been climbing for long, tedious hours since they had slipped
out of their saddles; though to him she said nothing, locking her lips
stubbornly, she knew that at last she was tired, very tired, that an
end of this laborious ascent must come soon or she would be forced to
stop and lie down and rest.

"Fifteen minutes more," said the sheriff, "and we're there.  We'll use
the first five minutes of it for a rest, too."

He made her sit down, unstoppered a canteen which, like the coil of
rope, she had not known he carried, and gave her a drink of water which
seemed to her the most wonderfully strength-making, life-giving draft
in the world.  Then he dropped down at her side, looked at his watch in
the light of a flaring match carefully cupped in his hand, and lighted
his pipe.

"Nearly midnight," he told her.

Without replying she lay back against the slope of the mountain, closed
her eyes and relaxed, breathing deeply.  Her chest expanded deeply to
the long indrawn breath which filled her lungs with the rare air.  She
felt suddenly a little sleepy, dreaming longingly of the unutterable
content one could find in just going to sleep with the cliff-scarred
mountainside for couch.

She stirred and opened her eyes.  Rod Norton, the sheriff of San Juan,
a man who a few brief hours ago had been unknown to her, his name
unfamiliar, sat two paces from her, smoking.  She and this man of whom
she still knew rather less than nothing were alone in the world; just
the two of them lifted into the sky, separated by a dreary stretch of
desert lands from other men and women . . . bound together by a bit of
rope.  She tried to see his face; the profile, more guessed than seen,
appeared to her fancy as unrelenting as the line of cliff just beyond
him, clear-cut against the sky.

Yet somehow . . . she did not definitely formulate the thought of which
she was at the time but dimly, vaguely conscious . . . she was glad
that she had come to San Juan.  And she was not afraid of the silent
man at her side, nor sorry that circumstance had given them this night
and its labors.

Norton knocked out his pipe.  Together they got to their feet.

"More careful than ever now," he cautioned her.  "Look out for each
step and go slowly.  We're there in ten minutes.  Ready?"

"Ready," she answered.




CHAPTER VII

IN THE HOME OF CLIFF-DWELLERS

Those remaining ten minutes tried all that there was of endurance in
Virginia Page.  Often Norton, bidding her wait a moment, climbed on to
some narrow ledge above her and, drawing the rope steadily through his
hands, gave her what aid he could; often, clinging with hand and foot
she thought breathlessly of the steep fall of cliff which the darkness
hid from her eyes, but which grew ever steeper in her mind as she
struggled on.  He had said it would be easier in daylight; she wondered
if after all it would not have been more difficult could she have seen
just what were the chances she was taking at every moment.  But more
and more she came to have utter faith in the quiet man going on before
her, and in the piece of rope which stretched taut between them.

"And now," said Norton at last, when once more he had drawn her up to
him and they stood close together upon a narrow ledge, "we've got a
good, safe trail under foot.  Good news, eh?"

But as he moved on now he kept her hand locked tight in his own.  Their
"good, safe trail" was a rough ledge running almost horizontally along
the cliffside, its trend scarcely perceptibly upward.  Within twenty
steps it led them into a wide, V-shaped fissure in the rocks.  Then
came a sort of cup in a nest of rugged peaks, its bottom filled with
imprisoned soil worn from the spires above.  As Norton, relinquishing
her hand, went forward swiftly she heard a man's voice saying weakly:

"That you, Rod?"

"I came as soon as I could, Brocky."  Norton, standing close to a big
outjutting boulder upon the far side of the cup, was bending over the
cattleman.  "How are you making out, old man?"

"I've sure been having one hell of a nice little party," grunted Brocky
Lane faintly.  "A man's so damn close to heaven on these mountain
tops. . . .  Who's that?"

Virginia came forward quickly and went down on her knees at Lane's side.

"I'm Dr. Page," she said quietly.  "Now if you'll tell me where you're
hit . . . and if Mr. Norton will get me some sort of a light.  A fire
will have to do. . . ."

Another little grunt came from Brocky Lane's tortured lips, this time a
wordless expression of his unmeasured amazement.

"I didn't want Patten in on this," Norton explained.  "Miss Page is a
doctor; just got into San Juan to-day.  She's a cousin of Engle.  And
she knows her business a whole lot better than Patten does, besides."

"Will you get the fire started immediately, Mr. Norton?" asked Virginia
somewhat sharply.  "Mr. Lane has waited long enough as it is."

"I'll be damned!" said Brocky Lane weakly.  And then, more weakly
still, in a voice which broke despite a manful effort to make it both
steady and careless, "I never cuss like that unless I'm delerious,
anyhow I never cuss when there's a lady. . . ."

"If you'll keep perfectly still," Virginia admonished him quickly,
"I'll do all the talking that is necessary.  Where is the wound?"

"You don't have to have a light, do you?" Brocky insisted on being
informed.  "You see, we can't have it.  Where'm I hurt, you want to
know?  Mostly right here in my side."

Virginia's hands found the rude bandage, damp and sticky.

"It's nonsense about not having a light," she said, turning toward
Norton.

"No," said the wounded man.  "Nonsense nothing, is it Rod?  How're we
going to have a fire when my matches are all gone and Rod's
matches. . . ."

"Mr. Norton," Virginia cut in crisply, "in spite of your friend's talk
and in spite of the bluff he is putting up he is pretty badly hurt.
You give me some sort of a light, I don't care if they see it down at
San Juan, or you shoulder the responsibility.  Which is it?"

Norton turned and was gone in the darkness; to Virginia's eyes it
seemed that he was swallowed up by the cliff's themselves, as though
they had opened and accepted him and closed after him.  She supposed
that he had gone to seek what scanty dry fuel one might find here.  But
in a moment he was back carrying a lighted lantern.

"Look here, Rod. . . ." expostulated Brocky.

"Shut up, Brocky," answered Norton quietly.  And, passing the lantern
to the girl.  "If you'll carry that I'll carry Brocky.  It's only a few
steps and I won't hurt him.  We can make him more comfortable there;
and besides, we can't leave him out here in the sun to-morrow."

Somewhat mystified, Virginia took the lantern and her own surgical case
from the sheriff and watched him stoop and gather the tall form of his
friend into his arms.  Then going the way he indicated, straight across
the tiny flat, she lighted the way.  She heard the wounded man groan
once; then, his teeth set to guard his lips, Brocky was silent.

After a dozen steps she came to a steep-sided, narrow chasm giving
passageway not six feet wide which twisted this way and that before her.

"Look out," called Norton sharply.  "Watch where you step now.  Go
slow."

Virginia swinging her lantern up shoulder-high, looking ahead, grew
instantly stock-still, a shiver tingling along her spine.  The narrow
defile through which she had passed had led out of the ring of peaks
and now abruptly debouched into nothingness.  As she had turned with
the twisting passageway, expecting to see another wall of rock before
her, she saw instead the sky filled with stars.  She stood almost at
the edge of a sheer precipice.

"Throw the light to the left now," commanded Norton.  "See what looks
like the entrance to a cave?  We go in there."

She walked on, moving slowly, warily, a little faint from the one
startled view before her, her body tight pressed to the rocks upon the
left, her feet only a pace from the edge of the cliff.  Now she saw the
mouth of the cave, a black ragged hole just above a flat rock which
thrust itself outward so that it seemed hanging, balanced insecurely,
over the abyss.  By the pale rays of the lantern she saw the fairly
smooth, gently sloping floor of the cavern; then, stooping, she passed
in, turned, and held the light for Norton.

He came on steadily, bearing his burden lightly.  Still holding the
lantern for him, turning as he came closer, she saw that the cave was
lofty and wide, that it ran farther back into the mountain than her
lantern's rays could follow.

"Back there," said Norton, "you'll find blankets.  I'll hold him while
you spread some out for him."

She hurried toward the farther end of the cave, came to a tumble of
blankets against the wall, dragged out two or three, spreading them
quickly.  And then, while Norton was stooping to lay Brocky's limp form
down, she busied herself with her case.

"He has fainted," she said quickly.  "I'd like to examine the wound
before he is conscious; it's going to hurt him.  Pour me some water
into any sort of basin or cup or anything else you've got here.  Then
stand by to help me if I need you. . . .  Hold the lantern for me."

Swiftly, but Norton marked with what skilful fingers, she removed the
bandage and made her examination.  Norton, squatting upon his heels at
her side, holding the lantern, after one frowning look at the wound,
kept his eyes fixed upon her face.  Brocky Lane was near his death and
the sheriff knew it after that one look; his life lay, perhaps, in the
hands of this girl.  Norton had brought her when he might have brought
Patten.  Had he chosen wrongly?

He had noted her hands before; now they seemed to him the most
wonderful hands ever possessed by either man or woman, strong, sure,
quick, sensitive, utterly capable.  He thought of Caleb Patten's hands,
thick, a little inclined to be flabby.

"Open that bottle," she directed coolly.  "One tablet into the water.
That box has cotton and gauze in it . . . don't touch them!  I want
everything clean; just open the box and set it where I can get it."

One by one she gave her directions and the man obeyed swiftly and
unquestioningly.  He watched her probe the wound, saw her eyes narrow,
knew that she had made her diagnosis.  As she washed the ugly hole in
the flesh and made her own bandage Brocky Lane was wincing, his eyes
again open.  Both men were watching her now, the same look in each
eager pair of eyes.  But until she had done and, with Norton's help,
had made Lane as comfortable as possible upon his crude bed, she gave
no answer to their mute pleading.  Then she sat down upon the stone
floor, caught her knees up in her clasped hands, and looked long and
searchingly into Brocky Lane's face.  The cowboy struggled with his
muscles and triumphed over them, summoning a sick grin as he muttered:

"You're mighty good to take all this trouble. . . .  I'm sure a hundred
times obliged. . . ."

"And," she cut in abruptly, "you mean to tell me that you shot that man
after he had put this hole in you?  And then you made him crawl out of
the brush and come to you?"

"I sure did," grunted Brocky.  "And if my aim hadn't been sort of bad,
me being all upset this way, I wouldn't have just winged old Moraga
that way, either!  When he's all cured up and I'm all well again. . . ."

