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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Bells of San Juan, by Jackson Gregory,
+Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Bells of San Juan
+
+
+Author: Jackson Gregory
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2005  [eBook #15438]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 15438-h.htm or 15438-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/4/3/15438/15438-h/15438-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/4/3/15438/15438-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+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
+hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+WAVERING IN THE BALANCE
+
+Ignacio Chavez, waiting to ask no questions, had raced away through the
+darkness to beat out a wild alarm upon his bells.  Later he would learn
+how many were dead and would set the Captain mourning.  But already had
+San Juan poured out her handful of citizens upon the street.
+
+"Keep those men where they are," called Tom Cutter to Struve.  "Every
+damned one of them; there'll be an answer wanted for to-night's work.
+Get a doctor, somebody; Patten or Miss Page."
+
+Candles were brought; presently a lamp was found and set on the bar.
+The curious began to desert Struve and his prisoners outside, and to
+crowd about Cutter and the two forms lying still in the corner.  Kid
+Rickard, cursing now and then, had dragged himself a little away and
+grew quiet, half propped up against the wall.  Struve, as the fire of
+fagots and grass began to burn low, commanded Galloway to lead the way
+back into the barroom and herded five other men after him, the shotgun
+promising a mutilated body to any man of them who sought to run for it.
+
+"Nuñez is dead," reported the deputy sheriff, getting up from his
+knees.  "Norton is alive and that's about all.  A shot along the side
+of the head."
+
+He turned slowly toward Galloway who, with steady hands and his face
+set in hard, inscrutable lines, was pouring himself a generous glass of
+whiskey.
+
+"Looks like you'd got him, Jim," he said harshly, his eyes glittering.
+"And it looks like I'd got you.  Where I want you, by God!"
+
+Galloway drank his whiskey and made no reply.  He was thinking,
+thinking fast.  His eyes were never still now, but roved from Rod
+Norton's white face to the faces of Tom Cutter, Struve, and the other
+men gathering in the room.
+
+Borne upon one of the Casa Blanca's doors Norton was carried to
+Struve's hotel, the nearest place where an attempt could be made to
+care for him.  Word came in that Virginia Page had been summoned upon
+one of her rare calls and was in Las Estrellas.  Patten, however, would
+be on hand in a moment.  It was suggested that Kid Rickard also be
+carried to the hotel.  But he himself asked to be left where he was
+until Patten came, and Cutter raised no objection.  It was clear that
+the Kid was too badly hurt to think of making an escape, were such his
+desire.
+
+Galloway and Antone alone were put under arrest, the others merely
+advised to be on hand if they were wanted later.  Galloway coolly
+demanded the charge against him.
+
+"Resisting an officer is as good as any right now," snapped Cutter.
+
+As quiet claimed the town again Caleb Patten became the most important
+figure in San Juan.  At such moments he seemed to swell visibly.  He
+drove the curious from the room while he examined the unconscious
+sheriff and, when he had finished, merely shook his head, looked grave,
+and refused to commit himself.  He ordered Norton undressed and put to
+bed, went down the street to see Kid Rickard, probed the wound in the
+upper chest, ordered him to bed, and returned to Norton at the hotel.
+
+"Well?" asked John Engle who had arrived, talked with Struve, and now
+looked anxiously to Patten.  Patten shrugged.
+
+"Heavy-caliber bullet ripped along the side of his head," he said
+thoughtfully.  "I am going to make a second examination now.  Doubtless
+just the shock stunned him.  That or striking his head as he pitched
+forward; there's another slight wound, a scalp wound, showing where his
+head hit as he fell."
+
+A moment later Tom Cutter came in hastily, stood for a little staring
+with frowning, troubled eyes at the quiet form on the bed, and went
+away, tugging at his lip, his frown deepening.  He had his hands full
+to-night, had Tom Cutter, and no one but himself knew how he wanted Rod
+Norton to tell him just what to do, to show him the way to make no
+mistake.  Leaving the room he had gone no farther than the front door
+when he swung about and returned.
+
+"May I have a word with you, Mr. Engle?" he asked.
+
+Engle nodded and followed him silently.  Out in the street, in the full
+light of Struve's porch-lamp, Cutter stopped, glancing about him to
+make sure that he was not overheard.
+
+"You know all about the shooting of Brocky Lane up in the mountains,"
+he said hurriedly.  "Rod told me you did.  Well, I just gathered in
+Moraga!"
+
+"Moraga?" muttered Engle.  "He has seen Galloway, then?  And told him
+all about our knowing the rifles were cached in the old caves?"
+
+"I found him at the Casa Blanca," said Cutter, the worried look in his
+eyes.  "Somebody shot out the light when the mix-up started, you know.
+I've a notion it was Moraga.  He was in one of the little
+card-rooms . . . putting on his shoes!  I got his gun; he'd fired just
+one shot.  The muzzle of it was bloody."
+
+"If he has told Galloway. . . ."
+
+"But I don't believe he has.  Struve says that just as Norton started
+things he saw a man run in from the cottonwoods and duck into the
+house.  It was Struve's job to see that nobody got out and he let him
+go by.  If it wasn't Moraga, who was it?  And, when I grabbed him just
+now, the first thing he said was: 'I want to talk with Galloway.'"
+
+"You didn't let him?" demanded Engle quickly.
+
+"No.  A couple of the boys have walked him off down the road.  I've got
+Galloway and Antone in the jail.  Now, what I want is some advice.
+What am I going to do with this job until Rod Norton comes to and takes
+a hand . . . if he ever does," he muttered heavily.
+
+"It's clear that you've got to keep Moraga away from Galloway; if they
+haven't already had a chance to talk it's a pure Godsend and it's up to
+you that they don't get that chance."
+
+"Yes,", admitted Cutter slowly.  "But I'm the first man to admit that
+I'm all muggled up.  What did Moraga have his shoes off for?  If he
+shot out the light, why did he do it?  And how'd he get blood on his
+gun?"
+
+Engle shook his head.
+
+"All questions for the district attorney later, Tom," he answered.
+"But, if you want any advice from me, here it is: Get Moraga out of the
+way on the jump.  He is supposed to be in jail in the next county; he
+must have broken out.  Send a man to Las Palmas to telephone to Sheriff
+Roberts; send Moraga along with him.  And, whatever you do, keep Jim
+Galloway where you've got him.  I think we've got our case against him
+to-night."
+
+"That's what I've been thinking.  I guess that's what Norton would do,
+eh?"
+
+"Sure of it," said Engle promptly.  "Find out, if you can, whether
+Moraga got a chance to talk with Galloway.  I'm going back to the house
+to let my wife and Florrie know what has happened."
+
+Engle hurried to his home, told what had happened, and, leaving his
+wife anxious, his daughter weeping hysterically, returned to the hotel.
+
+"I've done all that any one could do for him," said Patten, as though
+defending himself because of Norton's continued unconsciousness.  "He's
+in pretty bad shape, Engle.  Oh, I guess I can pull him through, but at
+that it's going to be a close squeak.  Lucky I was right on hand,
+though."  And he grew technical, spoke of blood pressures taken, of
+traumatism superinducing prolonged coma, of this and that which made no
+impression on the banker.
+
+"You mentioned two wounds," Engle reminded him.  "The one made by the
+bullet and another. . . ."
+
+"By his head striking as he fell?  Yes; that would have completed the
+work of the first shock in knocking him unconscious.  But it is a
+negligible affair now; he wouldn't know anything about it in the
+morning if it weren't for the lump that'll be there.  And since the
+other injury, the long gouging cut made by the bullet, has just plowed
+along the outer surface of the skull, I think that I can promise you
+he'll be all right pretty soon now.  We ought to have some ice, but
+I've made cold compresses do."
+
+Engle went again to look in upon Norton.  The sheriff lay as before, on
+his back, his limbs lax, his face deathly white, a bandage about his
+head.  A lump came into the banker's throat and he turned away.  For he
+remembered that just so had Billy Norton lain, that Billy Norton had
+never regained consciousness . . . and that the blow then as now had
+been struck by Galloway or Galloway's man.  The sudden fear was upon
+him that Rod Norton was even more badly hurt than Caleb Patten
+admitted.  The fear did not lessen as the night drew on and finally
+brightened into another day.  When the sun flared up out of the
+flatlands lying beyond Tecolote the wounded man at Struve's hotel lay
+as he had done all night giving no sign to tell whether he was life's
+or death's.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+CONCEALMENT
+
+The eyes of San Juan were upon Caleb Patten throughout the night and
+during the long hours of the following day.  Under them his inflated
+ego grew further distended while, waxing more technical than ever, he
+explained how a man in Rod Norton's condition could live and yet lie
+like a man dead.  So prolific and involved were his medical phrases
+that men like John Engle and Struve began to ask themselves if Patten
+understood his case.  When, after twelve hours, the wounded man awoke
+to a troubled consciousness Patten's relief was scarcely less visible
+than that of Norton's friends.  Patten felt his prestige taking unto
+itself new wings and immediately grew more wisely verbose than ever.
+It was a rare privilege to have the most talked of and generally liked
+man of the community under his hands; it was wine to Patten's soul to
+have that man show signs of recovering under his skill.
+
+So he drove well-wishers from the room, drew the shades, commanded
+quiet and came and went eternally, doing nothing whatever and appearing
+to be fighting, sleeves rolled up, for a threatened life.  Long before
+noon there were those who had laughed at Patten before, but who now
+accused themselves of having failed to do him justice.
+
+Virginia Page had remained all night with her patient in Las Estrellas.
+The first rumor she had of the fight in the Casa Blanca was borne to
+her ears by Ignacio's bell as she rode back toward San Juan.  Only a
+few hours ago she had talked with Galloway, watching him banter with
+Florrie Engle; but a little before that, earlier in the same day, she
+had seen Rod Norton.  Before she galloped up to the old Mission garden
+her heart was beating excitedly, and she was asking herself, a little
+fearfully: "Is it Galloway or is it Rod Norton?"  For she was so sure
+that in the end Ignacio would ring the Captain for one of them.
+
+Ignacio told her the story.  Norton was lying in the hotel,
+unconscious, Patten working over him; Jim Galloway and Antone were in
+the little jail and soon would be taken to the county-seat; Kid Rickard
+was shot through the lung but would live, Patten said; Vidal Nuñez,
+over whom the whole thing had started, was dead.
+
+"If _mi amigo_ Roderico die," mumbled Ignacio, "it will be two
+Nortones, two sheriffs, that die because of Galloway.  If Roderico
+live, then the next time he will kill Galloway.  You will see,
+_señorita_."
+
+She made no answer as she rode slowly down the street.  She was
+thinking how, only a few weeks ago, she had heard the bells ring for
+the first time, how then Galloway and Norton had been but meaningless
+names to her, how she had been little moved by either the sound of
+pistol-shots or the Captain's heavy tolling.  Now things were
+different.  Just in what were they "different" and to what degree?  She
+could not answer her own question before she was at the hotel.
+
+Struve came immediately, noted her pale face, attributed it to a
+sleepless night, and made her take a cup of coffee.  He rounded out the
+information she already had from Ignacio.  Norton was still unconscious
+though, only a few minutes ago, Patten had reported signs of
+improvement.  Mrs. Engle had been with him, was still there acting
+nurse; he was being given every attention possible.
+
+Patten himself entered, drawn by the aroma of coffee.  He nodded
+carelessly to the girl and remarked to Struve, with a flash of triumph
+in his eyes, that at last he had "brought him around."  Norton was very
+weak, sick, dizzy, perhaps not yet out of danger.  But Patten had won
+in the initial skirmish with old man Death.
+
+At least, so Struve was given to feel.  Virginia, with a quick look at
+Patten's complacent face, was moved with sudden, almost insistent
+longing, that Rod Norton's life might be given into her own hands
+rather than remain in the pudgy hands of a man she at once disliked as
+an individual and failed to admire as a physician.  For she had needed
+no long residence in San Juan to form her own estimate of the man's
+ability . . . or lack of ability.  But plainly this was Patten's case,
+not hers; she got up from the table and went into her own room.
+
+Elmer she found lying fully dressed upon a couch in her office,
+sleeping heavily.  She stood over him a moment, her eyes tender; he was
+still, would always be, her baby brother.  Then she went to her own
+room and threw herself down upon her bed, worn out, anxious, vaguely
+fearful for the future.
+
+It was a long day for San Juan.  Mrs. Engle came now and then to
+Virginia's room to wipe her eyes and force a hopeful smile; Florrie ran
+in like a young tempest to weep copiously and hyperbolically invest
+poor dear Roddy with all imaginable heroic attributes; Engle and Struve
+and Tom Cutter were grave-eyed and distressed.  Every hour Ignacio came
+to the hotel to ask quietly for news.
+
+In his own way, it appeared that Elmer Page was as deeply concerned as
+any one.  It was long before he told Virginia that he had been in the
+Casa Blanca when the shooting occurred; haltingly he gave her his
+version of it.