Then he broke off and again his eyes, like Norton's, asked their
question.  This time she answered it, speaking slowly and thoughtfully.

"Mr. Brocky Lane, I congratulate you on three things, your physique
first, your luck second, and third, your nerve.  They are a combination
that is hard to beat.  I am very much inclined to the belief that in a
month or so you'll be about as good as new."

Norton expelled a deep breath of relief; he realized suddenly that
whatever this gray-eyed, strong-handed girl had said would have had his
fullest credence.  Brocky's grin grew a shade less strained.

"When you add to that combination," he muttered, "a sure-enough angel
come to doctor a man. . . ."

"Growing delirious again," laughed Virginia.  "Give him a little
brandy, Mr. Norton.  Then a smoke if he's dying for one.  Then we'll
try to get a little sleep, all of us.  You see, I had virtually no
sleep on the train last night and to-day has been a big day for me.  If
I'm going to do your friend any good I've got to get three winks.  And,
unless you're made out of reinforced sheet-iron, it's the same for you.
You can lie down close to Mr. Lane so that he can wake you easily if he
needs us.  Now," and she rose, still smiling, but suddenly looking
unutterably weary, "where is the guest-chamber?"

She did not tell them that not only last night, but the night before
she had sat up in a day coach, saving every cent she could out of the
few dollars which were to give her and her brother a new start in the
world; there were many things which Virginia Page knew how to keep to
herself.

"This way," said Norton, taking up the lantern.  "We can really make
you more comfortable than you'd think."

At the very least he could count confidently on treating her to a
surprise.  She followed him for forty or fifty feet toward the end of
the cave and to an irregular hole in the side wall, through this, and
into another cave, smaller than the first, but as big as an ordinary
room.  The floor was strewn with the short needles of the mountain
pine.  As she turned, looking about her, she noted first another
opening in a wall suggesting still another cave; then, feeling a faint
breath of the night air on her cheek she saw a small rift in the outer
shell of rock and through it the stars thick in the sky.

"May you sleep well in Jim Galloway's hang-out," said Norton lightly.
"May you not be troubled with the ghosts of the old cliff-dwellers
whose house this was before our time.  And may you always remember that
if there is anything in the world that I can do for you all you have to
do is let me know.  Good night."

"Good night," she said.

He had left the lantern for her.  She placed it on the floor and went
across her strange bedroom to the hole in the rock through which the
stars were shining.  It seemed impossible that those stars out there
were the same stars which had shone upon her all of her life long.  She
could fancy that she had gone to sleep in one world and now had
awakened in another, coming into a far, unknown territory where the
face of the earth was changed, where men were different, where life was
new.  And though her body was tired her spirit did not droop.  Rather
an old exhilaration was in her blood.  She had stepped from an old,
outworn world into a new one, and with a quick stir of the pulses she
told herself that life was good where it was strenuous and that she was
glad that Virginia Page had come to San Juan.

"And now," she mused sleepily when at last she lay down upon heaped-up
pine-needles and drew over her the blanket Norton had brought, "I am
going to sleep in the hang-out of Jim Galloway and the old home of the
cliff-dwellers!  Virginia Page, you are a downright lucky girl!"

Whereupon she blew out her lantern, smiled faintly at the stars shining
upon her, sighed wearily and went to sleep.




CHAPTER VIII

JIM GALLOWAY'S GAME

As full consciousness of her surroundings returned slowly to her,
Virginia Page at first thought that she had been awakened by the aroma
of boiling coffee.  Then, sitting up, wide awake, she knew that Norton
had come to the doorway of her separate chamber and had called.  She
threw off her blanket and got up hastily.

It was still dark.  She imagined that she had merely dozed and that
Norton was summoning her because Brocky Lane was worse.  A dim glow
shone through the cave entrance, that flickering, uncertain light
eloquent of a camp-fire.  As her hands went swiftly and femininely to
her hair, she heard Norton's voice in a laughing remark.  Only then she
knew that she had slept three or four hours, that the dawn was near,
that it was time for her to return to San Juan.

"Good morning," she said brightly.

Norton, squatting by the fire, frying-pan in hand, turned and answered
her nod; Brocky Lane, flat on his back with his hands clasped behind
his head, a cigarette in his mouth, twisted a little where he lay, his
eyes eager upon his doctor.  Virginia came on into the full light,
striking the pine-needles from her riding-habit.

"Time to eat and ride," said Norton, turning again to his task.  "Bacon
and coffee and exercise.  Have you rested?"

"Perfectly.  And Mr. Lane?"

"Me?" said Brocky.  "Feeling fine."

Norton gave her a cup of warm water to wash her hands.  Then she made a
second, very careful examination of Brocky's wound, cleansing it and
adjusting a fresh bandage.

"I want to start in half an hour," said the sheriff.  "There'll be
light enough then so that we can make time getting down to the horses
and yet not enough light to show us up to a chance early rider down
below.  Then we'll swing off to the west, make a wide bend, ride
through Las Estrellas and get back into San Juan when we please.  That
is you will; I'll leave you outside of Las Estrellas, showing you the
way.  And, while we eat, I am going to tell you something."

"About Galloway?" she asked quickly.  "Explaining what you meant by
Galloway's hang-out?"

"Yes.  And more than that."

For a little she stood, looking at him very gravely.  Then she spoke in
utter frankness.

"Mr. Norton, I think that I can see your position; you were so
circumstanced through Mr. Lane's being hurt that you had to bring
either Dr. Patten or me here.  You decided it would be wiser to bring
me.  There is something of a compliment in that, isn't there?"

"You don't know Caleb Patten yet!" growled Brocky a bit savagely.

"Already it seems to me," she went on, "that you have a pretty hard row
to hoe.  It is evident that you have discovered a sort of thieves'
headquarters here; that, for your own reasons, you don't want it known
that you have found it.  To say that I am not curious about it all
would be talking nonsense, of course.  And yet I can assure you that I
hold you under no obligation whatever to do any explaining.  You are
the sheriff and your job is to get results, not to be polite to the
ladies."

But Norton shook his head.

"You know what you know," he said seriously.  "I think that if you know
a little more you will more readily understand why we must insist on
keeping our mouths shut . . . all of us."

"In that case," returned the girl, "and before you boil that coffee
into any more hopelessly black a concoction than it already is, I am
ready to drink mine and listen.  Coffee, Mr. Lane?"

"Had mine, thanks," answered Brocky.  "Spin the yarn, Rod."

Norton put down his frying-pan, the bacon brown and crisp, and rose to
his feet.

"Will you come this way a moment, Miss Page?" he asked.  "To begin
with, seeing is believing."

She followed him as she had, last night, back into the cave in which
she had slept.  But Norton did not stop here.  He went on, Virginia
still following him, came to that other hole in the rock wall which she
had noted by the lantern light.

"In here," he said.  "Just look."

He swept a match across his thigh, holding it up for her.  She came to
his side and looked in.  First she saw a number of small boxes,
innocent appearing affairs which suggested soda-crackers.  Beyond them
was something covered with a blanket; Norton stepped by her and jerked
the covering aside.  Startled, puzzled by what she saw, she looked to
him wonderingly.  Placed neatly, lying side by side, their metal
surfaces winking back at the light of Norton's match, were a number of
rifles.  A score of them, fifty, perhaps.

"It looks like a young revolution!" she cried, her gaze held, her eyes
fascinated by the unexpected.

"You've seen about everything now," he told her, the red ember of a
burnt-out match dropping to the floor.  "Those boxes contain
cartridges.  Now let's go back to Brocky."

"But they'll see that you have been here. . . ."

"I'll come back in a minute with the lantern; I want a further chance
to look things over.  Then I'll put the blanket back and see that not
even that charred match gives us away.  And we'd better be eating and
getting started."

With a steaming tin of black coffee before her, a brown piece of bacon
between her fingers, she forgot to eat or drink while she listened to
Norton's story.  At the beginning it seemed incredible; then, her
thoughts sweeping back over the experiences of these last twenty-four
hours, her eyes having before them the picture of a sheriff, grim-faced
and determined, a wounded man lying just beyond the fire, the rough,
rudely arched walls and ceiling of a cave man's dwelling about her, she
deemed that what Norton knew and suspected was but the thing to be
expected.

"Jim Galloway is a big man," the sheriff said thoughtfully.  "A very
big man in his way.  My father was after him for a long time; I have
been after him ever since my father's death.  But it is only recently
that I have come to appreciate Jim Galloway's caliber.  That's why I
could never get him with the goods on; I have been looking for him in
the wrong places.

"I estimated that he was making money with the Casa Blanca and a
similar house which he operates in Pozo; I thought that his entire game
lay in such layouts and a bit of business now and then like the robbing
of the Las Palmas man.  But now I know that most of these lesser jobs
are not even Galloway's affair, that he lets some of his crowd like the
Kid or Antone or Moraga put them across and keep the spoils, often
enough.  In a word, while I've been looking for Jim Galloway in the
brush he has been doing his stunt in the big timber!  And now. . . ."
The look in Norton's eyes suggested that he had forgotten the girl to
whom he was talking.  "And now I have picked up his trail!"

"And that's something," interposed Brocky Lane, a flash of fire in his
own eyes.  "Considering that no man ever knew better than Jim Galloway
how to cover tracks."

"You see," continued Norton, "Jim Galloway's bigness consists very
largely of these two things: he knows how to keep his hands off of the
little jobs, and he knows how to hold men to him.  Bisbee, of Las
Palmas, goes down in the Casa Blanca; his money, perhaps a thousand
dollars, finds its way into the pockets of Kid Rickard, Antone, and
maybe another two or three men.  Jim Galloway sees what goes on and
does no petty haggling over the spoils; he gets a strangle-hold on the
men who do the job; it costs him nothing but another lie or so, and he
has them where he can count on them later on when he needs such men.
Further, if they are arrested, Jim Galloway and Galloway's money come
to the front; they are defended in court by the best lawyers to be had,
men are bribed and they go free.  As a result of such labors on
Galloway's part I'd say at a rough guess that there are from a dozen to
fifty men in the county right now who are his men, body and soul.