+
+"Don't you think, Elmer," suggested the girl somewhat wearily, "that
+you have gotten hold of the wrong end of things here?  I mean in
+choosing your friends?  Certainly after this you will have nothing to
+do with men like Galloway and Rickard?"
+
+Ten minutes' talk with Elmer gave her a deeper understanding of his
+attitude than she had been able to guess until now.  Spontaneously he
+had leaned toward Kid Rickard because the Kid was a "killer" and Elmer
+was a boy; in other words, because young Page's imagination made of
+Rickard a truly picturesque figure.  Since Rickard admired Jim Galloway
+as he had never known how to admire aught else that breathed and
+walked, Elmer's eyes had from the first rested approvingly upon the
+massive figure of Casa Blanca's owner.  That both Galloway and Rickard
+were fighting against persecution, were merely individuals wronged by
+the law and too fearlessly independent to submit to the high hand of
+sheriff or judge, was easily implanted in the boy's mind.  Yesterday
+his fancies were ready to make heroes of Galloway and his crowd, to
+make of Norton a meddler hiding behind the bulwark of his office, and
+hounding those who were too manly to step aside for him.  But now Elmer
+was all at sea, no land in sight.
+
+"A gun in each hand, Sis," he cried warmly, his cheeks flushed, as the
+almost constantly recurring picture formed again in his memory.  "And
+if you could have only seen his eyes!  Talk about hiding behind
+anything . . . no sir!  And him only one against Galloway and the Kid
+and Nuñez and a whole room full."
+
+Here was Elmer's trouble drawn to the surface; he was touched with
+leaping admiration for the man who lay now in the darkened room, he
+couldn't admire both Norton, the sheriff, and Galloway and Rickard, the
+sheriff's sworn enemies!  Which way should Elmer Page turn?  Virginia
+very wisely held her tongue.
+
+Tom Cutter, having conferred with Engle and Struve, left San Juan in
+the early afternoon, convoying his prisoners to the greater security of
+the county jail.  It seemed the wisest step, the one which Norton would
+have taken.  Besides, Galloway insisted upon it and upon being allowed
+to send a message to his lawyer.
+
+"I am willing to stand trial," said Galloway indifferently.  "I'll
+arrange for bail to-morrow and be back to-morrow night."
+
+The question which Tom Cutter, Struve, and Engle all asked of
+themselves and of each other, "Did Moraga get his chance to talk with
+Galloway?" went unanswered.  There was nothing to do but wait upon the
+future to know that, unless Moraga, now on his way back to Sheriff
+Roberts, could be made to talk.  And Moraga was not given to garrulity.
+
+Meantime Patten brought hourly reports of Norton.  He was still in
+danger, to be sure; but he was doing as well as could be expected.  No
+one must go into the room except Mrs. Engle as nurse.  Norton was fully
+conscious, but forbidden to talk; he recognized those about him, his
+eyes were clear, his temperature satisfactory, his strength no longer
+waning.  He had partaken of a bit of nourishment and to-morrow, if
+there were no unlooked-for complications, would be able to speak with
+John Engle for whom he had asked.
+
+During the days which followed, days in which Rod Norton lay quiet in a
+darkened room, Virginia Page was conscious of having awakened some form
+of interest in Caleb Patten.  His eyes followed her when she came and
+went, and, when she surprised them, were withdrawn swiftly, but not
+before she had seen in them a speculative thoughtfulness.  While she
+noted this she gave it little thought, so occupied was her mind with
+other matters.  She had postponed, as long as she could, a talk with
+Julius Struve, her spirit galled that she must in the end go to him
+"like a beggar," as she expressed it to herself.  But one day, her head
+erect, she followed the hotel keeper into his office.  In the hallway
+she encountered Patten.
+
+"May I have a word with you?" Patten asked.
+
+But Virginia had steeled herself to the interview with Struve and would
+no longer set it aside, even for a moment.
+
+"If you care to wait on the veranda," she told Patten, "I'll be out in
+a minute.  I want to see Mr. Struve now."
+
+Patten stood aside and watched her pass, the shrewdly questioning look
+in his eyes.  When she disappeared in the office he remained where she
+had left him, listening.  When she began to speak with Struve, her
+voice rapid and hinting at nervousness, he came a quiet step nearer the
+door she had closed after her.
+
+"I am ashamed of myself, Mr. Struve," said Virginia, coming straight to
+the point.  "I owe you already for a month's board and room rent for
+myself and Elmer.  I . . ."
+
+"That's perfectly all right, Miss Virginia," said Struve hurriedly.  "I
+know the sort of job you've got on your hands making collections.  If
+you can wait I am willing to do so.  Glad to do so, in fact."
+
+Patten, fingering his little mustache, then letting his thick fingers
+drop to the diamond in his tie, smiled with satisfaction.  Smiling, he
+tiptoed down the hall and went out upon the veranda where he smoked his
+cigar serenely.  When Virginia came out to him her face was flaming.
+Had he not beard Struve's words, he would have thought that his answer
+to her apology had been an angry demand for immediate payment.  Patten
+failed to understand how the girl's fine, independent nature writhed in
+a situation all but intolerable.  That she appreciated gratefully
+Struve's quick kindness did not minimize her own mortification.
+
+Patten watched her seat herself; then he launched himself into his
+subject.  Virginia listened at first with faint interest, then with
+quickened wonder.  For the life of her she could not tell if the little
+man were seeking to flatter or insult her.
+
+"I have leased an old, deserted ranch-house just on the edge of town,"
+he told her.  "Got it for a song, too.  Some first-rate land goes with
+it; I'll probably buy the whole thing before long.  There's plenty of
+good water.  Now, what am I up to, eh?  Just the same thing all the
+time, if you want to know.  And that means making money."
+
+Leaning forward he knocked the ash from his cigar and brought himself
+confidentially nearer.
+
+"An open-air sanatorium," he announced triumphantly.  "For tuberculosis
+patients.  There are lots of them," and he waved his arm in a wide half
+circle, "coming out of the East on the run, scared to death, and with
+more or less money in their pockets.  It's a big proposition, a sure
+money-getter."
+
+He grew more animated than she had ever dreamed he could be, as he
+sketched his plans.  While she was wondering why he had come to her
+with them he gave his explanation, made her his double offer.  Then it
+was that she was puzzled to know whether he meant to compliment her or
+merely to insult her.
+
+In a word he assured her from the heights of superiority to which he
+had ascended these last few days of importance, the practice of
+medicine was no woman's work at best; certainly not in a land like
+this, where a man's endurance, breadth or mind, and keener innate
+ability to cope with big situations were indicated.  No work for a slip
+of a girl like Virginia Page.  Of that Caleb Patten assured her
+unhesitatingly.  But there was work for such as her and in a place
+which he would create for her.  Fairly bewildered at his audacity she
+found herself listening to his suggestion that she marry Caleb Patten
+and become a sort of head nurse in an institution which he would found!
+
+In spite of her she was moved to sudden, impulsive laughter.  She had
+not meant to laugh at the man who might be sincere, who, it was
+possible, was merely a fool.  But laugh she did, so that her mirth
+reached Rod Norton where he lay upon his bed and made him stir
+restlessly.
+
+"What do you mean by that?" demanded Patten, a flush in his cheeks.
+
+"I mean," stammered Virginia at last, "that I thank you very much, Dr.
+Patten, but that I can avail myself of neither the opportunity of being
+your wife or your head nurse.  As for my inability to do for myself
+what I have set out to accomplish . . . well, I am not afraid yet.
+There is work to be done here and I don't quite agree with you that
+it's all man's work.  There's always a little left over for a woman,
+you know," she added brightly.
+
+But Patten was obviously angered.  He flung to his feet and glared down
+at her.  Perhaps it had not entered his thought that she could make
+other than the answer he wanted; it had been very clear to him that he
+was offering to become responsible for one who was embarked upon a
+voyage already destined to failure, that he would support her, merely
+doing as many other men of his ilk did and make her work for all that
+she got.
+
+"It's silly nonsense, your thinking you can make a living here," he
+said irritably.  "I'm already established, I'm a man, I can have all of
+the cases I want, you'll get only a few breeds who haven't a dollar to
+the dozen of them.  If you are already broke and can't even pay for
+your room and board . . ."
+
+"Who told you that?" she asked quickly.
+
+"I can hear, can't I?" he demanded coarsely.  "Didn't you go just now
+to beg Struve to hold you over?  And . . ."
+
+She slipped out of her chair and stood a moment staring coldly and
+contemptuously at him.  Then she was gone, leaving Patten watching her
+departure incredulously.
+
+"A man who hasn't any more sense than Caleb Patten," she cried within
+herself, "has no business with a physician's license.  It's a sheer
+wonder he didn't kill Roderick Norton!"
+
+Already she had forgotten her words with Struve, or rather the matter
+for the present was shoved aside in her mind by another.  She had come
+here to make good, she had her fight before her, and she was going to
+make good.  She had to . . . for herself, for her own pride, for
+Elmer's sake.  She went straight to Elmer and made him sit down and
+listen while she sketched actual conditions briefly and emphatically.
+
+He was old enough to do something for himself in the world, continued
+idleness did him no earthly good and might do him no end of harm
+morally, mentally, and physically.  He had been her baby brother long
+enough; it was time that he became a man.  She had supported him until
+now, asking nothing of him in return save that he kept out of mischief
+a certain percentage of the time.  Now he was going to work and help
+out.  He could go to John Engle and get something to do upon one of
+Engle's ranches.
+
+Somewhat to her surprise Elmer responded eagerly.  He had been thinking
+the matter over and it appealed to him.  What he did not tell her was
+that he had seen some of the vaqueros riding in from one of the
+outlying ranges, lean, brown, quick-eyed men who bestrode high-headed
+mounts and who wore spurs, wide hats, shaggy chaps, and who, perhaps,
+carried revolvers hidden away in their hip pockets, men who drank
+freely, spent their money as freely at dice and cards, and who, all in
+all, were a picturesque crowd.  Elmer took up his hat and went down to
+the bank and had a talk with John Engle.  Virginia's eyes followed him
+hopefully.
+
+That day Norton was allowed for the first time to receive callers.  He
+had his talk with Engle, limited to five minutes by Patten who hung
+about curiously until Norton said pointedly that he wanted to speak
+privately with the banker.  Later Florrie came with her mother,
+bringing an immense armful of roses culled by her own hands, excited,
+earnest, entering the shaded room like a frightened child, speaking
+only in hushed whispers.
+
+"Won't you come in too for a moment, Virginia?" asked Mrs. Engle.
+"Roddy will be glad to see you; he has asked about you."
+
+But Virginia made an excuse; it was Patten's case and after what had
+occurred between herself and Patten she had no intention of so much as
+seeming to overstep the professional lines.  The following day,
+however, she did go to see him.  Patten himself, stiff and boorish,
+asked her to.  His patient had asked for her several times, knowing
+that she was in the building and marking how she made an exception and
+refused to look in on him while all of his other friends were doing so,
+some of them coming many miles.  Patten told her that Norton was not
+well by any means yet and that he did not intend to have him worried up
+over an imagined slight.  So Virginia did as she was bid.
+
+Mrs. Engle was in the room, bending over the bed with a dampened towel
+to lay upon Norton's forehead; he showed a sign of fever and his head
+ached constantly.  He looked about quickly as the girl came in, his
+hand stirring a little, offering itself.  She took it by way of
+greeting and sat down in the chair drawn up at his side.
+
+"It's good of you to come!" he said quickly, his eyes brightening.  "I
+was beginning to wonder if I had offended you in some way?  You see,
+everybody has run in but you.  A man gets spoiled when he's laid up
+like this, doesn't he?  Especially when it's the first time he can
+remember when he has stuck in bed for upward of twenty-four hours
+running."
+
+Despite her familiarity with the swift ravages of illness she received
+a positive shock as she looked at him; she had visualized him during
+these latter days as she had last seen him, brown, vitally robust, the
+embodiment of lean, clean strength.  Now sunless inaction had set its
+mark in his skin which had already grown sallow; his eyes burned into
+her own, his hand fell weakly to the coverlet as she removed her own,
+his fingers plucking nervously.  And yet she summoned a cheerful smile
+to answer his.
+
+"I was satisfied just in hearing that you were doing well," she said.
+"And I know that the fewer people a sick man sees the better for him."
+
+He moved his head restlessly back and forth on his pillow.
+
+"Not for a man like me," he told her.  "I'm not used to this sort of
+business.  Just lying here with my eyes shut or staring at the ceiling,
+which is worse, drives a man mad.  I told Patten to-day that if he
+didn't let me see folks I'd get up and go out if I had to crawl."
+
+Virginia laughed, determined to be cheerful.
+
+"I am afraid that you make a rather troublesome patient, don't you?"
+she asked lightly.