"With a gang like that at his back, a man of Galloway's type has grown
pretty strong.  Strong enough to plan . . . yes, and by the Lord, carry
out! . . . the kind of game he's playing right now.

"A half-breed took sick and died a short time ago, a man whom I'd never
set my eyes on particularly.  It happened that he was a superstitious
devil and that he was a second or third cousin of Ignacio Chavez.  He
was quite positive that unless the bells rang properly for him he would
go to hell the shortest way.  So he sent for Ignacio and wound up by
talking a good deal.  Ignacio passed the word on to me.  And that was
the first inkling I had of Galloway's real game.  In a word, this is
what it is:

"He plans on one big stroke and then a long rest and quiet enjoyment of
the proceeds.  You have seen the rifles; he'll arm a crowd of his best
men . . . or his worst, as you please . . . swoop down on San Juan, rob
the bank, shooting down just as many men as happen to be in the way,
rush in automobiles to Pozo and Kepple's Town, stick up the banks
there, levy on the Las Palmas mines, and then steer straight to the
border.  And, if all worked according to schedule, the papers across
the country would record the most daring raid across the border yet,
blaming the whole affair on a detachment of Gringo-hating Mexican
bandits and revolutionists."

Virginia stared at him, half incredulously.  But the look in Norton's
eyes, the same look in Brocky Lane's, assured her.

"Why do you wait then?" she asked sharply.  "If you know all this, why
don't you arrest the man and his accomplices now?  Before it is too
late?"

"And have the whole country laugh at me?  Where's my evidence?  Just
the word of a dead Indian, repeated by another Indian, and a few rifles
hid in the mountains?  Even if we proved the rifles were Galloway's,
and I don't believe we could, how would we set about proving his
intention?  No; I've talked it all over with the district attorney and
we can't move yet.  We've got our chance at last; the chance to watch
and get Jim Galloway with the goods on.  But we've got to wait until he
is just ready to strike.  And then we are going to put a stop to
lawlessness in San Juan once and for all."

"But," she objected breathlessly, "if he should strike before you are
ready?"

"It is our one business in life that he doesn't do it.  We know what he
is up to; we have found this hiding-place; we shall keep an eye on it
night and day.  He doesn't know that we have been here; no one knows
but ourselves.  You see now, Miss Page, why I couldn't bring Patten
here?  Patten talks too much and Galloway knows every thought in
Patten's mind.  And you understand how important it is for you to
forget that you have been here?"

She sat silent, staring into the embers of the dying fire.

"The thing which I can't understand," she said presently, "is that if
Jim Galloway is the 'big man' that you say he is he should do as much
talking as he must have done; that he should have told his plans to
such a man as the Indian who told them to Ignacio Chavez."

"But he didn't tell all of this," Norton informed her.  "The Indian
died without guessing what I have told you.  He merely knew that the
rifles were here because Galloway had employed him to bring them and
because he was the man who told Galloway of this hiding-place.  He
believed that Galloway's whole scheme was to smuggle a lot of arms and
ammunition south and across the border, selling to the Mexicans.  But
from what little he could tell Chavez and from what we found out for
ourselves, the whole play became pretty obvious.  No, Galloway hasn't
been talking and he has been playing as safe as a man can upon such
business as this.  His luck was against him, that's all, when the
Indian died and insisted on being rung out by the San Juan bells.
There's always that little element of chance in any business,
legitimate or otherwise. . . .  And now, if you'll finish your
breakfast I'll show you a view you'll never forget and then we'll hit
the trail."

"But, Mr. Lane," she asked, "you don't intend to leave him here all
alone?  He will get well with the proper attention; but be must have
that."

"Within another hour or so," Norton told her, "Tom Cutter will be back
with one of Brocky's cowboys.  They'll move Lane into a cañon on the
other side of the mountain.  Oh, I know he oughtn't to be moved, but
what else can we do?  Besides, Brocky insists on it.  Then they'll
arrange to take care of him; if necessary you'll come out again
to-morrow night?"

"Of course," she said.  She went to Brocky and held out her hand to
him.  "I understand now, I think, why you would refuse to die, no
matter how badly you were hurt, until you had helped Mr. Norton finish
the work you have set your hands to.  It's an honor, Mr. Lane, to have
a patient like you."

Whereupon Brocky Lane grew promptly crimson and tongue-tied.

"And now the view, Mr. Norton, and I am ready to go."

He led the way to the outer ledge from which last night they had
entered the cave.

"In daylight you can see half round the world from here," he said as
they stood with their backs to the rock.  "Now you can get an idea of
what it's like."

Below her was the chasm formed by these cliffs standing sheer and
fronting other tall cliffs looming blackly, the stars beginning to fade
in the sky above them.  Norton pushed a stone outward with his boot;
she heard it strike, rebound, strike again . . . and then there was
silence; when the falling stone reached the bottom no sound came back
to tell her how far it had dropped.

Turning a little to look southward, she saw the cliffs standing farther
and farther back on each side so that the eye might travel between them
and out over the lower slopes and the distant stretches of level land
which, more now than ever, seemed a great limitless sea.  The stars
were paling rapidly; the first glint of the new day was in the air, the
world lay shadowy and silent and lifeless, softened in the seeming,
but, as in the daytime, slumbrous under an atmosphere of brooding
mystery.

"When you told me last night . . . when you put your rope around me and
said that I might fall half a dozen feet. . . ."

"Had we fallen it would have been a hundred feet, many a time," he said
quietly.  "But I knew we wouldn't fall.  And," looking into her face
with an expression in his eyes which the shadows hid, "I shouldn't have
sought to minimize the danger to you had I known you as well as I think
I know you now."

"Thank you," she said lightly.  But she was conscious of a warm
pleasurable glow throughout her entire being.  It was good to live life
in the open, it was good to stand upon the cliff tops with a man like
Roderick Norton, it was good to have such a man speak thus.


Five minutes later they were making their way down the cliffs toward
the horses.




CHAPTER IX

YOUNG PAGE COMES TO TOWN

Here and there throughout the great stretches of the sun-smitten
southwest are spots which still remain practically unknown, wherein men
come seldom or not at all, where no man cares to tarry.  Barren
mountains that are blistering hot, sucked dry long ago of their last
vestige of moisture; endless drifts of sand where the silent animal
life is scanty, where fanged cactus and stubborn mesquite fight their
eternal battles for life; mesas and lomas little known, shunned by
humanity.  True, men have been here, some few poking into the dust of
ancient ruins, more seeking minerals, and now and then one, fleeing the
law, to be followed relentlessly by such as Roderick Norton.  And yet
there is the evidence, if one looks, that this desolate, shunned land
once had its teeming tribes and its green fields.

Virginia and Roderick, having made their hazardous way down the cliffs
and to their horses in silence, found their tongues loosened as they
rode westward in the soft dawn.  Virginia put her questions and he, as
best he could, answered them.  She asked eagerly of the old
cliff-dwellers and he shrugged his shoulders.  Aztecs, were they?
Toltecs?  What?  _Quien sabe_!  They were a people of mystery who had
left behind them a silence like that of the desert wastes themselves.
Whence they came, where they went, and why, must long remain questions
with many answers and therefore none at all.  But he could tell her a
few things of the ancient civilization . . . and a civilization it
truly was . . . and of the signs left for posterity to puzzle over.

They had builded cities, and the ruins of their pueblos still stand
scattered across the weary, scorched land; they constructed mile after
mile of aqueducts whose lines are followed to-day by reclamation
engineers; they irrigated and cultivated their lands; they made abodes
high up on the mountains, dwelling in caves, enlarging their dwellings,
shaping homes and fortresses and lookouts.  And just so long as the
mountains themselves last, will men come now and then into such places
as that wherein Jim Galloway's rifles lay hidden.

"I have lived in this part of the world all but two or three years of
my life," said Norton at the end, "and yet I never heard of these
particular caves until a very few days ago.  I don't believe that there
are ten people living who know of them; so Galloway, hiding his stuff
out there was playing just as safe as a man can play--when he plays the
game crooked, anyway."

"But won't he guess something when he misses Moraga?"

"I don't think so." Norton shook his head.  "Tom Cutter and Brocky made
Moraga talk.  His job was to keep an eye on this end, but he was
commissioned also to make a trip over to the county line.  The first
thing Jim Galloway will hear will be that Moraga got drunk and into a
scrape and was taken in by Sheriff Roberts.  Then I think that Galloway
himself will slip out of San Juan himself some dark night and climb the
cliffs to make sure.  When he finds everything absolutely as it was
left, when time passes and nothing is done, I think he will replace
Moraga with another man and figure that everything is all right.  Why
shouldn't he?"

From Galloway and Moraga they got back to a discussion of the ancient
peoples of the desert, venturing surmise for surmise, finding that
their stimulated fancies winged together, daring to construct for
themselves something of the forgotten annals of a forgotten folk who,
perhaps, were living in walled cities while old Egypt was building her
pyramids.  Then, abruptly, in a patch of tall mesquite, Norton reined
in his horse and stopped.

"You understand why I must leave you here," he said.  "Yonder, beyond
those trees straight ahead . . . you will see it from that little
ridge . . . is Las Estrellas, a town of a dozen houses.  But before you
get there you will come to the house where old Ramorez, a half-breed,
lives.  You remember; if you are missed in San Juan, Struve will say
that you have gone to see Ramorez.  He is actually sick by the way;
maybe you can do something for him.  His shack is in those cottonwoods,
this side of Las Estrellas.  You'll find Ignacio there, too; he'll go
back to San Juan with you.  And, once again, thank you."

He put out his hand; she gave him hers and for a moment they sat
looking at each other gravely.  Then Norton smiled, the pleasant boyish
smile, her lips curved at him deliciously, he touched his hat and was
gone.  And she, riding slowly, turned Persis toward Las Estrellas.

From Las Estrellas, an unkempt, ugly village strangely named, it was
necessary to ride some fifteen miles through sand and scrub before
coming again into San Juan.  Virginia Page, sincerely glad that she had
made her call upon old Ramorez who was suffering painfully from acute
stomach trouble and whose distress she could partially alleviate, made
the return ride in the company of Ignacio.  But first, from Ramorez's
baking hovel, the Indian conducted her to another where a young woman
with a baby a week old needed her.  So it was well on in the afternoon
and with a securely established alibi that she rode by the old Mission
and to the hotel.  As Ignacio rode listlessly away with the horses, as
innocent looking a lazy beggar as the world ever knew, Virginia caught
a glimpse of a white skirt and cool sunshade coming up the street.

"Florence Engle," she thought.  "Who, no doubt, will cut me dead if I
give her the opportunity."

A little hurriedly she turned in at the hotel door and went to her
room.  She had removed hat and gantlets, and was preparing for a bath
and change of clothing when a light knock sounded on her door.  The
rap, preceded by quick little steps down the hall, was essentially
feminine.

"Hello, Cousin Virginia," said Florence.  "May I come in?"

Virginia brought her in, gave her a chair and regarded her curiously.
The girl's face was flushed and pink, her eyes were bright and quite
gay and untroubled, her whole air genuinely friendly.  Last night
Virginia had judged her to be about seventeen; now she looked a mere
child.

"I was perfectly nasty last night, wasn't I?" Florrie remarked as she
stood her sunshade by her chair and smiled engagingly.  "Oh, I know it.
Just a horrid little cat . . . but then I'm that most of the time.  I
came all this way and in all this dust and heat just to ask you to
forgive me.  Will you?"

For the moment Virginia was nonplussed.  But Florence only laughed,
clasped her hands somewhat affectedly and ran on, her words tumbling
out in helter-skelter fashion.

"Oh, I know.  I'm spoiled and I'm selfish, and I'm mean, I suppose.
And, oh dear, I'm as jealous as anything.  But I'm ashamed of myself
this time.  Whew!  You ought to have listened in on the party after you
left!  If you could have heard mama scold me and papa jaw me about the
way I acted it would have made you almost sorry for me."

"But you weren't horrid at all," Virginia broke in at last, her heart
suddenly warming to this very obviously spoiled, futile, but none the
less likable, Florrie.  "You mustn't talk that way.  And if your
parents made you come. . . ."

"They didn't," said Florrie calmly.  "They couldn't.  Nobody ever made
me do anything; that's what's the matter with me.  I came because I
wanted to.  As the men say, I wanted to square myself.  And, would you
believe it, this is the third time I have called.  Mr. Struve kept
telling me that you had gone to see old Joe Ramorez . . . isn't he the
awfullest old pirate you ever saw?  And the dirtiest?  I don't see how
you can go near a man like that, even if he is dying; honestly I don't.
But you must do all kinds of things, being a doctor."

Her clasped hands tightened, she put her head of fluffy hair to one
side and looked at Virginia with such frank wonder in her eyes that
Virginia colored under them.

"And," ran on Florrie, forestalling a possible interruption, "I was
ready to poke fun at you last night just for being something capable
and . . . and splendid.  There was my jealousy again, I suppose.  You
ought to have heard papa on that score; 'Look here, my fine miss; if
you could just be something worth while in the world, if you could do
as much good in all of your silly life as Virginia Page does every day
of hers,' . . . and so forth until he was ready to burst and mama was
ready to cry, and I was ready to bite him!"  She trilled off in a burst
of laughter which was eloquent of the fact that Florence Engle, be her
faults what they might, was not the one to hold a grudge.

"I am sorry," said Virginia, smiling a little, "if on my account . . ."

"You were just going to get cleaned up, weren't you?" asked Florrie
contritely.  "You look as hot and dusty as anything.  My, what pretty
hair you have; I'll bet it comes down to your waist, doesn't it?  You
ought to see mine when I take it down; it's like the pictures of the
bush-whackers . . . you know what I mean, from South Africa or
somewhere, you know . . . only, of course, mine's a prettier color.
Sometime I'll come and comb yours for you, when you're tired out from
curing sick Indians.  But now," and she jumped to her feet, "I'll go
out on the porch while you get dressed and then you come out, will you?
It's cool there under the awning, and I'll have Mr. Struve bring us out
some cold lemonade.  But first, you do forgive me, don't you?"

Virginia's prompt assurance was incomplete when Florrie flitted out,
banging the door after her, headed toward the lounging-chairs on the
veranda.


"You pretty thing!" exclaimed Miss Florrie as Virginia joined her as
coolly and femininely dressed, if not quite as fluffily, as the
banker's daughter.  "Oh, but you are quite the most stunning creature
that ever came into San Juan!  Oh, I know all about myself; don't you
suppose I've stood in front of a glass by the long hours . . . wishing
it was a wishing-glass all the time and that I could turn a pug-nose
into a Grecian.  I'm pretty; you're simply beautiful!"

"Look here, my dear," laughed Virginia, taking the chair which Florrie
had drawn close up to her own in the shade against the adobe wall, "you
have already made amends.  It isn't necessary to . . ."

"I haven't half finished," cried Florrie emphatically.  "You see it's a
way of mine to do things just by halves and quit there.  But to-day it
is different; to-day I am going to square myself.  That's one reason
why I treated you so cattishly last night; because you were so
maddeningly good to look upon.  Through a man's eyes, you know; and
that's about all that counts anyway, isn't it?  And the other reason
was that you came in with Roddy and he looked so contented. . . .  Do
you wonder that I am just wild about him?  Isn't he a perfect dear?"

Florrie's utter frankness disconcerted Virginia.  The confession of
"wildness" about San Juan's sheriff, followed by the asseveration of
his perfect dearness was made in bright frankness, Florrie's voice
lowered no whit though Julius Struve at the moment was coming down the
veranda bearing a tray and glasses.  Virginia was not without gratitude
that Struve lingered a moment and bantered with Florrie; when he
departed she sought to switch the talk in another direction.  But
Florrie, sipping her tall glass and setting it aside, was before her.

"You see it was double-barrelled jealousy; so I did rather well not to
fly at you and tear your eyes out, didn't I?  Just because you and he
came in together . . . as if every time a man and girl walk down the
street together it means that they are going to get married!  But you
see, Roddy and I have known each other ever since before I can
remember, and I have asked myself a million times if some day we are
going to be Mr. and Mrs. Roderick Norton . . . and there are times when
I think we are!"

"You have a long time ahead of you yet, haven't you, Florence, before
you have to answer a question like that?" asked Virginia amusedly.

"Because I am so young?" cried Florrie.  "Oh, I don't know; girls marry
young here.  Now there is Tita . . . she is our cook's sister . . . she
has two babies already and she is only four months older than I am.
And . . .  Look, Virgie; there is the most terrible creature in the
world.  It is Kid Rickard; he killed the Las Palmas man, you know.  I
am not going even to look at him; I hate him worse that Caleb
Patten . . . and that's like saying I hate strychnine worse than
arsenic, isn't it?  But who in the name of all that is wonderful is the
man with him?  Isn't he the handsome thing?  I never saw him before.
He is from the outside, Virgie; you can tell by the fashionable cut of
his clothes and by the way he walks and . . .  Isn't he distinguished!"

"It is Elmer!" exclaimed Virginia, staring at the two figures which
were slowly approaching from the southern end of the street.  "When did
he get here?  I didn't expect him. . . ."

Then she chose to forget all save the essential fact that her "baby
brother" was here and ran out to the sidewalk, calling to him.

"Hello, Sis," returned Elmer nonchalantly.  He was a thin,
anaemic-looking young fellow a couple of years younger than Virginia
who affected a swagger and gloves and who had a cough which was
insistent, but which he strove to disguise.  And yet Florrie's
hyperbole had not been entirely without warrant.  He had something of
Virginia's fine profile, a look of her in his eyes, the stamp of good
blood upon him.  He suffered his sister to kiss him, meantime turning
his eyes with a faint sign of interest to the fair girl on the veranda.
Florrie smiled.

"Sis," said Elmer, "this is Mr. Rickard.  Mr. Rickard, shake hands with
my sister, Miss Page."

A feeling of pure loathing swept over the girl as she turned to look
into Kid Rickard's sullen eyes and degenerate, cruel face.  But, since
the Kid was a couple of paces removed and was slow about coming
forward, not so much as raising his hand to his wide hat, she nodded at
him and managed to say a quiet, non-committal, "How do you do?"  Then
she slipped her arm through Elmer's.

"Come, Elmer," she said hastily.  "I want you to know Miss Florence
Engle; she is a sort of cousin of ours."

"Sure," said Elmer off-handedly.  "Come on, Rickard."

But the Kid, standing upon no ceremony, had drawn his hat a trifle
lower over his eyes and turned his shoulder upon them, continuing along
the street in his slouching walk.  Elmer, summoning youth's supreme
weapon of an affected boredom, yawned, stifled his little cough and
went with Virginia to meet Florence.

Florence giggled over the introduction, then grew abruptly as grave as
a matron of seventy and tactlessly observed that Mr. Page had a very
bad cold; how could one have a cold in weather like this?  Whereupon
Mr. Page glared at her belligerently, noted her little row of curls,
revised his first opinion of her, set her down not only as a cousin,
but as a crazy kid besides, and removed half a dozen steps to a chair.

"I don't think much of your friends," remarked Florrie, sensing sudden
opposition and flying half-way to meet it.

Elmer Page produced a very new, unsullied pipe from his pocket and
filled it with an air, while Virginia looked on curiously.  Having done
so and having drawn up one trouser's leg to save the crease, crossed
the leg and at last put the pipe stem into his mouth, he regarded
Florrie from the cool and serene height of his superior age.

"If you refer to Mr. Rickard," he said aloofly, "I may say that he is
not a friend . . . yet.  I just met him this afternoon.  But, although
he hasn't had the social advantages, perhaps, still he is a man of
parts."

Florrie sniffed and tossed her head.  Virginia bit her lips and watched
them.