+
+Norton made no answer but lay motionless save for the constant plucking
+at his coverlet, his eyes moodily fixed upon the wall.  Mrs. Engle,
+finding the water-pitcher empty and saying that she would be back in
+two seconds, went out to fill it.  Promptly Norton's eyes returned to
+Virginia's face, resting there steadily.
+
+"I've been dizzy and sick and half out of my head a whole lot," he said
+abruptly.  "I've been thinking of you most of the time, dreaming about
+you, climbing cliffs with you. . . ."
+
+He broke off suddenly, but did not remove his eyes from hers.  It was
+she who turned away, pretending to find it necessary to adjust the
+window-curtain.  It was impossible to sit quietly while he looked at
+her that way, his eyes all without warning filling with a look for any
+girl to read a look of glowing admiration, almost a look of pure
+love-making.  Norton sighed and again his head moved restlessly on his
+pillow.
+
+"I've had time to think here of late," he said after a little.  "More
+time to think than I've ever had before in my life.  About everything;
+myself and Jim Galloway and you. . . .  I have decided to send word to
+the district attorney to let Galloway go," he added, again watching
+her.  "I am not going to appear against him and there's no case if I
+don't."
+
+"But . . ." she began, wondering.
+
+"There are no buts about it.  Suppose I can get him convicted, which I
+doubt; he'd get a light sentence, would appeal, at most would be out of
+the way a couple of years or so.  And then it would all be to do over
+again.  No; I want him out in the open, where he can go as far as he
+wants to go.  And then . . ."
+
+She saw how his body stiffened as he braced himself with his feet
+against the foot-board.
+
+"We won't talk shop," she said gently.  "It isn't good for you.  Don't
+think about such things any more than you have to."
+
+"I've got to think about something," he said impatiently.  "Can I think
+about you?"
+
+"Why not?" she answered as lightly as she had spoken before.
+
+"Maybe that isn't good for me either," he answered.
+
+"Nonsense.  It's always good for us to think about our friends."
+
+His eyes wandered from hers, rested a moment upon the little table near
+his bedhead and came back to her, narrowing a little.
+
+"Will you set a chair against that window-shade?" he asked.  "The light
+at the side hurts my eyes."
+
+It was a natural request and she turned naturally to do what he asked.
+But, even with her back turned, she knew that he had reached out
+swiftly for something that lay on the table, that he had thrust it out
+of sight under his pillow.
+
+Mrs. Engle returned and Virginia, staying another minute, said good-by.
+As she went out she glanced down at the table.  In her room she asked
+herself what it was that he had snatched and hidden.  It seemed a
+strange thing to do and the question perplexed her; while she attached
+no importance to it, it was there like a pebble in one's shoe, refusing
+to be ignored.
+
+That night, just as she was going to sleep, she knew.  Out of a half
+doze she had visualized the table with its couple of bottles, a
+withering rose, a scrap of note-paper, a fountain pen.  The pen . . .
+it was Patten's . . . had evidently leaked and had been wiped
+carelessly upon the sheet of paper, left lying with the paper half
+wrapped around it.  She had noted carelessly a few scrawled words in
+Patten's slovenly hand.  And she knew that it had been removed while
+she turned her back, removed by a hand which, in its haste, had slipped
+the pen with it under the pillow.
+
+She went to sleep incensed with herself that she gave the matter
+another thought.  But she kept asking herself what it was that Patten
+had written that Roderick Norton did not want her to read.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A FREE MAN
+
+"I am a free man, if you please."  The sheriff stood in the hotel
+doorway, looking down upon her as she sat in her favorite veranda
+chair.  "I have given my keeper his fee and sent him away.  May I watch
+you while you read?"
+
+Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of
+welcome.  He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low
+entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt
+and haggard.
+
+"I shouldn't be reading in this light, anyway," she said.  "I hadn't
+noticed that the sun was down.  It is good to be what you call free
+again, isn't it?"
+
+He laughed softly, put back his head, filled his lungs.  Then he came
+on to her and stood leaning against the wall, his hat cocked to one
+side to hide the bandage.
+
+"The world is good," he announced with gay positiveness.  "Especially
+when you've been away from it for a spell and weren't quite sure what
+was next.  And especially, too, when you've had time to think.  Did you
+ever take off a week and just do nothing but think?"
+
+"One doesn't have time for that sort of thing as a rule," she admitted.
+"There's a chair standing empty if you care to let me in on your
+deductions."
+
+"I don't want to sit down or lie down until I'm ready to drop," he
+grinned down at her.  "A bed makes me sick at my stomach and a chair is
+pretty nearly as bad.  I'd like almighty well to get a horse between my
+knees . . . and _ride_!  Suppose I'd fall to pieces if I tried it
+right now?"
+
+"Sure of it.  And not so sure that you haven't discharged your keeper
+prematurely.  You mustn't think of such things."
+
+"There you go.  Forbidding me to think again! . . . Believe I will sit
+down; would you believe that a full-grown man like me could get as weak
+as a cat this quick?"
+
+He took the chair just beyond her, tilted it back against the wall, his
+booted heels caught under its elevated legs, and glanced away from her
+to the colorful sky above San Juan's scattered houses in the west.
+
+"Yes, sir," he continued his train of thought, "I'd like a horse
+between my knees; I'd like to ride out yonder into the sunset, to meet
+the night as it comes down; I'd like the feeling of nothing but the
+stars over me instead of the smothery roof of a house.  Doesn't it
+appeal to you, too?"
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"You on Persis, with me on my big roan, riding not as we rode that
+other night, but just for the fun of it.  I'd like to ride like the
+devil. . . .  You don't mind my saying what I mean, do you? . . . to go
+scooting across the sage-brush letting out a yell at every jump, boring
+holes in the night with my gun, making all of the racket and dust that
+one man can make.  Ever feel that way? just like getting outside and
+making a noise?  Let me talk!  I'm the one who has been shut up for so
+long my tongue has started to grow fast to the roof of my mouth.  At
+first I could do nothing but lie flat on my back in a sort of fog,
+seeing nothing clearly, thinking not at all.  Then came the hours in
+which I could do nothing but think, under orders to keep still.  Think?
+Why, I thought about everything that ever happened, most things that
+might happen, and a whole lot that never will.  Now comes the third
+stage; I can talk better than I can walk. . . .  Do you mind listening
+while a man raves?"
+
+"Not in the least."  She found his mood contagious and, smiling in that
+quick, bright way natural to her, showed for a moment the twin dimples
+of which together with a host of other things he had had ample time to
+think during his bedroom imprisonment.  "Please rave on."
+
+"In due course," he mused, "the fourth stage will arrive and I can be
+doing something besides talk, can't I?  Now let me tell you about the
+King's Palace."
+
+"You begin well."
+
+"The King's Palace is where we are going on our first outing.  That was
+decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M.  You and I and, if
+you like, Florrie and your kid brother.  We'll ride out there in the
+very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone.  We'll
+lunch and loaf there all day.  For lunch we will have bacon and coffee,
+cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms.  We will have some
+trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest
+mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about.  We will have cheese,
+perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert.  We'll ride home in the
+dusk and the dark."
+
+"The King's Palace?" she asked curiously.  "I never heard of such a
+place.  Are you making it all up?"
+
+"Not a bit of it.  It's all that's left of some of the old ruins of the
+same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs. . . .  Do you know
+why I am bound to get Jim Galloway's tag soon or late?"
+
+Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt
+digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.
+
+"Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other
+words, because he opposes the law and you represent it."
+
+"Because he plays the game wrong!  Some more results of a long week of
+nothing to do but think things out.  There is just one way for a
+law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it."
+
+"You mean that a man can get away with it?  Surely not for good?"
+
+But he nodded thoughtfully at the slowly fading strata of shaded colors
+splashed across the sky.
+
+"A man can get away with it for keeps . . . if he plays the game right.
+Jim Galloway isn't that man and so I'll get him.  He has ignored the
+first necessary principle, which is the lone hand."
+
+"You mean he takes men into his confidence?"
+
+"And he goes on and ignores the second necessary principle; a man must
+stop short of murder.  If he turns gangman and killer, he ties his own
+rope around his neck.  If a man like Galloway, a man with brains,
+power, without fear, without scruple, should decide to loot this corner
+of the world or any other corner, and set about it right, playing the
+lone hand invariably, he would be a man I couldn't bring in in a
+thousand years.  But Galloway has slipped up; he has too many Moragas
+and Antones and Vidals at his heels; he has been the cause, directly or
+indirectly, of too many killings. . . .  A theft will be forgotten in
+time, the hue and cry die down; spilled blood cries to heaven after ten
+years."
+
+"Galloway is back in San Juan."
+
+"I know.  I wanted him back.  I wanted him free and unhampered.  He'll
+be bolder than ever now, won't he, if this case is dropped?  He's come
+out a little into the open already, he'll be tempted out a little
+farther.  There'll be more of his work soon, a robbery here or there,
+and he will grow so sure of himself that he'll get careless.  Then I'll
+get him."
+
+"But have you the right?" she asked quickly.  "Knowing him a
+lawbreaker, have you the right to allow him to go farther and farther,
+just because in the end you hope to get him?"
+
+He met her look with a smile which puzzled her.
+
+"I'll answer your question when you define right and wrong for me," he
+said quietly.
+
+They grew silent together, watching the gradual sinking of day into
+twilight and early dusk.  Norton, for all his vaunted ravings, had
+grown thoughtful; Virginia turning her eyes toward him while his were
+staring out beyond the house-tops saw in them a look of deep, frowning
+speculation.  And through this look, like a little fire gleaming
+through a fog, was another look whose meaning baffled her.
+
+"What do you think of Patten?" he asked.
+
+Startled by his abruptness, characteristic of him though it was to-day,
+she asked in puzzled fashion:
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Not as a man," he said, withdrawing his gaze from the sunset and
+bestowing it gravely upon her.  "As a physician.  Do you size him up as
+capable or as something of a quack?"
+
+She hesitated.  But finally she made the only reply possible.
+
+"Of course you don't expect any answer, knowing that you should not
+come to one member of a profession for an estimate of another.  And,
+besides, you realize that I know nothing whatever of Dr. Patten, either
+as a man or as a physician."
+
+He laughed softly.
+
+"Hedging, pure, unadulterated hedging!  I didn't look for that from
+you.  Shall I tell you what we both think of him?  He is a farce and a
+fake, and I rather think that I am going to run him out of the State
+pretty soon. . . .  What would you say of a doctor who couldn't tell
+the difference between a wound made by a man bumping his head when he
+fell and by a smashing blow with a gun-barrel?  Patten doesn't guess
+yet that it was the blow Moraga gave me the other night which came so
+close to ringing down the sable curtains for me."
+
+"Moraga?" she asked with quickened interest.  "Not the same Moraga who
+shot Brocky Lane?"
+
+"The same little old Moraga," he assured her lightly.  "You needn't
+mention it abroad, of course; I don't think Galloway got a chance to
+talk with him and we are not sure yet that he even knows Moraga was
+here.  But I know somebody put me out in the dark by hammering me over
+the head; and Tom Cutter found blood on Moraga's revolver.  But we
+wander far afield.  Coming back to Patten, do we agree that he is
+something of a dub?"
+
+"I'd rather not discuss him."
+
+"Exactly.  And I, being in the talkative way, am going to tell you that
+he has made blunders before now; that at least one man died under his
+nice little fat hands who shouldn't have died outside of jail; that
+long ago I had my suspicions and began instituting inquiries; that now
+I am fully prepared to learn that Caleb Patten has no more right to an
+M.D. after his name than I have."
+
+"You must be mistaken.  I hope you are.  Men used to do that sort of
+thing, but under existing laws . . ."
+
+"Under existing laws men do a good many things in and about San Juan
+which they shouldn't do.  I have found out that there was a Caleb
+Patten who was a young doctor; that there was a Charles Patten, his
+brother, who was a young scamp; that they both lived in Baltimore a few
+years ago; that from Baltimore they both went hastily no man knows
+where.  This gentleman whom we have with us might be either one of
+them. . . .  Here comes Ignacio.  _Que hay_, Ignacio!"
+
+"_Que hay_, Roderico?" responded Ignacio, coming to lean languidly
+against the veranda post.  He removed his hat elaborately, his liquid
+eyes doing justice to Virginia's dainty charm.  "_Buenos tardes,
+señorita_," he greeted her.
+
+"What is new, Ignacio?" queried Norton, "No bells for you to ring for
+the last ten days!  You grow fat in idleness, _amigo mio_."
+
+Ignacio sighed and rolled his cigarette.
+
+"What is new, you ask?  No?  _Bueno_, this is new!"  He lifted his
+eyes suddenly and they were sparkling as with suppressed excitement.
+"The Devil himself has made a visit to San Juan.  _Si, señor; si,
+señorita_.  It is so."
+
+Virginia smiled; Norton gravely asked the explanation.  Why should his
+satanic majesty come to San Juan?