"Been smoking too many cigs, I guess, Sis," Elmer remarked apropos of
the initial observation of Miss Engle which still rankled.  "Got a
regular cigarette fiend's cough.  Gave 'em up.  Hitting the pipe now."

"If you knew," said Florrie spitefully, "that Mr. Rickard as you call
him had just murdered a man yesterday, what would you say then, I
wonder?"

There was a sparkle of excitement in Elmer's eyes as he swung about to
answer.

"Murdered!" he challenged.  "You've heard just one side of it, of
course.  Bisbee got drunk and insulted Mr. Rickard.  They call him the
Kid, you know.  Say, Sis, he's had a life for you!  Full of adventure,
all kinds of sport.  And Bisbee shot first, too.  But the Kid got him!"
he concluded triumphantly.  "Galloway told me all about it . . . and
what a blundering rummy the fool sheriff is."

"Galloway?" queried Virginia uneasily.  "You know him too, already?"

"Sure," replied Elmer.  "He's a good sort, too, You'll like him.  I
asked him around."

"For goodness' sake, Elmer, when did you get to San Juan?  Have you
been here a week or just a few hours?"

"Got in on the stage at noon, of course.  But it doesn't take a man all
year to get acquainted in a town this size."

"A man!" giggled Florrie.

"I can see," laughed Virginia, "that you two are going to be more kin
than kind to each other; you'll be quarrelling in another moment."

Florrie looked delighted at the prospect; Elmer yawned and brooded over
his pipe.  But out of the tail of his eye he took stock again of her
blonde prettiness, and she, ready from the beginning to make fun of
him, repeated to herself the words she had used to Virginia:

"But he is handsome . . . and distinguished looking!"




CHAPTER X

A BRIBE AND A THREAT

Virginia Page found time passing swiftly in San Juan.  Within two weeks
she came almost to forget how she had heard a rattle of pistol-shots,
how the slow sobbing of a bell in the Mission garden had bemoaned a
life gone and a fresh crime upon a man's soul; at the end of a month it
seemed to her that she had dreamed that ride through the night with
Roderick Norton, climbing the cliffs, ministering to a stricken man in
the forsaken abode of ancient cliff-dwellers.  She was like one
marooned upon a tiny island in an immense sea who has experienced the
crisis of shipwreck and now finds existence suddenly resolved into a
quiet struggle for the maintenance of life . . . that and a placid
expectation.  As another might have waited through the long, quiet
hours for the sign of a white sail or a black plume of smoke, so did
she wait for the end of a tale whose beginning had included her.

That the long days did not drag was due not so much to that which
happened about her, as to that which occurred within her.  She carried
responsibility upon each shoulder; her life was in the shaping and she
and none other must make it what it would be; her brother's character
was at that unstable stage when it was ready to run into the mould.
She had brought him here, from the city to the rim of the desert--the
step had been her doing, nobody's but hers.  And she had come here far
less for the sake of Elmer Page's cough than for the sake of his
manhood.  She wanted him to grow to be a man one could be proud of;
there were times when his eyes evaded her and she feared the outcome.

"He is just a boy," she told herself, seeking courage.  It seemed such
a brief time ago that she had blown his nose for him and washed his
face.  She made excuses for him, but did not close her eyes to the
truth.  The good old saw that boys will be boys failed to make of Elmer
all that she would have him.

Further to this consideration was another matter which filled the hours
for her.  The few dollars with which she had established herself in San
Juan marched in steady procession out of her purse and fewer other
dollars came to take their places.  The Indian Ramorez whose stomach
trouble she had mitigated came full of gratitude and Casa Blanca
whiskey and paid La Señorita Doctor as handsomely as he could; he gave
her his unlimited and eternal thanks and a very beautiful hair rope.
Neither helped her very greatly to pay for room and board.  Another
Indian offered her a pair of chickens; a third paid her seventy-five
cents on account and promised the rest soon.  When she came to know his
type better she realized that he had done exceptionally well by her.

She went often to the Engles', growing to love all three of them, each
in a different way.  Florrie she found vain, spoiled, selfish, but all
in so frank a fashion that in return for an admittedly half-jealous
admiration she gave a genuine affection.  And she was glad to see how
Elmer made friends with them, always appearing at his best in their
home.  He and Florrie were already as intimate as though they had grown
up with a back-yard fence separating their two homes; they criticised
each other with terrible outspokenness, they made fun of each other,
they very frequently "hated and despised" each other and, utterly
unknown to either Florrie Engle or Elmer Page, were the best of friends.

Of Roderick Norton San Juan saw little through these weeks.  He came
now and then, twice ate with Virginia and Elmer at Struve's, talked
seriously with John Engle, teased Florrie, and went away upon the
business which called him elsewhere.  Upon one of these visits he told
Virginia that Brocky Lane was "on the mend" and would be as good as new
in a month; no other reference was made to her ride with him.

But through his visits to San Juan, brief and few though they were,
Roderick Norton was enabled to assure himself with his own eyes that
Kid Rickard was still to be found here if required, that Antone, as
usual, was behind the Casa Blanca bar; that Jim Galloway was biding his
time with no outward show of growing restless or impatient.  Tom
Cutter, Norton's San Juan deputy, was a man to keep both eyes open, and
yet there were times when the sheriff was not content with another
man's vision.

Nor did the other towns of the county, scattered widely across the
desert, beyond the mountains and throughout the little valleys, see
much more of him.  If a man wished word with Rod Norton these days his
best hope of finding him lay in going out to _el Rancho de las Flores_.

It was Norton's ranch, having been Billy Norton's before him, one of
the choice spots of the county bordering Las Cruces Rancho where Brocky
Lane was manager and foreman.  Beyond the San Juan mountains it lay
across the head of one of the most fertile of the neighboring valleys,
the Big Water Creek giving it its greenness, its value, and the basis
for its name.  Here for days at a time the sheriff could in part lay
aside the cares of his office, take the reins out of his hired
foreman's hands, ride among his cattle and horses, and dream such
dreams as came to him.

"One of these days I'll get you, Jim Galloway," he had grown into the
habit of musing.  "Then they can look for another sheriff and I can do
what I want to do."

And his desire had grown very clearly defined to him; it was the old
longing of a man who comes into a wilderness such as this, the longing
to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before his coming.
With his water rights a man might work modern magic; far back in the
hills he had found the natural site for his storage dams; slightly
lower in a nest of hills there would be some day a pygmy lake whose
seductive beauty to him who dwells on desert lands calls like the soft
beauty of a woman; upon a knoll where now was nothing there would come
to be a comfortable, roomy, hospitable ranch-house to displace forever
the shacks which housed the men now farther down the slopes; and
everywhere, because there was water aplenty, would there be roses and
grape-vines and orange-trees.  All this when he should get Jim Galloway.

From almost any knoll upon the Rancho de las Flores he could see the
crests of Mt. Temple lifted in clear-cut lines against the sky.  If he
rode with Gaucho, his foreman, among the yearlings, he saw Mt. Temple;
if he rode the fifty miles to San Juan he saw the same peaks from the
other side.  And a hundred times he looked up at them with eyes which
were at once impatient and stern; he began to grow angry with Galloway
for so long postponing the final issue.

For, though he did not go near the cliff caves, he knew that the rifles
still lay there awaiting Jim Galloway's readiness.  A man named Bucky
Walsh was prospecting for gold upon the slopes of Mt. Temple, a silent,
leather-faced little fellow, quick-eyed and resourceful.  And, above
the discovery of color, it was the supreme business of Bucky Walsh to
know what happened upon the cliffs above him.  If there were anything
to report no man knew better than he how to get out of a horse all
there was of speed in him.

In the end Norton called upon the reserves of his patience, saying to
himself that if Jim Galloway could bide his time in calmness he could
do the same.  The easier since he was unshaken in his confidence that
the time was coming when he and Galloway would stand face to face while
guns talked.  Never once did he let himself hope for another ending.

Giving what time he had free to ranch matters at Las Flores the sheriff
found other things to occupy him.  There was a gamblers' fight one
night at the camp at Las Palmas mines, a man badly hurt, an ill-starred
bystander dead, the careless gunman a fugitive, headed for the border.
Norton went out after him, shifted saddle from jaded beast to fresh
again and again, rode two hundred miles with only the short stops for
hastily taken food and water and got his man willy-nilly a mile below
the border.  What was more, he made it his personal business that the
man was convicted and sentenced to a long term; about San Juan there
was no crime less tolerable than that of "shooting wild."

But all this brought him no closer to Jim Galloway; Galloway, meeting
him shortly afterward in San Juan, laughed and thanked him for the job.
It appeared that the man whom Norton had brought back to stand trial
was not only no friend of the proprietor of the Casa Blanca, but an
out-spoken enemy.

"You'll be asking favors of me next, Norton," grinned the big,
thick-bodied man.  "I'd pay you real money for getting a few like him
out of my way.  Get me, don't you?" and he passed on, his eyes turned
tauntingly.

Yes, Norton "got" him.  No man in the southwest harbored more bitter
ill-will for the lawless than Jim Galloway . . . unless the lawless
stood in with him.  Aforetime many a hardy, tempestuous spirit had
defied the crime-dictator; here of late they were few who hoped to slit
throats or cut purses and not pay allegiance to the saloon-keeper of
San Juan.

Upon the heels of this affair, however, came another which was destined
to bring Roderick Norton to a crisis in his life.  Word reached him at
Las Flores that a lone prospector in the Red Hills had been robbed of a
baking-powder tin of dust and that the prospector, recovering from the
blows which had been rained on his head, had identified one of his two
assailants.  That one was Vidal Nuñez; circumstances hinted that the
other well might be Kid Rickard.

Norton promptly instructed Tom Cutter to find out what he could of
Rickard's movements upon the day of the robbery, and himself set out to
bring in Vidal Nuñez, taking a grim joy in his task when he remembered
how Nuñez had been the man who, with a glance, had cautioned Antone to
hold his tongue after the shooting of Bisbee at the Casa Blanca.

"Here's a man Jim Galloway won't thank me for rounding up," he told
himself.  "And we are going to see if his arm is long enough to keep
Nuñez out of the penitentiary."