+
+"Why?  _Quien sabe_?"  Ignacio shrugged all responsibility from his
+lazy shoulders.  "But he came and more bad will come from his visit,
+more and more of evil things.  One knows.  _Seguro que si_; one knows.
+But I will tell you and the señorita; no one else knows of it.  It was
+while in the Casa Blanca men are shooting, while Roderico Nortone will
+make his arrest of poor Vidal who is dead now."  He crossed himself and
+drew a thoughtful puff from his cigarette.  "I run fast to ring the
+bells.  I come into the garden and it is dark.  I come under the bells.
+And while my hand cannot find the rope . . .  _Si, señor y
+señorita_! . . . before I touch the rope the Captain begins to ring!
+Just a little; not long; low and quiet and . . . angry!  And then he
+stop and I shiver.  It is hard not to run out of the garden.  But I
+cross myself and find the ropes and make all the bells dance.  But I
+know; it was the Devil who was before me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE KING'S PALACE
+
+Not only was Galloway back in San Juan but, as Norton had predicted of
+him, he appeared to have every assurance that he stood in no unusual
+danger.  There had been a fight in a dark room and one man had been
+killed, certain others wounded.  The dead man was Galloway's friend,
+hence it was not to be thought that Galloway had killed him.  Kid
+Rickard was another friend.  As for the wound Rod Norton had received,
+who could swear that this man or that had given it to him?
+
+"The chances are," Galloway had already said in many quarters, "that
+Tom Cutter, getting excited, popped over his own sheriff."
+
+True, it was quite obvious that a charge lay at Galloway's door, that
+of harboring a fugitive from justice and of resisting an officer.  But
+with Galloway's money and influence, with the shrewdest technical
+lawyer in the State retained, with ample perjured testimony to be had
+as desired, the law-breaker saw no reason for present uneasiness.
+Perhaps more than anything else he regretted the death of Vidal Nuñez
+and the wounding of Kid Rickard.  For these matters vitally touched Jim
+Galloway and his swollen prestige among his henchmen; he had thrown the
+cloak of his protection about Vidal, had summoned him, promised him all
+safety . . . and Vidal was dead.  He knew that men spoke of this over
+and over and hushed when he came upon them; that Vidal's brother, Pete,
+grumbled and muttered that Galloway was losing his grip, that soon or
+late he would fall, that falling he would drag others down with him.
+More than ever before the whole county watched for the final duello
+between Galloway and Norton.  In half a dozen small towns and
+mining-camps men laid bets upon the result.
+
+For the first time, also, there was much barbed comment and criticism
+of the sheriff.  He had gotten this man and that, it was true.  And
+yet, after all this time, he seemed to be no nearer than at the
+beginning to getting the man who counted.  There were those who
+recalled the killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas, and reminded others that
+there had been no attempt at prosecution.  Now there had come forth
+from the Casa Blanca fresh defiance and lawlessness and still Jim
+Galloway came and went as he pleased.  Those who criticised said that
+Norton was losing his nerve, or else that he was merely incompetent
+when measured by the yardstick of swift, incisive action wedded to
+capability.
+
+"If he can't get Jim Galloway, let him step out of the way and give the
+chance to a man who can," was said many times and in many ways.  Even
+John Engle, Julius Struve, Tom Cutter, and Brocky Lane came to Norton
+at one time or another, telling him what they had heard, urging him to
+give some heed to popular clamor, and to begin legal action.
+
+"Put the skids under him, Roddy," pleaded Brocky Lane.  "We can't slide
+him far the first trip, maybe.  But a year or so in jail will break his
+grip here."
+
+But Norton shook his head.  He was playing the game his way.
+
+"The rifles are still in the cache," he told Brocky.  "He is getting
+ready, as we know; further, just as my friends are beginning to find
+fault with me, so are his hangers-on beginning to wonder if they
+haven't tied to the wrong man.  Just to save his own face he'll have to
+start something pretty pronto.  And we know about where he is going to
+strike.  It's up to us to hold our horses, Brocky."
+
+Brocky growled a bit, but went away more than half-persuaded.  He
+called at the hotel, paid his respects to Virginia, and affording her a
+satisfaction which it was hard for her to conceal, also paid her for
+her services rendered him in the cliff-dweller's cave.
+
+Often enough the man who tilts with the law is in most things not
+unlike his fellows, different alone perhaps in the one essential that
+he is born a few hundreds of years late in the advance of civilization.
+Going about that part of his business which has its claims to
+legitimacy, mingling freely with his fellows, he fails to stand out
+distinctly from them as a monster.  Given the slow passing of
+uneventful time, and it becomes hard and harder to consider him as a
+social menace.  When the man is of the Jim Galloway type, his plans
+large, his patience long, he may even pass out from the shadow of a
+gallows-tree and return to occupy his former place in the quiet
+community life, while his neighbors are prone to forget or condone.
+
+As other days came and slipped by and the weeks grew out of them,
+Galloway's was a pleasant, untroubled face to be seen on the street, at
+the post-office, behind his own bar, on the country roads.  He ignored
+any animosity which San Juan might feel for him.  If a man looked at
+him stonily, Galloway did not care to let it be seen that he saw; if a
+woman turned out to avoid him, no evidence that he understood darkened
+his eyes.  He had a good-humored word to speak always; he lifted his
+hat to the banker's wife, as he had always done; he mingled with the
+crowd when there were "exercises" at the little schoolhouse; he warmly
+congratulated Miss Porter, the crabbed old-maid teacher, on the work
+she had accomplished and made her wonder fleetingly if there wasn't a
+bit of good in the man, after all.  Perhaps there was; there is in most
+men.  And Florrie Engle was beginning to wonder the same thing.  For
+Rod Norton, recovered and about his duties, was not quite the same
+touchingly heroic figure he had been while lying unconscious and in
+danger of his life.  Nor was it any part of Florrie Engle's nature to
+remain long either upon the heights or in the depths of an emotion.
+The night of the shooting she had cried out passionately against
+Galloway; as days went their placid way and she saw Galloway upon each
+one of them . . . and did not see a great deal of Norton, who was
+either away or monopolizing Virginia, . . . she took the first step in
+the gambler's direction by beginning to be sorry for him.  First, it
+was too bad that Mr. Galloway did the sort of things which he did; no
+doubt he had had no mother to teach him when he was very young.  Next,
+it was a shame that he was blamed for everything that had to happen;
+maybe he was a . . . a bad man, but Florrie simply didn't believe he
+was responsible for half of the deeds laid at his door.  Finally,
+through a long and intricate chain of considerations, the girl reached
+the point where she nodded when Galloway lifted his hat.  The smile in
+the man's eyes was one of pure triumph.
+
+"Oh, my dear!"  Florrie burst into Virginia's room, flushed and
+palpitant with her latest emotion.  "He has told me all about it, and
+do you know, I don't believe that we have the right to blame him?
+Doesn't it say in the Bible or . . . or somewhere, that greater praise
+or something shall no man have than he who gives his life for a friend?
+It's something like that, anyway.  Aren't people just horrid, always
+blaming other people, never stopping to consider their reasons and
+impulses and looking at it from their side?  Vidal Nuñez was a friend
+of Mr. Galloway's; he was in Mr. Galloway's house.  Of course . . ."
+
+"I thought that you didn't speak to him any more."
+
+"I didn't for a long time.  But if you could have only seen the way he
+always looks at me when I bump into him.  Virgie, I believe he is sad
+and lonely and that he would like to be good if people would only give
+him the chance.  Why, he is human, after all, you know."
+
+Virginia began to ask herself if Galloway were merely amusing himself
+with Florrie or if the man were really interested in her.  It did not
+seem likely that a girl like Florrie would appeal to a man like him;
+and yet, why not?  There is at least a grain of truth, if no more, in
+the old saw of the attraction of opposites.  And it was scarcely more
+improbable that he should be interested in her than that she should
+allow herself to be ever so slightly moved by him.  Furthermore, in its
+final analysis, emotion is not always to be explained.
+
+Virginia set herself the task of watching for any slightest development
+of the man's influence over the girl.  She saw Florrie almost daily,
+either at the hotel to which Florrie had acquired the habit of coming
+in the cool of the afternoons or at the Engle home.  And for the sake
+of her little friend, and at the same time for Elmer's sake, she threw
+the two youngsters together as much as possible.  They quarrelled
+rather a good deal, criticised each other with startling frankness, and
+grew to be better friends than either realized.  Elmer was a vaquero
+now, as he explained whenever need be or opportunity arose, wore chaps,
+a knotted handkerchief about a throat which daily grew more brown,
+spurs as large and noisy as were to be encountered on San Juan's
+street, and his right hip pocket bulged.  None of the details escaped
+Florrie's eyes . . . he called her "Fluff" now and she nicknamed him
+"Black Bill" . . . and she never failed to refer to them mockingly.
+
+"They tell me, Black Bill," she said innocently, "that you fell off
+your horse yesterday.  I was so _sorry_."
+
+She had offered her sympathy during a lull in the conversation, drawing
+the attention of her father, mother, and Virginia to Elmer, whose face
+reddened promptly.
+
+"Florrie!" chided Mrs. Engle, hiding the twinkle in her own eyes.
+
+"Oh, her," said Elmer with a wave of the hand.  "I don't mind what
+Fluff says.  She's just trying to kid me."
+
+Toward the end of the evening, having been thoughtful for ten minutes,
+Elmer adopted Florrie's tactics and remarked suddenly and in a voice to
+be heard much farther than his needed to carry:
+
+"Say, Fluff.  Saw an old friend of yours the other day."  And when
+Florrie, "gun-shy" as Elmer called her, was too wise to ask any
+questions, he hastened on: "Juanito Miranda it was.  Sent his best.  So
+did Mrs. Juanito."
+
+Whereupon it was Florrie's turn to turn a scarlet of mortification and
+anger.  For Juanito had soft black eyes and almost equally soft black
+mustaches, with probably a heart to match, and only a year ago Florrie
+had been busied making a hero of him when he, the blind one, took unto
+himself an Indian bride and in all innocence heaped shame high upon the
+blonde head.  How Elmer unearthed such ancient history was a mystery to
+Florrie; but none the less she "hated" him for it.  They saw a very
+great deal of each other, each serving as a sort of balance-wheel to
+the other's self-centred complacency.  Perhaps the one subject upon
+which they could agree was Jim Galloway; Elmer still liked to look upon
+the gambler as a colossal figure standing serene among wolves, while
+Florrie could admit to him, with no fear of a chiding, that she thought
+Mr. Galloway "simply splendid!"
+
+When one evening, after having failed to show himself for a full month,
+Rod Norton came to the Engles', found Elmer and Virginia there, and
+suggested the ride to the King's Palace, he awakened no end of
+enthusiasm.  Elmer had a day off, thanks to the generosity of his
+employer, Mr. Engle, and had just secretly purchased a fresh outfit
+consisting of a silver-mounted Spanish bit, a new pair of white and
+unspeakably shaggy, draggy chaps, a wide hat with a band of snake hide,
+and boots that were the final whisper in high-heeled discomfort.
+Florrie disappeared into her room to make her own little riding-costume
+as irresistible as possible.  They were to start with the first streaks
+of dawn to-morrow, just the four of them, since the banker and his
+wife, lukewarmly invited, had no desire for a forty-mile ride between
+morning and night.
+
+It was Rod Norton's privilege to lead his merry party into what for
+them was wonderland.  Even Florrie, though so much other life had been
+passed in San Juan, had never before visited the King's Palace.
+Clattering through the street while most folk were asleep, they took
+advantage of the cool of the dawn and rode swiftly.  Elmer and Florrie
+racing on ahead laid aside their accustomed weapons and were, for the
+once, utterly flattering to each other.  Each wishing to be admired,
+admired the other, and was paid back in the coveted coin.  Norton and
+Virginia, at first a little inclined toward silence, soon grew as
+noisily merry as the others, drawing deep enjoyment from the moment.
+
+And at the portals of the King's Palace, reached after four hours in
+the saddle, followed by thirty minutes on foot, they stood hushed with
+wonder.  High upon the southern slope of Mt. Temple they had come
+abruptly into the unexpected.  Here a rugged plateau had caught and
+held through the ages the soil which had weathered down from the cliffs
+above; here were trees to replace the weary gray brush, shade instead
+of glare, birds as welcome substitutes for droning insects, water and
+flowers to make the cañons doubly cool and fragrant for him who had
+ascended from the dry reaches of sand below the talus.
+
+"It's just like fairy-land!" cried the ecstatic Florrie.  "Roddy
+Norton, I think you're real mean not to have brought me here ages ago!"
+
+"Ages ago, my dear miss," laughed Norton, "you were too little to
+appreciate it.  You should thank me for bringing you now."
+
+Down through the middle of the plateau from its hidden source ran the
+purling stream which was destined to yield to sun and thirsty earth
+long before it twisted down the lower slopes of the hills.  Along its
+edges the grass was thick and rich, shot through everywhere with little
+blue blossoms and the golden gleam of the starflowers.  Further promise
+of yellow beauty was given by the stalks of the evening-primrose
+scattered on every hand, the flowers furled now, sleeping.  In the
+groves were pines, small cedars, and a sprinkling of sturdy dwarf oaks.
+And from their shelter came the welcome sound of a bird's twitter.
+
+"It's always about as you see it," Norton explained.  "Too hard to get
+to, too small when one makes the climb to afford enough pasturage for
+sheep.  And now the Palace itself."
+
+Straight ahead the cliffs overhung the farther rim of the plateau.  And
+there, under the out-jutting roof of rock, an ancient people had
+fashioned themselves a home which stood now as when their hands
+laboriously set it there.  The protected ledge which afforded eternal
+foundation was slightly above the plateau's level, to be reached by a
+series of "steps" in the rock, steps which were holes worn deep,
+perhaps five hundred years ago.  The climb was steep, hazardous unless
+one went with due precaution, but the four holiday-makers hurried to
+begin it.
+
+So close to the edge of the rock ledge did the walls of the ruin stand
+that there was barely room to edge along it to come to the narrow
+doorway.  Holding hands, Norton in the lead, Elmer in the rear, they
+made their breathless way.  And then they were in the hushed, shaded
+anteroom.
+
+The dust of untroubled ages lay upon the surprisingly smooth floor.
+Walls of cemented rock rose intact on two sides, broken here and there
+on a third, while the cliff itself made the fourth at the rear.  And
+unusually spacious, wide, and high-ceiled was this room, which may have
+had its use when time was younger as a council-chamber.  At one end was
+another door, small and dark and forbidding, leading to another room.
+Beyond lay other quarters, a long line of them, which might have housed
+scores in their time.
+
+While Florrie, letting out little shrieks now and then interspersed
+with gay cries of delight, led a half-timorous way and Elmer went with
+her upon the tour of discovery, Virginia and Norton stood a moment at
+the front entrance looking down upon the fertile plateau and across it
+to the level miles running out to San Juan and beyond.
+
+"Who were they?" asked Virginia, unconscious of a half-sigh as she
+withdrew abstracted eyes from the wide panorama which had filled the
+vision of so many other men and women and little children before the
+white man came to claim the New World.  "They who builded here and
+lived and died here.  What has become of them?  Where did they go?"
+
+"All questions asked a thousand times and never answered.  I don't
+know.  But they were good builders, good engineers, good
+pottery-makers, good farmers and hunters and fighters; rather a goodly
+crowd, I take it.  Come, and I'll share my secret with you while
+Florrie and Elmer discover the skeleton a little farther on and stop to
+exclaim over it."
+
+[Illustration: "Come, and I'll share my secret with you."]
+
+Norton's secret was a hidden room of the King's Palace.  While many men
+knew of the Palace itself, he believed that none other than himself had
+ever ferreted out this particular chamber which he called the Treasure
+Chamber.  It was to be reached by clambering through an orifice of the
+eastern wall, over a clutter of fallen blocks of stone and a score of
+feet along the narrowing ledge.  Just before they came to the point
+where the encroaching wall of cliff denied farther foothold they found
+a fissure in the rock itself wide enough to allow them to slip into it.
+Again they climbed, coming presently to a ledge smaller than the one
+below and hidden by an outthrust boulder.  Here was the last of the
+rooms of the King's Palace, cunningly masked, to be found only by
+accident, even the cramped door concealed by the branches of a tortured
+cedar.  Norton pushed them aside and they entered.
+
+"I have cached a few of my things here," he told her as they confronted
+each other in the gloom of the room's interior.  "And the joke of it is
+that my hiding-place is almost if not quite directly below the caves
+where Galloway's rifles are.  This is a secret, mind you! . . .  If
+you'll look around, you'll find some of the articles our friends the
+cliff-dwellers left behind them when they made their getaway."
+
+In a dark corner she found a blackened coffee-pot and a frying-pan,
+proclaiming anachronistically that here was the twentieth century
+interloping upon the fifteenth, articles which Norton had hidden here.
+In another corner were jumbled the things which the ancient people had
+left to mark their passing, an earthenware water-jar, half a dozen
+spear and arrow points of stone, a clumsy-looking axe still fitted to
+its handle of century-seasoned cedar, bound with thongs.
+
+"But," exclaimed the girl, "the wood, the raw-hide . . . they would
+have disintegrated long ago.  They must belong to the age of your
+coffee-pot and frying-pan!"
+
+"The air is bone-dry," he reminded her.  "What little rain there is
+never gets in here.  Nothing decays; look yonder."
+
+He showed her a basket made of withes, a graceful thing skilfully made,
+small, frail-looking, and as perfect as the day it had come from a pair
+of quick brown hands under a pair of quick black eyes.  She took it
+almost with a sense of awe upon her.
+
+"Keep it, will you?" he asked lightly.  "As a memento.  Presented by a
+caveman through your friend the sheriff.  Now let's get back before
+they miss us.  I may have need of this place some time and I'd rather
+no one else knew of it."
+
+They made their way back as they had come and in silence, Virginia
+treasuring the token and with it the sense that her friend the sheriff
+had cared to share his secret with her.
+
+
+They made of the day an occasion to be remembered, to be considered
+wistfully in retrospect during the troubled hours so soon to come to
+each one of the four of them.  While Elmer and Florrie gathered
+fire-wood, Norton showed Virginia how simple a matter it was here in
+this seldom-visited mountain-stream to take a trout.  Cool, shaded
+pools under overhanging, gouged-out banks, tiny falls, and shimmering
+riffles all housed the quick speckled beauties.  Then, as Norton had
+predicted, the fish were fried, crisp and brown, in sizzling
+bacon-grease, while the thin wafers of bacon garnished the tin plate
+bedded in hot ashes.  They nooned in the shady grove, sipping their
+coffee that had the taste of some rare, black nectar.  And throughout
+the long lazy afternoon they loitered as it pleased them, picked
+flowers, wandered anew through the ruins of the King's Palace, lay by
+the singing water, and were quietly content.  It was only when the
+shadows had thickened over the world and the promise of the primroses
+was fulfilled that they made ready for the return ride.  Before they
+had gone down to their horses the moths were coming to the yellow
+flowers, tumbling about them, filling the air with the frail beating of
+their wings.
+
+At Struve's hotel . . . Elmer and Virginia had ridden on to Engle's
+home . . . Virginia told Norton good night, thanking him for a perfect
+day.  As their hands met for a little she saw a new, deeply probing
+look in his eyes, a look to be understood.  He towered over her,
+physically superb.  As she had felt it before, so now did she
+experience that odd little thrill born from nearness to him go singing
+through her.  She withdrew her hand hastily and went in.  In her own
+room she stood a long time before her glass, seeking to read what lay
+in her own eyes.
+
+
+Tom Cutter was waiting for Norton--merely to tell him that a stranger
+had come to San Juan, a Mexican with all the earmarks of a gentleman
+and a man of means.  The Mexican's name was Enrique del Rio.  He
+evidently came from below the border.  He had lost no time in finding
+Jim Galloway, with whom he had been all afternoon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE MEXICAN FROM MEXICO
+
+Enrique del Rio promptly became known to San Juan as the Mexican from
+Mexico, this to distinguish him from the many Mexicans, as San Juan
+knew them, who had never seen that turbulent field of intrigue and
+revolt from which their sires had come.  He showed himself from the
+outset to be a gentleman of culture, discernment, and ability.  He was
+suave, he was polished, he gave certain signs of refinement.
+
+His first afternoon and evening he bestowed upon Jim Galloway.  The
+second day found him registered at Struve's hotel.  The following
+morning he presented himself with a sheaf of credentials at the bank,
+asking for John Engle.  With him came Ignacio Chavez in the rôle of
+interpreter.  Del Rio spoke absolutely no English and had informed
+himself that Engle's Spanish was inadequate for the occasion.
+
+"He is Señor Don Enrique del Rio," explained Ignacio, touched by the
+spell of the other's munificence and immaculate clothes.  "He would
+like to shake the hand of Señor Engle to become acquainted and then
+friends. . . .  He brings papers to tell who and what he is in Mexico
+City, whence he has departed because of too damn much fight down there;
+he wishes to put some money here in the _banco_, which he can take
+away again to buy a big ranch and many cattle and horses.  He has the
+other money in a _banco_ in New York, where he sent it out from Mexico
+two, three months ago."
+
+And so on, while Engle gravely listened and shrewdly, after his fashion
+in business hours, probed for the inner man under the outer polish,
+while del Rio nodded and smiled and never withdrew his night-black eyes
+from Engle's face.
+
+Del Rio, it appeared, had gone first to the Casa Blanca because he had
+heard of Jim Galloway as one of the most influential men of the county.
+Since arriving in San Juan, however, he had heard this and that, mere
+rumors, which caused him to come to Engle.  He, a stranger, could ill
+afford in the beginning to have his name coupled with that of any man
+not known for his spotless integrity.  Señor Engle understood? . . .
+Later, when del Rio had found the properties to his liking and had
+builded a home, his wife and two daughters would arrive.  Now they
+travelled in California.
+
+In the end Engle accepted the Mexican's deposits, which amounted to
+approximately a thousand dollars, and which were to be drawn against
+merely as an expense account until del Rio found his ranch.  And the
+first item of expense was the purchase from Engle himself of a fine
+saddle-animal, a pure-blooded, clean-limbed young mare, sister to
+Persis.  After which the Mexican spent a great deal of his time riding
+about the country, looking at ranches.  He visited Engle's two places,
+called upon Norton at Las Flores, ferreting out prices, looking at
+water and feed, examining soil.
+
+It was a bare fortnight after the coming of del Rio when out of Las
+Palmas came word of fresh lawlessness.  The superintendent of the three
+Quigley mines had been surprised the night before pay-day, forced at
+the point of a revolver to open his own safe, and robbed of several
+thousand dollars.  A man on horseback rushed word to San Juan, found
+Tom Cutter, who located Norton the same afternoon at his ranch at Las
+Flores.
+
+"Rod, old man," cried Cutter angrily, "this damned thing has got to
+stop!  You haven't a much better friend than I am, I guess, and I'm
+telling you straight that the whole county is getting sore on you.
+They will talk more than ever now, saying that it's up to you to get
+results and that you don't get them."
+
+"The stick-up was last night?" asked the sheriff coolly.
+
+"Yes," snapped Cutter.
+
+"You were in San Juan?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where was Jim Galloway?  Was he in town?"
+
+"No, he wasn't.  I don't know where he was.  But I do know where he
+ought to be. . . ."
+
+"Was that Mexican gent, del Rio, in town?"
+
+Cutter opened his eyes.
+
+"No.  I don't think so.  You haven't got anything on him, have you?"
+
+"Only what you told me.  Remember that his first day in San Juan he
+went to Galloway like a homing pigeon."
+
+Norton went for his horse, saddled, and rode swiftly to Las Palmas.  In
+the mining-camp he went immediately to the office of Nate Kemble, the
+superintendent, whom he found cursing volubly.
+
+"It's up to you," were the sharp words of greeting as Kemble wheeled
+upon the sheriff.  "What the hell do you think you're for, anyway?
+Good Lord, man, if you can't cut the mustard, why don't you crawl out
+and let a man who _can_ wear your star?"
+
+"Easy there, Kemble," said Norton quietly.  "You can do your raring and
+pitching after I'm gone.  Tell me about it.  What time did it happen?"
+
+"It was hardly dark."
+
+"How many men jumped you?"
+
+"Just one.  But . . ."
+
+"Just one, eh?"  He pondered the information.  "That isn't the usual
+brand of Galloway work, is it?  Get a good slant at him?"
+
+"At his clothes," growled Kemble, slamming himself down dejectedly in
+his chair.  "His face was hid, of course."
+
+"Ever see a Mexican named del Rio?"
+
+Like Cutter before him, Kemble started.
+
+"Don't ask me what I mean," Norton cut him short.  "Del Rio is a pretty
+big man for a Mexican; was this highwayman about his size?"
+
+Kemble hesitated.
+
+"It's hard to say just how big a man is when he comes in on you like
+that," he said at last.  "At a guess I'd say that the man who stuck me
+up was a little taller than del Rio.  But I wouldn't swear to it."
+
+"It might have been del Rio himself, then?" Norton insisted.
+
+"Yes.  Or it might have been the Devil's grandmother.  I don't . . ."
+
+"See anything of del Rio the last few days?"
+
+"Saw him yesterday.  He was in camp.  Was talking mines."
+
+"See anything of Galloway hereabouts of late?"
+
+"No.  Haven't seen him for a month or two."
+
+Norton asked a few other questions, kept his own thoughts to himself,
+and rode away.  Less than a mile from the camp he met Jim Galloway
+riding a sweat-wet horse.  The two men reined in sharply, each man's
+eyes matching the other's for hardness.  Galloway's face was red, the
+fiery red of anger.