He went to San Juan, learned that nothing had been seen of the Mexican
there, set the machinery of the man hunt in full swing, doubled back
through the settlements to the eastward, and for two weeks got nothing
but disappointment for his efforts.  Nuñez had disappeared and none who
cared to tell knew where.  But Norton kept on doggedly; confident that
the man had not had the opportunity to get out of the country, he was
equally confident that, soon or late, he would get him.  Then came the
second meeting with Jim Galloway.

[Illustration: Then came the second meeting with Jim Galloway.]

The two men rode into each other's view on the lonely trail half-way
between San Juan and Tecolote, which is to say where the little, barren
hills break the monotony of the desert lands some eight or ten miles to
the eastward of San Juan.  It was late afternoon, and Galloway, riding
back toward town, had the sun in his eyes so that he could not have
known as soon as did Norton whom he was encountering.  But Galloway was
not the man to ride anywhere that he was not ready for whatever man he
might meet; Norton's eyes, as the two drew nearer on the blistering
trail, marked the way Galloway's right hand rested loosely on the
cantle of his saddle and very near Galloway's right hip.

Norton, merely eying him sharply, was for passing on without a word or
a nod.  The other, however, jerked in his horse, clearly of a mind for
parley.

"Well?" demanded Norton.

"I was just thinking," said Galloway dryly, "what an exceptionally
fitting spot we've picked!  If I got you or you got me right now nobody
in the world need ever know who did the trick.  We couldn't have found
a much likelier place if we'd sailed away to an island in the South
Seas."

"I was thinking something of the same kind," returned Norton coolly.
"Have you any curiosity in the matter?  If you think you can get your
gun first . . . why, then, go to it!"

Galloway eased himself in the saddle.

"If I thought I could beat you to it," he answered tonelessly, "I'd do
it.  As you know.  If I even thought that I'd have an even break with
you," he added, his eyes narrowing thoughtfully as they took stock of
the sheriff's right hand swinging free at his side and never far from
the butt of the revolver fitting loosely in his holster, "I'd take the
chance.  No, you're a shade too lively in the draw for me and I happen
to know it."

For a little they sat staring into each other's eyes, the distance of
ten steps between them, their right hands idle while their left hands
upon twitching reins curbed the impatience of two mettled horses.  As
was usual their regard was one of equal malevolence, of brimming, cold
hatred.  But slowly a new look came into Norton's eyes, a probing,
penetrating look of calculation.  Galloway was again opening his lips
when the sheriff spoke, saying with contemptuous lightness:

"Jim Galloway, you and I have bucked each other for a long time.  I
guess it's in the cards that one of us will get the other some day.
Why not right now and end the whole damned thing?--When I'm up against
a man as I am against you I like to make it my business to know just
how much sand has filtered into his make-up.  You'd kill me if you had
the chance and weren't afraid to do it, wouldn't you?"

"If I had the chance," returned Galloway as coolly, though a spot of
color showed under the thick tan of his cheek.  "And I'll get it some
day."

"If you've got the sand," said Norton, "you don't have to wait!"

"What do you mean?" snapped Galloway sharply.

Norton's answer lay in a gesture.  Always keeping such a rein on his
horse that he faced Galloway and kept him at his right, he lifted the
hand which had been hanging close to his gun.  Slowly, inch by inch,
his eyes hard and watchful upon Galloway's eyes, he raised his hand.
Understanding leaped into Galloway's prominent eyes; it seemed that he
had stopped breathing; surely the hairy fingers upon the cantle of his
saddle had separated a little, his hand growing to resemble a tarantula
preparing for its brief spring.

Steadily, slowly, the sheriff's hand rose in the air, brought upward
and outward in an arc as his arm was held stiff, as high as his
shoulder now, now at last lifted high above his head.  And all of the
time his eyes rested bright and hard and watchful upon Jim Galloway's,
filled at once with challenge and recklessness . . . and certainty of
himself.

Galloway's right hand had stirred the slight fraction of an inch, his
fingers were rigid and still stood apart.  As he sat, twisted about in
his saddle, his hand had about seven inches to travel to find the gun
in his hip pocket.  Since, when they first met, he had thrown his big
body to one side, his left boot loose in its stirrup while his weight
rested upon his right leg, his gun pocket was clear of the saddle, to
be reached in a flash.

"You'll never get another chance like this, Galloway," said Norton
crisply.  "I'd say, at a guess, that my hand has about eight times as
far to travel as yours.  You wanted an even break; you've got more than
that.  But you'll never get more than one shot.  Now, it's up to you."

"Before we start anything," began Galloway.  But Norton cut him short.

"I am not fool enough to hold my hand up like this until the blood runs
out of my fingers.  You've got your chance; take it or leave it, but
don't ask for half an hour's option on it."

Swift changing lights were in Galloway's eyes.  But his thoughts were
not to be read.  That he was tempted by his opportunity was clear; that
he understood the full sense underlying the words, "You'll never get
more than one shot," was equally obvious.  That shot, if it were not to
be his last act in this world, must be the accurate result of one
lightning gesture; his hand must find his gun, close about the grip,
draw, and fire with the one absolutely certain movement.  For the look
in Rod Norton's eyes was for any man to read.

Jim Galloway was not a coward and Rod Norton knew it.  He was
essentially a gambler whose business in life was to take chances.  But
he was of that type of gambler who plays not for the love of the game
but to win; who sets a cool brain to study each hand before he lays his
bet; who gauges the strength of that hand not alone upon its intrinsic
value but upon a shrewd guess at the value of the cards out against it.

At that moment he wanted, more than he wanted anything else in the wide
scope of his unleashed desires, to kill Rod Norton; he balanced that
fact with the other fact that less than anything in the world did he
want to be killed himself.  The issue was clear cut.

While a watch might have ticked ten times neither man moved.  During
that brief time Galloway's jaw muscles corded, his face went a little
white with the strain put upon him.  The restive horses, tossing their
heads, making merry music with jingling bridle chains, might have
galloped a moment ago from an old book of fairy-tales, each carrying a
man bewitched, turned to stone.

"If you've got the sand!" Norton taunted him, his blood running hot
with the fierce wish to have done with sidestepping and
procrastination.  "If you've got the sand, Jim Galloway!"

"It's better than an even break that I could get you," said Galloway at
last.  "And, at that, it's an even break or nearly so, that as you
slipped out of the saddle you'd get me, too. . . .  You take the pot
this time, Norton; I'm not betting."  Shifting his hand he laid it
loosely upon the horn of his saddle.  As he did so his chest inflated
deeply to a long breath.

Norton's uplifted hand came down swiftly, his thumb catching in his
belt.  There was a contemptuous glitter in his eyes.

"After this," he said bluntly, "you'll always know and I'll always know
that you are afraid.  I make it a part of my business not to
under-estimate the man I go out to get; I think I have overestimated
you."

For a moment Galloway seemed not to have heard as he stared away
through the gray distances.  When he brought his eyes back to Norton's
they were speculative.

"Men like you and me ought to understand each other and not make any
mistakes," he said, speaking slowly.  "I have just begun to imagine
lately that I have been doping you up wrong all the time.  Now I've got
two propositions to make you; you can take either or neither."

"It will probably be neither; what are they?  I've got a day's ride
ahead of me."

"Maybe you have; maybe you haven't.  That depends on what you say to my
proposition.  You're looking for Vidal Nuñez, they tell me?"

"And I'm going to get him; as much as anything for the sake of swatting
the devil around the stump."

"Meaning me?" Galloway shrugged.  "Well, here's my song and dance: This
county isn't quite big enough; you drop your little job and clear out
and leave me alone and I'll pay you ten thousand dollars now and
another ten thousand six months from now."

"Offer number one," said Norton, manifesting neither surprise nor
interest even.  "Twenty thousand dollars to pull my freight.  Well, Jim
Galloway, you must have something on the line that pulls like a big
fish.  Now, let's have the other barrel."

"I have suggested that you clean out; the other suggestion is that, if
you won't get out of my way, you get busy on your job.  Vidal Nuñez
will be at the Casa Blanca to-night.  I have sent word for him to come
in and that I'd look out for him.  Come, get him.  Which will you take,
Rod Norton?  Twenty thousand iron men or your chances at the Casa
Blanca?"

It was Norton's turn to grow thoughtful.  Galloway was rolling a
cigarette.  The sheriff reached for his own tobacco and papers.  Only
when he had set a match to the brown cylinder and drawn the first of
the smoke did he answer.

"You've said it all now, have you?" he demanded.

"Yes," said Galloway.  "It's up to you this time.  What's the word?"

Norton laughed.

"When I decide what I am going to do I always do it," he said lightly.
"And as a rule I don't do a lot of talking about it beforehand.  I'll
leave you to guess the answer, Galloway."

Galloway shrugged and swung his horse back into the trail.

"So long," he said colorlessly.

"So long," Norton returned.




CHAPTER XI

THE FIGHT AT LA CASA BLANCA

It was something after six o'clock when Jim Galloway rode into San
Juan.  Leaving his sweat-wet horse in his own stable at the rear of the
Casa Blanca he passed through the patio and into a little room whose
door he unlocked with a key from his pocket.  For ten minutes he sat
before a typewriting machine, one big forefinger slowly picking out the
letters of a brief note.  The address, also typed, bore the name of a
town below the border.  Without signing his communication he sealed it
into its envelope and, relocking the door as he went out, walked
thoughtfully down the street to the post-office.

As he passed Struve's hotel he lifted his hat; upon the veranda at the
cooler, shaded end, Virginia was entertaining Florence Engle.  Florrie
nodded brightly to Galloway, turning quickly to Virginia as the big man
went on.

"Do you actually believe, Virginia dear," she whispered, "that that man
is as wicked as they say he is?  Did you watch him going by?  Did you
see the way he took off his hat?  Did you ever know a man to smile
quite as he does?"

"I don't believe," returned Virginia, "that I ever had him smile at me,
Florrie."