+
+"Going back for what you forgot, Jim?" asked Norton.
+
+For a moment Galloway, staring back at him, seemed utterly speechless
+in the grip of his wrath.  Norton did not remember ever having seen
+such blazing anger in the prominent eyes.
+
+"Between you and me, Rod Norton," muttered Galloway at last, "I have
+turned a trick or two in my time.  But this job is none of my doing and
+if I wise up as to who put it over he'll go under the sand or into the
+pen, and I'll put him there."
+
+Norton laughed.
+
+"In other words, some free-lance has made a bid to break your corner on
+the crime market, eh?" he jeered.  "Put one over on you without your
+knowledge and consent?  And without splitting two ways?  That what you
+mean?"
+
+"I mean that I'd pay five hundred dollars out of my own pocket right
+now for the dead-wood on the man who robbed Kemble."
+
+"Kid Rickard is around once more; sure he didn't do it?"
+
+"Yes, I am.  Kid Rickard didn't do it."
+
+Norton eased himself in the saddle, thoughtfully regarding Galloway.
+And then, very abruptly:
+
+"How about your friend, del Rio?"
+
+It was the third time that he had mentioned del Rio's name in this
+connection and to the third man.  And now, but slightly different in
+degree only, he saw the same look in Galloway's eyes which he had
+brought into Cutter's and Kemble's.
+
+"Del Rio?" repeated Galloway frowningly.  "What makes you say that?"
+
+"I'll collect your five hundred later," was Norton's laughing response.
+Swerving out a little as he passed, he rode on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+A STACK OF GOLD PIECES
+
+John Engle rapidly came to assume the nature and proportions of a
+stubborn bulwark standing sturdily between Roderick Norton and the
+fires of criticism, which, springing from little, scattered flames were
+now a wide-spread blaze amply fed with the dry fuel of many fields.
+Again there had been a general excitement over a crime committed, much
+talk, various suspicions, and, in the end, no arrest made.  Men who had
+stood by the sheriff until now began to lose faith in him.  They
+recalled how, after the fight in the Casa Blanca, he had let Galloway
+go and with him Antone and the Kid; their memories trailed back to the
+killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas and the evidence of the boots.  They
+began to admit, at first reluctantly, then with angry eagerness, that
+Norton was not the man his father had been before him, not the man they
+had taken him to be.  And all of this hurt Norton's stanch friend, John
+Engle.  All the more that he, too, saw signs of hesitancy which he
+found it hard to condone.
+
+"Let him alone," he said many a time.  "Give him his chance and a free
+hand.  He knows what he is doing."
+
+From that point he began to make excuses, first to himself and then to
+others.  People were forgetting that only a short time ago the sheriff
+had lain many days at the point of death; that his system had been
+overtaxed; that not yet had his superb strength come back to him.  Wait
+until once more he was physically fit.
+
+It was merely an excuse, and at the outset no man knew it better than
+the banker himself.  But as time went by without bringing results and
+tongues grew sharper and more insistent everywhere, Engle grew
+convinced that there was a grain of truth in his trumped-up argument.
+He invited Norton to his home, had him to dinner, watched him keenly,
+and came to the conclusion that Norton was riding on his nerves, that
+he had not taken sufficient time to recuperate before getting his feet
+back into the official stirrups, that the strain of his duties was
+telling on him, that he needed a rest and a change or would go to
+pieces.
+
+But Norton, the subject broached, merely shook his head.
+
+"I'm all right, John," he said a little hurriedly and nervously.  "I am
+run down at the heels a bit, I'll admit.  But I can't stop to rest
+right now.  One of these days I'll quit this job and go back to
+ranching.  Until then . . .  Well, let them talk.  We can't stop them
+very well."
+
+Suspicion of the Quigley mines robbery had turned at first toward del
+Rio.  But he had established an alibi.  So had Galloway.  So had Antone
+and the Kid.
+
+"There is nothing to do but wait," Norton insisted.  "It won't be long
+now."
+
+Engle, having less than no faith in Patten's ability, went to Virginia
+Page.  She saw Norton often; what did she think?  Was he on the verge
+of a collapse?  Was he physically fit?
+
+"All of this criticism hurts him," said the banker thoughtfully.  "I
+know Rod and how he must take it, though he only shrugs.  It's gall and
+wormwood to him.  He's up against a hard proposition, as we all know;
+if he is half-sick, I wonder if the proposition isn't going to be too
+much for him?  Can't you advise him, persuade him to knock off for a
+couple of weeks and clear out?  Get into a city somewhere and forget
+his work.  Why, it's the most pitiful thing in the world to see a man
+like him lose his grip."
+
+"He is not quite himself," she admitted slowly.  "He is more nervous,
+inclined to be short and irritable, than he used to be.  You may be
+right; or it may be simply that his continued failure to stop these
+crimes is wearing him down.  I'll be glad to watch him, to talk with
+him if he will listen to me."
+
+But first she forced herself to what seemed a casual chat with Patten,
+finding him loitering upon the hotel veranda.  She suggested to him
+that Norton was beginning to show the strain, that he looked haggard
+under it, and wondered if he had quite recovered from his recent
+illness?
+
+Patten, after his pompous way, leaned back in his chair, his thumbs in
+his armholes, his manner that of a most high judge.
+
+"He's as well as I am," he announced positively.  "Thin, to be sure,
+just from being laid up those ten days.  And from a lot of hard riding
+and worry.  That's all."
+
+Out of Patten's vest-pocket peeped a lead-pencil.  Curiously enough, it
+carried her mind back to Patten's incompetence.  For it suggested the
+fountain pen which of old occupied the pencil's place and which the
+sheriff had taken in his haste to secrete a bit of paper with Patten's
+scrawl upon it.  She wondered again just what had been on that paper,
+and if it were meant to help Norton prove that Patten had no right to
+the M.D. after his name?  The incident, all but forgotten, remained
+prominently in her mind, soon to assume a position of transcendent
+importance.
+
+And then, one after the other, here and there throughout the county
+came fresh crimes which not only set men talking angrily but which drew
+the eyes of the State and then of the neighboring States upon this
+corner of the world.  Newspapers in the cities commented variously,
+most of them sweepingly condemning the county's sheriff for a
+figurehead and a boy who should never have been given a man's place in
+the sun.  New faces were seen in San Juan, in Las Estrellas, Las
+Palmas, Pozo, everywhere, and men said that the undesirable citizens of
+the whole Southwest were flocking here where they might reap with
+others of their ilk and go scot free.  Naturally, the Casa Blanca
+became headquarters for a large percentage of the newcomers.
+
+"The condition in and about San Juan," commented one of the most
+reputable and generally conservative of the attacking dailies, "has
+become acute, unprecedented for this time in our development.  The
+community has become the asylum of the lawless.  The authorities have
+shown themselves utterly unable to cope with the situation.  A
+well-known figure of the desert town who long ago should have gone to
+the gallows is daily growing bolder, attaching to himself the wildest
+of the insurging element, and is commonly looked upon as a crime
+dictator.  Unless there comes a stiffening in the moral fiber of the
+local officers, we dread to consider the logical outcome of these
+conditions."
+
+And so forth from countless quarters.  Galloway openly jeered at
+Norton.  New faces, looking out from the Casa Blanca, grinned widely as
+the sheriff now and then rode past.  Engle and Struve and Tom Cutter,
+anxious and beginning to be afraid of what lurked in the future, met at
+the hotel and sought to hit upon a solution of the problem.
+
+"Norton has got something up his sleeve," growled the hotel keeper,
+"and he's as stubborn as a mule.  He's after Galloway, and it begins to
+look as though he were forgetting that his job is to serve the county
+first and his own private quarrels next.  I've jawed him up and down;
+it only makes him shake his head like a horse with flies after him."
+
+The three, hoping that their combined arguments might have weight with
+Norton, went to him and did not leave him until they had made clear
+what their thoughts were, what the whole State was saying of him.  And,
+as Struve had predicted, he shook his head.
+
+"These later robberies haven't been Galloway's work," he told them
+positively.  "They were pulled off by the same man who stuck up Kemble
+of the Quigley mines.  Inside of a week I'll get something done; I'll
+promise you that.  But let me do it my way."
+
+Engle alone of the three drew a certain satisfaction from the interview.
+
+"He has promised something definite," he told them.  "Did you ever know
+him to do that and fail to keep his word?  Maybe we're getting a little
+excited, boys."
+
+The latest crime had been the robbery of the little bank at Packard
+Springs.  The highwayman had gone in the night to the room of the
+cashier, forced him to dress, go to the bank, and open his safe.  The
+result was a theft of a couple of thousand dollars, no trace left
+behind, and a growing feeling of insecurity throughout the county.  It
+was for this crime that Norton meant and promised to make an arrest.
+
+Exactly seven days from the day of his promise Norton rode into San
+Juan and asked for Tom Cutter.  Struve, meeting him at the hotel door,
+looked at him sharply.
+
+"Made that arrest yet, Norton?" he demanded.  Norton smiled.
+
+"No, I haven't," he admitted coolly.  "But I've got a few minutes
+before my week's up, haven't I?  Fix me up with something to eat and
+I'll have a talk with you and Tom while I attend to the inner man."
+
+But over his meal, while Cutter and Struve watched him impatiently, he
+did little talking other than to ask carelessly where del Rio was.
+
+"Damn it, man," cried Struve irritably.  "You've hinted at him before
+now.  If he's a crook, why don't you go grab him?  He's in his room."
+
+Norton swung about upon Struve, his eyes suddenly filled with fire.
+
+"Look here, Struve," he retorted, "I've had about a bellyful of
+badgering.  I'm running my job and it will be just as well for you to
+keep your hands off.  As for why I don't make an arrest . . .  Come on,
+Tom.  You, too, Julius," his smile coming back.  "I'm going to get del
+Rio."
+
+"I don't believe . . ." began Struve.
+
+"Seeing is believing," returned Norton lightly.  "Come on."
+
+Followed by the two men, Norton went direct to del Rio's room, at the
+front of the house, just across the hall from Virginia's office.  At
+del Rio's quick "_Entra_," he threw open the door and went in.  Del
+Rio, seated smoking a cigar, looked up with curious eyes which did not
+miss the two men following the sheriff.
+
+"You are under arrest for the bank robbery at Packard Springs," said
+Norton crisply.
+
+"_Que quiere usted decir_?" demanded the Mexican, to whom the English
+words were meaningless.
+
+Norton threw back his vest, showing his star.  And while he kept his
+eye upon del Rio he said quietly to Cutter:
+
+"Look through his trunk and bags."
+
+Del Rio, understanding quickly enough, sat smoking swiftly, his eyes
+narrowing as they clung steadily to Norton's.  Cutter, a rising hope in
+his breast that at last his superior had made good, went to the trunk
+in the corner.  Del Rio shrugged and remained silent.
+
+Cutter began tumbling out upon the floor an assortment of clothing,
+evincing little respect for the Mexican's finery.  Suddenly, when his
+hands had gone to the bottom, he sat back upon his heels, a leaping
+light in his eyes.
+
+"Caught with the goods on, by God!" he cried.  "Look here, Struve!"
+
+He had whipped out a canvas bag which gave forth the chink of gold.
+Another came after it.  And across each bag was stamped "Packard
+Springs Bank."
+
+Del Rio's eyes had wandered a moment to Cutter and the evidence.  Then
+they came back to Norton, filled with black malevolence.  One did not
+need to understand the southern language to grasp the meaning of the
+words muttered under his breath.
+
+Within the half-hour Strove, Cutter, and Engle had apologized to
+Norton; after this, they promised him to keep their hands off and their
+mouths shut.
+
+
+That evening Virginia and Norton sat long together on Struve's veranda.
+There was more silence than talk between them.  Norton seemed
+abstracted; the girl was plainly constrained, anxious, and found it
+difficult to keep her mind upon the thin thread of conversation joining
+their occasional remarks.  Abruptly, out of one of their wordless
+intervals, she said quickly:
+
+"Congratulate me on being a rich woman!  I got a check from an old,
+almost forgotten, patient to-day.  A hundred dollars, all in one lump!
+It's a fortune in San Juan, isn't it?"
+
+Norton laughed with her.
+
+"I feel like spending it all in a breath," she ran on.  "I went right
+away to Mr. Engle and had him cash it so that I could see what five
+twenty-dollar gold pieces looked like.  And I chinked them and played
+with them like a child!  Do you think I am growing greedy for gold in
+my old age? . . .  You ought to see them piled up, though; five
+twenties.  Isn't gold a pretty thing?  I've a notion to go get them and
+show them to you; they're right on my table ..."
+
+She broke off suddenly, her hand on his arm.
+
+"Did you see some one out there at the corner of the house?" she asked
+quickly.  "Do you think . . ."