"His eyes are not bad eyes, are they?" Florrie ran on.  "Oh, I know
what papa thinks and what Rod thinks about him; but I just don't
believe it!  How could a man be the sort they say he is and still be as
pleasant and agreeable and downright good-looking as Mr. Galloway?
Why," and she achieved a quick little shudder, "if I had done all the
terrible deeds they accuse him of I'd go around looking as black as a
cloud all the time, savage and glum and remembering every minute how
wicked I was."

Virginia laughed, failing to picture Florrie grown murderous.  But
Florrie merely pursed her lips as her eyes followed Galloway down the
street.

"I just ask you, Virginia Page," she said at last, sinking back into
the wide arms of her chair with a sigh, "if a man with murder and all
kinds of sin on his soul could make love prettily?"

Virginia started.

"You don't mean . . ." she began quickly.

Florrie laughed, but the other girl noted wonderingly a fresher tint of
color in her cool cheeks.

"Goosey!"  Florrie tossed her head, drew her skirts down modestly over
her white-stockinged ankles and laughed again.  "He never held my hand
and all that.  But with his eyes.  Is there any law against a man
saying nice things with his eyes?  And how is a girl going to stop him?"

Virginia might have replied that here was a matter which depended very
largely upon the girl herself; but instead, estimating that there was
little serious love-making on Galloway's part to be apprehended and
taking Florrie as lightly as Florrie took the rest of the world, she
was merely further amused.  And already she had learned to welcome
amusement of any sort in San Juan town.

But again here was Galloway, stopping now in front of Struve's, drawing
another quick, bright smile from the banker's daughter, accepting its
invitation and coming into the little yard and down the veranda.  Only
when he fairly towered over the two girls did he push back the hat
which already he had touched to them, standing with his hands on his
hips, his heavy features bespeaking a deep inward serenity and quiet
good humor.

It would have required a blinder man than Jim Galloway not to have
marked the cool dislike and distrust in Virginia's eyes.  But, though
he turned from them to the pink-and-white girl at her side, he gave no
sign of sensing that he was in any way unwelcome here.

He had greeted Virginia casually; she, observing him keenly, understood
what Florrie had meant by a man's making love with his eyes.  His look,
directed downward into the face smiling up at him, was alive with what
was obviously a very genuine admiration.  While Florrie allowed her
flattered soul to drink deep and thirstily of the wine of adulation
Virginia, only half understanding the writing in Galloway's eyes,
shivered a little and, leaning forward suddenly, put her hand on
Florrie's arm; the gesture, quick and spontaneous, meant nothing to
Florrie, nothing to Galloway, and a very great deal to Virginia Page.
For it was essentially protective; it served to emphasize in her own
mind a fear which until now had been a mere formless mist, a fear for
her frivolous little friend.  Galloway's whole being was so expressive
of conscious power, Florrie's of vacillating impulsiveness, that it
required no considerable burden laid upon the imagination to picture
the girl coming if he called . . . if he called with the look in his
eyes now, with the tone he knew to put into his voice.

Social lines are none too clearly drawn in towns like San Juan; often
enough they have long ago failed to exist.  A John Engle, though six
days of the seven he sat behind his desk in a bank, was only a man, his
daughter only the daughter of a mere man; a Jim Galloway, though he
owned the Casa Blanca and upon occasion stood behind his own bar, might
be a man and look with level eyes upon all other men, their wives, and
their daughters.  Here, with conditions what they always had been,
there could stand but one barrier between Galloway and Florrie Engle,
the barrier of character.  And already the girl had cried: "His eyes
are not bad eyes, are they?"  A barrier is a silent command to pause;
what is the spontaneous answer of a spoiled child to any command?

Galloway spoke lightly of this and that, managing in a dozen little
ways to compliment Florrie who chattered with a gayety which partook of
excitement.  In ten minutes he went his way, drawing her musing eyes
after him.  Until he had reached his own door and turned it at the Casa
Blanca the two girls on Struve's veranda were silent.  Florrie's
thoughts were flitting hither and yon, bright-winged, inconsequential,
fluttering about Jim Galloway, deserting him for Roderick Norton,
darting off to Elmer Page, coming home to Florrie herself.  As for
Virginia, conscious of a sort of dread, she was oppressed with the
stubbornly insistent thought that if Jim Galloway cared to amuse
himself with Florrie he was strong and she was weak; if he called to
her she would follow. . . .


Virginia was not the only one whom Galloway had set pondering; certain
of his words spoken to the sheriff when the two faced each other on the
Tecolote trail gave Norton food for thought.  For the first time Jim
Galloway had openly offered a bribe, one of no insignificant
proportions, prefacing his offer with the remark: "I have just begun to
imagine lately that I have doped you up wrong all the time."  If
Galloway had gone on to add: "Time was when I didn't believe I could
buy you, but I have changed my mind about that," his meaning could have
been no plainer.  Now he held out a bribe in one hand, a threat in the
other, and Norton riding on to Tecolote mused long over them both.

In Tecolote, a straggling village of many dogs and swarthy, grimy-faced
children, he tarried until well after dark, making his meal of coffee,
_frijoles_, and _chili con carne_, thereafter smoking a contemplative
pipe.  Abandoning the little lunch-room to the flies and silence he
crossed the road to the saloon kept by Pete Nuñez, the brother of the
man whom it was Norton's present business to make answer for a crime
committed.  Pete, a law-abiding citizen nowadays, principally for the
reason that he had lost a leg in his younger, gayer days, swept up his
crutch and swung across the room from the table where he was sitting to
the bar, saying a careless "Que hay?" by way of greeting.

"Hello, Pete," Norton returned quietly.  "Haven't seen Vidal lately,
have you?"

Besides Vidal's brother there were a half dozen men in the room playing
cards or merely idling in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp swung
from the ceiling, men of the saloon-keeper's breed to the last man of
them.  Their eyes, the slumbrous, mystery-filled orbs of their kind,
had lifted under their long lashes to regard the sheriff with seeming
indifference.  Pete shrugged.

"Me, I ain't seen Vidal for a mont'," he answered briefly.  "I see Jim
Galloway though.  Galloway say," and Pete ran his towel idly back and
forth along the bar, "Vidal come to la Casa Blanca to-night.  I dunno,"
and again he shrugged.

Norton allowed himself the luxury of a mystifying smile as Pete Nuñez
lifted probing eyes to his face.

"Jim Galloway has been known to lie before now, like other men," was
all of the information he gave to the questioning look.  "And," his
face suddenly as expressionless as Pete's own, "it wouldn't be a bad
bet to look for Vidal in Tres Robles, would it?  Eh, Pete?"

With that he went out.  Quite willing that Pete and his crowd should
think what they pleased, Tres Robles lay twenty miles northeast of
Tecolote, and if Pete cared to send word to Galloway that the sheriff
had ridden on that way, well and good.

Half an hour later, with the deeper dark of the night settling thick
and sultry over the surface of the desert lands, he rode out of town
following the Tres Robles trail.  He knew that Pete had come to his
door and was watching; he had the vague suspicion that it was quite
possible that Vidal was watching, too, with eyes smouldering with
hatred.  That was only a guess, not even for a man to hazard a bet
upon.  But the feeling that the fugitive was somewhere in Tecolote or
in the mesquite thickets near abouts had been strong enough to send him
travelling this way in the afternoon, would have been strong enough for
him to have acted upon, searching through shack after shack, were it
not that deep down in his heart he did not believe that Jim Galloway
had lied.  Here, while he came in at one door Vidal might slip out at
another, safe among friends.  But in the Casa Blanca Norton meant that
matters should be different.

For an hour he rode toward the northeast.  Then, turning out of the
trail and reining his horse into the utter blackness offered by the
narrow mouth or an arroyo, he sat still for a long time, listening,
staring back through the night toward Tecolote.  At last, confident
that he had not been followed, he cut across the low-lying lomas
marking the western horizon and in a swinging gallop rode straight
toward San Juan.

He had had ample time for the shaping of his simple plans long before
catching the first winking glimpse of the lights of the Casa Blanca.
He left his horse under the cottonwoods, hung his spurs over the horn
of the saddle, and went silently to the back of Struve's hotel.
Certain that no one had seen him, he half-circled the building, came to
the window which he had counted upon finding open, slipped in, and
passed down the hall to Struve's room.  At his light tap Struve called,
"Come in," and turned toward him as the door opened.  Norton closed it
behind him.

"I am taking a chance that Vidal Nuñez is at Galloway's right now," he
told the hotel keeper.  "I am going to get him if he is.  I want you to
watch the back end of the Casa Blanca and see that he doesn't slip out
that way.  A shotgun is what you want.  Blow the head off any man who
doesn't stop when you tell him to.  Is Tom Cutter in his room yet?"

While Struve, wasting neither time nor words, went to see, Norton
unbuttoned his shirt, removed the thirty-eight-caliber revolver from
the holster slung under his left arm, whirled the cylinder, and kept
the gun in his left hand.  In a moment Struve had returned, the deputy
at his heels.

"What's this about Vidal being here?" Cutter asked sharply.

Norton explained briefly and as briefly gave Tom Cutter his orders.
While Struve mounted guard at the rear, Cutter was to look out for the
front of the building.

"Going in alone, are you, Rod?"  Cutter shook his head.  "If Vidal is
in there, and Galloway and the Kid and Antone are all on the job, the
chances are there's going to be something happen.  Better let me come
in along with you."

But Norton, his mouth grown set and grim and chary of words, shook his
head.  Followed by Struve and Cutter he was outside in the darkness
five minutes after he had entered the hotel.

Struve, a shotgun in his hands, took his place twenty steps from the
back door of the Casa Blanca, his restless eyes sweeping back and forth
continually, taking stock of door and window; a lamp burning in a rear
room cast its light out through a window whose shade was less than half
drawn.  Tom Cutter, accustomed to acting swiftly upon his superior's
suggestions, listened wordlessly to the few whispered instructions,
nodded, and did as he was told, effacing himself in the shadows at the
corner of the building, prepared when the time came to spring out into
the street whence he could command the front and one side of the Casa
Blanca.  Norton, before leaving Cutter, had drawn the heavy gun from
the holster swinging at his belt.

"It's some time since we've had any two-handed shooting to do, Tommy,"
he said as his lean fingers curved to the familiar grip of the Colt 45.
"But I guess we haven't forgotten how.  Now, stick tight until you hear
things wake up."

He was gone, turning back to the rear of the house, passing close to
Struve, going on to the northeast corner, slipping quietly about it,
moving like a shadow along the eastern wall.  Here were two windows,
both looking into the long barroom, both with their shades drawn down
tight.

At the first window Norton paused, listening.  From within came a man's
voice, the Kid's, in his ugly snarl of a laugh, evil and reckless and
defiant, that and the clink of a bottle-neck against a glass.  Norton,
his body pressed against the wall, stood still, waiting for other
voices, for Galloway's, for Vidal Nuñez's.  But after Kid Rickard's
jarring mirth it was strangely still in the Casa Blanca; no noise of
clicking chips bespeaking a poker game, no loud-voiced babble, no sound
of a man walking across the bare floor.

"They're waiting for me," was Norton's quick thought.  "Galloway knew
I'd come."

He passed on, came to the second window and paused again.  The brief,
almost breathless silence within, which had followed the Kid's laugh,
had already been dissipated by the customary Casa Blanca sounds; a
guitar was strumming, chips clicked, a bottle was set heavily upon the
bar, a chair scraped.  Norton frowned; a moment ago something happened
in there to still men's tongues.  What was it?  It was Galloway who
gave him his answer.

"So you came, did you, Vidal?"  There was a jeer in the heavy voice.
"Scared to come, eh?  And scared worse to stay away!"  Galloway's short
laugh was as unpleasant as ever Rickard's had been.

"Si; I am here," the voice of Vidal Nuñez was answering, quick, eager,
sibilant with its unmistakable nervous excitement.  "Pete tell me what
you say an' I come."  He lifted his voice abruptly, breaking into a
soft Southern oath.  "Like a cat, to jump through the little window an'
roll on the floor an' by God, jus' in time.  There is one man at the
back with a gun an' one man in front an' another man . . ."

"Let 'em come," cried Galloway loudly, a heavy hand smiting a table top
so that a glass jumped and fell breaking to the floor.  "Only," and he
sent his voice booming out warningly, "any man who chips in unasked and
starts trouble in my house can take what's coming to him."

So then Vidal had just arrived, it had been his sudden entrance which
had invoked the silence in the barroom.  Norton merely shrugged; there
had been a chance of taking Vidal alone, intercepting him.  But that
chance had not been one to wait for; now it was past, negligible, not
to be regretted.  At last he knew where Vidal Nuñez was and it was his
business to make an arrest and not to wait upon further chance.  The
man who is not ready to go into a crowd to get his law-breaker is not
the man to stand for sheriff in the southwest country.

"Coming, Galloway!" Norton's ringing shout came back in answer.
Suddenly the steady pulse of his blood had been stirred, the hot hope
stood high in his heart again that he and Jim Galloway were going to
look into each other's eyes with guns talking and an end of a long
devious trail in sight.  For the moment he half forgot Vidal Nuñez whom
he could fancy cowering in a corner.

Then when he knew that every man in the Casa Blanca had turned sharply
at his voice he ran from the window to the street, turned the corner of
the building and in at the wide front doorway.  A short hall, a closed
door confronting him . . . then that had been flung open and on its
threshold, a gun in each hand, his hat far back on his head, his eyes
on fire, he stood looking in on a half dozen men and three glinting
steel barrels which, describing quick arcs, were whipped from the
window toward him.  A gun in Galloway's hand, one in the hand of Vidal
Nuñez, the third already spitting fire as Kid Rickard's narrowed eyes
shone above it.  The other men had fallen back precipitately to right
and left; Norton noted that Elmer Page was among them, a pace or two
from Rickard's side.

The Kid, being young, had something of youth's impatience, perhaps the
only reminiscence of youth left in a calloused soul.  So it was that he
had shot a second too soon.  Norton, as both hands rose in front of
him, answered Kid Rickard with the smaller-caliber gun while the Colt
in his right hand was concerned impartially with Galloway and Vidal
Nuñez, standing close together.  The Kid cursed, his voice rose in a
shriek of anger rather than pain, and he spun about and fell backward,
tripping over an overturned chair.

"Shoot, Galloway!" cried Norton.  "Shoot, damn you, shoot!"

Now, as for the second time that day the two men confronted each other,
naked, hot hatred glaring out of their eyes, each man knew that he
stood balancing a crucial second, midway between death and triumph.
Jim Galloway, who never until now had come out into the open in
defiance of the law, must swallow his words under the eyes of his own
gang, or once and for all forsake the semi-security behind his ambush.
Again issues were clear cut.

He answered the sheriff with a curse and a stream of lead.  As he fired
he threw himself to the side, the old trick, his gun little higher than
his hip, and fired again.  And shot for shot Norton answered him.

Though but half the length of a room lay between them, as yet, neither
man was hurt.  For no longer were they in the rich light of the
swinging coal-oil lamp; the room was gathered in pitch darkness; their
guns spat long tongues of vivid flame.  For, just as Kid Ricard was
falling, while Jim Galloway's finger was crooked to the trigger, while
Antone was whipping up his gun behind the bar, there had come a shot
from the card-room door shattering the lamp.  Neither Norton nor
Galloway, Rickard nor Vidal Nuñez, nor Antone nor any of the other men
in the room saw who had fired the shot.

As the light went out Norton leaped away from the door, having little
wish to stand silhouetted against the rectangle of pale light from the
outer night; and, leaping, he poured in his fourth and fifth and sixth
shots in the quarter where he hoped to find Galloway.  But always he
remembered where he had seen Elmer Page standing, and always he
remembered Antone behind the bar, and Vidal Nuñez drawn back into a
corner.  His forty-five emptied, he jammed it back into its holster and
stood rigid, staring into the blackness about him, every sense on the
qui vive.  Galloway had given over shooting; he might be dead or merely
waiting.  Vidal had held his fire, seeming frightened, uncertain, half
stunned.  Antone would be leaning forward, peering with frowning eyes,
trying to locate him.

It swept into Norton's mind suddenly that thus, in utter and unexpected
darkness, he had the upper hand.  He could shoot, the law riding upon
each flying pellet of lead, and be it Jim Galloway or Antone or Vidal,
or any other of Galloway's crowd who fell, it would be a man who richly
deserved what his fate was bringing him.  They, on the other hand,
being many against one, must be careful which way they shot.

He had come for Vidal Nuñez.  The man he wanted was yonder, but a few
feet from him.  Duty and desire pointed across the room to the obscure
corner.  He moved a cautious foot.  The floor complained under his
shifting weight and from Galloway's quarter came a spit of fire.  Twin
with it came a shot from behind the bar.  That was Antone talking.  And
now at last came the other shot from Vidal himself.

Rod Norton's was that type of man which finds caution less to his
liking than headlong action; furthermore, in the present crisis,
caution had seemed the acme of foolhardiness.  There are times when
true wisdom lies in taking one's chance boldly, flying half-way to meet
it.  Now, as three bullets sang by him, he gathered himself; then,
before the sharp reports had died in his ears, he sprang forward,
hurling himself across the room, striking with his lifted gun as he
went, missing, striking again and experiencing that grinding, crunching
sensation transmitted along the metal barrel as it struck a man fair
upon the head.  The man went down heavily and Norton stood over him,
praying that it was Vidal Nuñez.

Then it was that Julius Struve, having deserted his post at the rear,
smashed through a window with the muzzle of his shotgun, sending the
shade flipping up, springing back from the square of faint light as he
cried out sharply:

"All right, Nort?"

"All right!" cried Norton.  "I'm against the north wall; rake the other
side and the bar with your shotgun if they don't step out.  You and
Cutter together.  I've got Rickard and Nuñez out of it.  Drop your gun,
Galloway; lively, while you've got the chance.  Antone, Struve's got a
shotgun!"

Antone cursed, and with the snarl of his voice came the clatter of a
revolver slammed down on the bar.  Galloway cursed and fired, emptying
his second gun, crazed with hatred and blind anger.  Again, shot for
shot Norton answered him.  And again it grew very silent in the Casa
Blanca.

"Out through the window, one by one, with your hands up and your guns
down," shouted Struve; "or I start in.  Which is it, boys?"

There was a scramble to obey, the several men who had taken no part
leading the way.  As they went out their forms were for a moment
clearly outlined, then swallowed up in the outer darkness.  At Struve's
command they lined up against the wall, watched over by the muzzle of
his shotgun.  Antone, crying out that he was coming, followed.  Elmer
Page, sick and dizzy, was at Antone's heels.

Tom Cutter had gathered up some dry grass, and with that and a
chance-found bit of wood started a blaze near the second window; in its
wavering, uncertain light the faces of the men stood out whitely.

"Galloway is not here yet," he snapped.  And, lifting his voice: "Come
on, Galloway."

A crowd had gathered in the street, asking questions that went
unanswered.  Other hands added fuel to Cutter's fire.  The increasing
light at last penetrated the blackness filling the barroom.

"Come out, Galloway," said Struve coldly.  "I've got you covered."

Since things were bad enough as they were, and he had no desire to make
them worse and saw no opportunity to better them, Jim Galloway, his
hand nursing a bleeding shoulder, stumbled awkwardly through the
opening.

"Is that all of 'em, Roddy?" called Cutter.  Norton didn't answer.  The
deputy called again.  Then, while the crowd surged about door and
window.  Cutter came in, a revolver in his right hand, a torch of a
burning fagot in his left, held high.

Vidal Nuñez was dead; not from a blow upon the head, but from a chance
bullet through the heart after he had fallen.  Kid Rickard, his sullen
eyes wide with their pain, lay half under a poker table.  Lying across
the body of Nuñez, as though still guarding his prisoner, was the quiet
form of Rod Norton, his face bloodlessly white save for the smear of
blood which had run from the wound hidden by the close-cropped, black

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