+
+Then she laughed again and settled back in her chair.
+
+"Already thinking somebody is going to steal my gold!  My five
+twenties.  Just to punish myself I am going to leave them on my office
+table all night; do you suppose I'll be wondering all the time if
+somebody is crawling in at a window and taking them?"
+
+Five minutes later she said good night and left him.
+
+"I'll be up early in the morning," she said laughingly.  "Just to make
+sure that my gold is there!"
+
+
+An hour later Virginia Page, sitting fully dressed in the darkness of
+her bedroom, got quietly to her feet and went to the door leading to
+her office.  With wildly beating heart she stood listening, seeking to
+peer through the crack of the door she had left ajar.  She had heard
+the faint, expected sound of some one moving cautiously.
+
+Now she heard it again, then the rustling of loose papers lying on her
+table, then the faint, golden chink of yellow-minted disks.  As she
+suddenly scratched the match in her hand, drawing it along the wall,
+she threw the door open.  The tiny flame, held high, retrieved the room
+from darkness into sufficient pale light.  The man at her table whirled
+upon her, an exclamation caught in his throat, one hand going to his
+hip, the other closing tight upon what it held.
+
+She came in, her eyes steadily upon his, her face deathly pale.  As the
+match fell from her fingers she went to the open window and drew down
+the shade.  Then she lit a second match, set it to her lamp, and sank
+wearily into her chair.
+
+"Shall we thresh matters out, Mr. Norton?" she asked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+DESIRE OUTWEIGHS DISCRETION
+
+Following Virginia's barely audible words there was a long silence.
+Her eyes, dark with the trouble in them, rested upon Norton's face and
+saw the frown go from his brows while slowly the red seeped into his
+bronzed cheeks.  For the first time in her life she saw him staggered
+by the shock of surprise, held hesitant and uncertain.  For a little
+there was never a movement of his rigid muscles; one hand rested upon
+the butt of his revolver, the other was closed upon the stack of gold
+pieces.  When at last he found his tongue it was to accuse her.
+
+"You trapped me," he said bitterly.
+
+"With golden bait," she admitted, her voice oddly spiritless.  "Yes."
+
+"Well," he challenged, "what are you going to do about it?"
+
+"Do?  I don't know!"
+
+Again they grew silent, studying each other intently.  Norton, his
+poise coming back to him as the unusual color receded from his face,
+smiled at her with an affectation of his old manner.  Suddenly he
+stepped back to her table, noiselessly set down the coins, eased
+himself into a chair.
+
+"You wished to thresh things out?  I am ready.  And in case we should
+be interrupted, you know, I have called on you in your official
+capacity.  We'll say that I am troubled by the old wound in the head;
+that will do as well as anything, won't it?"
+
+"It was you who robbed the bank at Pozo!" she cried softly, leaning
+toward him, the look in her eyes one of dread now.  "And the mine
+superintendent at Las Palmas?  And I don't know how many other people.
+It was you!"
+
+She had startled him in the beginning; she knew she would not draw
+another sign of surprise from him.  He had himself under control, and
+long years of severe training made that control complete.  He merely
+looked interested under her sweeping accusation.
+
+"You must have a reason for a charge like that," he remarked evenly.
+
+"Do you deny it?"
+
+"I deny nothing, I affirm nothing right now.  I say that you must have
+a reason for what you state."
+
+"You put the incriminating evidence in del Rio's trunk," she ran on
+hurriedly.  "The canvas bags of gold.  Didn't you?"
+
+"Reason?" he insisted equably.
+
+"You took Caleb Patten's fountain pen!  I saw you."
+
+He lifted his brows at her.  Then he laughed softly.
+
+"In the first place," he replied thoughtfully, "I really believe that
+he is not Caleb at all but Charles Patten.  We'll talk of that later,
+however.  In the second place isn't it rather humorous to wind up by
+accusing a man with the theft of a fountain pen after your other
+charges?"
+
+"Answer one question," she urged earnestly.  "Please.  It is only a
+small matter.  Give me your word of honor that you will answer it
+truthfully."
+
+He was very grave as he sat for a moment, head down, twirling his big
+hat in slow fingers.  Then he smiled again as he looked up.
+
+"Either truthfully or not at all," he promised her.  "My word of honor."
+
+She was plainly excited as she set him her question, seeming at once
+eager and afraid to have his response.
+
+"I saw you take Patten's fountain pen and a scrap of note-paper from
+the table by your bed when you were hurt--the first time I called to
+see how you were doing.  I thought that perhaps there was something of
+importance written on the paper, that, if nothing else, you wanted a
+bit of Patten's handwriting to use in your proof that he was not the
+man he pretended to be.  You slipped both pen and paper under your
+pillow.  Tell me just this: Was that paper of any importance whatever,
+of any interest even, to you?"
+
+"No," he said steadily, without hesitation.  "It was not.  I did not so
+much as look at it."
+
+She leaned back in her chair with a long sigh, her eyes wide on his.
+And while he marvelled at it, he saw that now her look was one of pure
+pity.
+
+"Just what has that got to do with the robberies you mention?"
+
+"Everything!" she burst out.  "Everything!  Can't you see?  Oh, my God!"
+
+She dropped her face into her hands and he saw her shoulders lift and
+slump.  Glancing aside swiftly, he saw the five golden disks on the
+table, almost to be reached from where he sat.
+
+"No doubt," he said hastily, as her head was lifted again, "you think
+that you would like to send me to jail?"
+
+"Jail, no!  A thousand times no!  But you must, you must let me send
+you to a hospital!"
+
+He frowned at her while he gave over twirling his hat and grew very
+still.
+
+"You think I am crazy?" he asked sharply.  "That it?"
+
+"No.  You are as sane as I am.  I don't think that at all.  But . . .
+Oh, can't you understand?"
+
+"No, I can't.  You accuse me of this and that, you give no reasons for
+your wild suspicions, you end up by suggesting medical treatment.
+What's the answer, Virginia Page?"
+
+"The answer, Roderick Norton, is a very simple one.  But first I am
+going to ask you another question or so.  You sought to commit a theft
+to-night, I saw you, so there is no use denying it to me, is there?"
+
+"Go ahead.  What next?"
+
+"While you lay ill during a week or ten days you had time to think.
+You remember having told me that you had had time to think about
+everything in the world?  It was at that time, wasn't it, that you came
+to the decision which you mentioned to me that a man to commit crime
+and play safe at the same time must keep in mind two essential matters:
+First, the lone hand; second, not to kill?"
+
+"I thought it out then; yes.  In fact, I suppose I told you so."
+
+"The crimes committed recently have been characterized by these two
+essentials, haven't they?  Nearly all of them?"
+
+He nodded, watching her keenly, holding back his answers for just a
+second or two each time.
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"Did you ever have an impulse to steal before you were knocked
+unconscious at the Casa Blanca?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And you have had that impulse almost all the time ever since?  Answer
+me, tell me the truth!  I am right, am I not?"
+
+Now again he laughed softly at her.
+
+"Virginia Page, the medico, speaks," he returned lightly.  "She has a
+theory.  A man may have such an accident, leaving such and such
+pressure on the brain, with the result that he becomes a thief or
+worse!  Virginia . . ."
+
+"Theory!  It is no theory.  It is an established, undeniable, and
+undenied fact!  It has occurred time and again, physicians have
+observed, have made cures!  Can't you see now, Rod Norton?  Won't you
+see?"
+
+She was upon her feet, her hands clasped before her, her eyes shining,
+her figure tense, her cheeks stained with the color of her excitement.
+
+"I don't care whether Patten is a physician or not," she ran on.  "He
+is a bungler.  It is a sheer wonder he did not let you die.  You told
+me yourself that he attributed the second wound to your fall and that
+you knew that Moraga had struck you a terrible blow with his
+gun-barrel.  Patten did not treat that wound; he cared for the lesser
+injury like a fool and allowed the major one to take care of itself.
+And the result . . .  Oh, dear God!  Think of what might have happened.
+If any one but me had learned what I have learned to-night."
+
+He rose with her, stood still, regarding her with eyes like drills.
+Then he shook his head.
+
+"You are wrong, Virginia, dead wrong," he told her with quiet emphasis.
+"You have called me a thief?  Well, perhaps I am.  You have given your
+explanation; let me give mine."
+
+He paused, shaping the matter in mind.  His face was stern and very,
+very grave.  Presently, his lowered voice guarded against any chance
+ears, he continued.
+
+"I lay on my bed a week, a long, utterly damnable week.  I could do
+nothing but think.  So I thought, as I told you, of everything.  Most
+of all I thought of you, Virginia Page.  Shall I tell you why?  No;
+we'll let that go until we understand each other.  I thought of myself,
+of my life, of my eternal striving with Jim Galloway.  Some day I
+should get Galloway or he would get me.  In either case, what good?
+Was not Galloway a wiser man than I?  He took what he wanted; I merely
+wasted my time chasing after such bigger men as he.  If he desired a
+thousand dollars or five, ten thousand, he went out for it like a man
+and took it.  Why shouldn't he?  Oh, I tell you I had the time to dwell
+upon the little meaningless words of honesty and dishonesty, honor and
+dishonor, and all of their progeny and forebears!  They are empty;
+empty, I tell you, Virginia!  When I stood on my feet again I was a
+free man.  I knew it then, I know it now.  Free, I tell you.  Free,
+most of all from shackles of empty ideas.  What I wanted I would take."
+
+She looked at him helplessly, his dominant vigor for the moment seeming
+a thing not to be restricted or tamed.
+
+"What you have done," she told him gently, "is to find argument to
+bolster up impulse.  That is generally very easy to do, isn't it?  If
+one wants a thing, it is not hard convincing himself that it is right
+that he should have it."
+
+"At least I have decided sanely what I wanted, there is no call for
+hospitals."
+
+"You sustained a fracture of the skull.  That fracture had improper
+treatment.  It is a wonder you did not die.  The wound healed and there
+remains a pressure of a bit of bone upon the brain.  Until that
+pressure is removed by an operation you are doomed to be a criminal.  A
+kleptomaniac," she said steadily, "if not much worse."
+
+"I believe that you mean what you say.  You are just mistaken, that is
+all.  I'd know if there were anything physically wrong."
+
+She came closer, laid her hand upon his arm, and lifted her eyes
+pleadingly to his.
+
+"I have had the best of medical training," she said slowly.  "I have
+specialized in brain disorders, interested in that branch of my work
+until I decided to bring Elmer out here.  I know what I am saying.
+Will you at least promise to do as I ask?  Have a thorough examination
+by a specialist?  And have the operation if he advises it?"
+
+"Such an operation is a serious matter?"
+
+"Yes.  It must be.  But think . . ."
+
+"A man might die under the hands of the surgeon?"
+
+"Yes.  There is always the danger, there is always the chance of death
+resulting from any but the most minor of operations.  But you are not
+the man to be afraid, Rod Norton.  I know that."
+
+"You say that you have specialized In this sort of thing."  He was
+probing for her thoughts with keen, narrowed eyes.  "Would you be
+willing to perform that operation for me?"
+
+She shrank back suddenly, her hand dropping from his arm.
+
+"No," she cried.  "No, no."
+
+He smiled triumphantly.
+
+"Then we'll let it go for a while.  If you wouldn't care to do it,
+afraid that I might die under your knife, I guess I don't want it done
+at all.  I am quite content with things as they are.  I see the way to
+gain the ends I desire; I am gaining them; if there is a brain
+pressure, well, I'm quite ready to thank God and Moraga for it!  Which
+you may take as absolutely final, Dr. Page!"
+
+She was beaten then and she knew it.  She went back to her chair in a
+sort of bewildered despair, her hands dropping idly to her lap.
+
+"It would be just as well," he said presently, "if I left before any
+one came in.  Before I go, do you mind telling me what you mean to do?
+Shall you denounce me?  Are you going to spread your suspicions abroad?"
+
+"What do you leave me to do?  Have I the right to sit still and say
+nothing?  You would go on as you have begun; you would commit fresh
+crimes.  In spite of your 'two essentials' you would be led to kill a
+man sooner or later.  Or you yourself would be killed.  Have I the
+right to allow all of that to continue?"
+
+"Then you have decided to accuse me?"
+
+"It is so hard to decide anything.  You make it so hard; can't you see
+that you do? . . .  But, after all, my part is clear; if you will
+consent to an examination and an operation I will say nothing of what
+has happened.  If you won't do that . . . you will drive me to tell
+what I know."
+
+"Our trails divide to-night, then?  I had hoped for better than that,
+Virginia."
+
+Though her cheeks flushed, she held her eyes steadily upon his.
+
+"I, too, had hoped for better than that," she confessed, finding this
+no time for faltering.  "I should continue to hope if you would just do
+your part."
+
+He came a swift step toward her.  Then he stopped suddenly, his hands
+falling to his sides.  But the light in his eyes did not diminish.
+
+"Denounce me to-morrow, if you wish," he said slowly, indifferently it
+seemed to her.  "Accept my promise that I will attempt no theft of more
+gold to-night; give me this one last chance to talk with you.  Before
+some one comes, come out with me.  You are not afraid of me; you admit
+that I am sane.  Then let us ride together.  And let me talk with you
+freely.  Will you, Virginia?  Will you do that one favor for me?"
+
+The high desire was upon her to accede to his request; her calmer
+judgment forbade it.  But to-night was to-night; to-morrow would be
+to-morrow.  And, after all, in her talk with him, she might save the
+man to himself and to his truer manhood.
+
+But even that hope was less than her desire when she answered him.
+
+"Have my horse saddled," she said.  "I'll let Struve think I have to
+make a call at Las Estrellas.  I'll be out in five minutes."
+
+He thanked her with his eyes, opened the hall door, and went out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+DEADLOCK
+
+Virginia, having changed swiftly to her riding-togs, took up her little
+black emergency kit, which would lend an air of business urgency to her
+nocturnal ride with Norton, and stepped out into the hall.
+
+"There's a call for you from Las Estrellas," said Struve, appearing
+from the front, whence his voice had come to her mingled with the
+excited tones of a Mexican.  "Tony Garcia has been hurt; pretty badly,
+I expect.  His brother says that Tony got his hand caught in some kind
+of machinery he was fooling with late this afternoon and crushed so
+that it's all but torn off."
+
+Into the light cast by the hotel porch-lamp Norton, leading Persis,
+rode around the corner of the building.
+
+"I was just going out," said Virginia.  "But I'll go on this case
+first.  Mr. Norton is riding with me.  Please ask him to wait while I
+get my other bag."
+
+In her room again, the lamp lighted on her table, she stood a moment
+frowning thoughtfully into vacancy.  Then with a quick shake of the
+head she snatched up the two other bags which might be needed in
+treating Tony's hurt and again hastened out.  Norton bending from his
+saddle took them from her.  As Struve relinquished into her gantletted
+hands the reins of Persis's bridle she swung lightly up to the mare's
+back.
+
+"The poor fellow must be suffering all kinds of torture," she said as
+Norton reined in with her.  "Let's hurry."
+
+He offered no answer as they clattered out of San Juan and turned out
+across the level lands toward Las Estrellas.  So, as upon another night
+when speeding upon a similar errand, they rode for a long time in
+silence.  Again they two alone were pushing out into the dark and the
+vast silence that was broken only by the soft thudding of their own
+horses' hoofs and the creak of saddle leather and jingle of spur and
+bit chains.
+
+"You wanted to talk with me?" suggested the girl after fifteen minutes
+of wordless restraint between them.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "But not now.  That is, if you will give me a
+further chance after you have done what you can for poor old Tony.  You
+will hardly need to stay at Las Estrellas all night, I imagine.  When
+we leave you can listen to me.  Do you mind?"
+
+"No," she said slowly.  "I don't mind.  I'd rather it was then.  You
+and I have a good bit to think about before we do any talking.  Haven't
+we?"
+
+They fell silent again.  The soft beauty of the night over the southern
+desert lands . . . and there is no other earthly beauty like it . . .
+touched the girl's soul now as it had never done before; perhaps,
+similarly, it disturbed shadows in the man's.  She was distressed by
+the position in which she found herself, and the night's infinite quiet
+and utter peace was grateful to her.  As she left the hotel her
+thoughts were in chaos; she was caught in a fearsome labyrinth whence
+there appeared no escape.  Now, though no way out suggested itself,
+still the stars were shining.
+
+At last the twinkling lights of Las Estrellas, seeming at first fallen
+stars caught in the mesquite branches, swam into view.  Plainly Tony's
+accident had stimulated much local interest; among the few straggling
+houses men came and went, while a knot of women, children, and
+countless mongrel dogs had congregated just outside of the hut where
+the injured man lay.  A brush fire in the street crackled right
+merrily, its sparks dancing skyward.
+
+"You promise me," said Norton as they drew their horses down to a trot,
+"not to say anything until we can have had time to talk?"
+
+"I promise," she said wearily.
+
+She entered the sufferer's room first, Norton delaying to tie the
+horses and lift down the instrument cases from the saddle-strings.  She
+stopped abruptly just beyond the threshold; the smell of chloroform was
+heavy upon the air, Tony lay whitefaced upon a table, Caleb Patten with
+coat off and sleeves rolled up was bending over him.
+
+"Oh, señorita!" cried a woman, hurrying forward, her hands twisting
+nervously in her apron.  And a torrential outpouring in Spanish greeted
+the mystified Virginia.
+
+"I thought that I was wanted here," she said, looking about her at the
+four or five grave faces.  "Tony's brother came for me."
+
+One of the men shambled forward to explain.  "Tony want you," he said
+quickly.  "Tony ver' bad hurt.  Dr. Patten come in Las Estrellas by
+accident, he say got to cut off the arm, can't wait too long or Tony
+die.  He just beginnin' now."
+
+The woman, who, it appeared was Tony's wife and the mother of two of
+the ragged children out by the fire, joined her voice eagerly to the
+man's.  He translated.
+
+"Eloisa say she thank God you come; Tony want you, she want you.
+Patten charge one hundred dollar an'. . . ."  He shrugged eloquently.
+"She say you do for Tony; you do better than Patten."
+
+Virginia's eyes flashed upon Patten.  He came a step toward her, his
+attitude half belligerent.
+
+"The man has to be operated upon immediately," he said sharply.  "He
+was hurt in the afternoon out on the end of the ranch; has been all day
+getting in; fainted half a dozen times, I guess.  The arm has to come
+off at the elbow."
+
+"Thank you," returned Virginia quietly, going to the table.  "I'll take
+the case now, Dr. Patten."
+
+"You?" Patten laughed, his eyes jeering.  "You operate?  Do you think
+that they want you to cut a skein of silk with a pair of scissors?  Cut
+off a man's arm . . . how far would you go before you fainted?"
+
+"That'll be about all, Patten," came Norton's voice sternly from the
+door.  "This is Dr. Page's case.  Clear out."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Norton," said Virginia quickly.  She was already making
+an examination of the blood covered arm and hand, and did not look
+around.  "And please clear the room, will you?  Let Tony's wife stay,
+that is all.  Eloisa."
+
+The woman came forward, her eyes wide and frightened.  Virginia smiled
+at her reassuringly.
+
+"_No muy malo_," she said in the few Spanish words which she could
+summon for the occasion from those she had picked up from the desert
+people.  "_Muy bueno manana_.  And now get me some warm water . . .
+_agua caliente_.  Mr. Norton, if you will open my instrument
+case . . . no; the other one.  And then stand by to help with the
+anaesthetic if Patten hasn't already given him enough to keep him
+asleep all night!"
+
+She gave her directions concisely and was obeyed.  Norton put the last
+of the undesired onlookers out of the door, closed it after them, found
+another lamp and some candles, did all that he could think of to help
+and all that was asked of him.  Eloisa, having brought the water,
+withdrew to a corner and kept her fascinated eyes upon Virginia's face
+and stubbornly away from her husband's.
+
+Virginia, when she had completed a very thorough examination, turned
+toward Norton, her eyes blazing.
+
+"Patten has no more right to an M.D. after his name than you have," she
+cried angrily.  "Not so much, for he hasn't even any brains!  Cut the
+man's arm off!  Why, there is only a simple fracture above the wrist
+which won't cause a bit of trouble.  The hand is another matter; but
+even it isn't half as badly mangled as it looks. . . .  The second and
+third fingers are terribly crushed; they've got to come off.  We might
+as well do it now, while he is already under the chloroform. . . .
+Tell Eloisa just how matters stand and then send her out."
+
+Eloisa, already prepared for the greater operation, gasped her
+gratitude for the lesser and allowed herself to be gently thrust from
+the room.  Then Norton came back to the table, his eyes wonderingly
+upon Virginia.  He knew that she was capable; he had read that fact the
+first day when he had seen her hands.  But it struck him as rather
+unusual that a girl, any girl no matter what her training, should take
+hold as she was doing.
+
+And as she selected her instruments, laid them out upon a bit of
+sterilized gauze upon a chair, cleansed her hands and prepared to
+operate he began to feel a sense of utter confidence in her.  Rapidly
+his own anger rose at the thought of the crime Patten would have
+perpetrated.
+
+
+Tony Garcia, when in due time his consciousness came back to him
+bringing the attendant dizzy nausea in its wake, looked down at his
+side curiously, wondering how it would be to go without an arm.  And
+when his Eloisa told him. . . .
+
+"We are going to sell our cow and the goats to-morrow!" vowed Tony
+faintly.  "And give her all the money!"
+
+"_Si, si_, Tony," wept the wife.
+
+Whereupon the small children, who were teaching the goats to pull a
+wagon, set up a wail of grief and rebellion.
+
+
+It struck both Virginia and Norton as a shade odd that Patten should be
+still in Las Estrellas when they rode out of it long after midnight.
+They saw him standing in the doorway of the one still lighted building
+of the village as they galloped past.  It was the Three Star saloon.
+Patten's horse was tied in front of it.  Since Patten neither drank nor
+played at dice or cards here might have been matter to ponder on.  But
+in neither mind was there place now for any interest other than that
+which again held them silent and constrained.
+
+Las Estrellas lost behind them, they drew their horses down into a
+rocking trot, then to a slow walk.  Virginia rode with her head up, her
+eyes upon the field of stars.  Her face, as Norton kept close to her
+side, looked very white in the starlight.  He would have given much to
+have seen her eyes when a little later he began to talk.  And she was
+conscious of a kindred wish.
+
+"Look yonder," she said.  "The late moon is coming up.  There will be a
+little more light then and. . . .  And I want to look at you, Rod
+Norton, while we thresh it out."
+
+The thin curved sliver of silver thrusting up over the edge of the
+world in the east, ghostly and pale, added little to the throbbing
+gleam of the stars; but the waiting for it had put Las Estrellas a mile
+behind them, had set them alone together out in the heart of the
+silences, had given them that last excuse to be had to set back an evil
+moment.  Virginia, with a sigh, brought her eyes down from the glitter
+of the wide heavens and sought Norton's.
+
+"I am afraid," she said listlessly, "that there is no way out for us,
+Rod Norton."
+
+"There is a way!" he began quickly
+
+"There is no way unless you do what I say.  If you would only give me
+your word to take the stage to-morrow, to go to a competent surgeon, to
+submit to the operation.  If you would only give me your word. . . ."
+
+"I give you my word," he said sharply, "that that is just the thing
+which I will never do.  Virginia, breathe deep, fill your lungs with
+the wonder of the night; realize what it means to live; think what it
+means to die!  You say that I am not afraid of death; well, maybe not
+if it comes in a guise I have grown up to be familiar with.  But to lie
+as I saw Tony Garcia lying just now, powerless, unconscious, without
+will or knowledge of what was coming to me, and to let a man cut into
+me . . .  I'd rather die, I think, standing upon my two feet and
+fighting it out with a gun!  You would go on and tell me that the
+chances would be highly in favor of my recovery; and yet you would
+admit that the danger would be grave."
+
+"Then you are afraid, after all?  That is it?  That holds you back?"
+She found it hard to believe that he was telling her his true emotion.
+
+"I am merely measuring the chances," he said steadily.  "I am satisfied
+with life as I find it; I do not believe that there is anything wrong
+with me; I see at least the possibility of death and nothing to be
+gained by submitting to an operation."
+
+"Then," she said again wearily, "there is no way out."
+
+"But there is!  My way, not the one you have thought of.  You have
+stumbled upon a thing which you must forget; that is all.  Give me the
+free swing to finish Jim Galloway, to complete certain other
+undertakings.  Promise me that you will do this; in return I will
+promise you not to . . . ."
+
+And here he hesitated.
+
+"Not to commit another theft?"  She set the matter squarely before him.
+"Can you promise that, Rod Norton?  Could you keep the promise were it
+once made?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"No!  You could not.  You don't understand or you won't understand.
+You would obey the impulse which would come just as certainly as the
+sun will rise and set again.  So I can neither accept your
+promise . . . nor give you mine."
+
+"You will tell what you have guessed?"
+
+"Rather what I know!  Even if you were my own brother. . . ."
+
+"Or your lover?" he demanded, a challenge in his voice.
+
+"Or my lover.  For his sake if not for the sake of others."
+
+For a little while he made no answer.  Again there was absolute silence
+between him, a troubled silence filled with pain.  Then suddenly he
+leaned close to her, threw out his hand for Persis's rein, jerked both
+horses back to a fretful standstill.
+
+"Can't you see what you force me to do?" he demanded half angrily.  "Do
+you picture what your denunciation would do for me?  Do you think that
+I can let you make it?"
+
+His face was so near hers that she could see it clearly in the pallid
+light.  He could see hers and that it was lifted fearlessly.
+
+"How will you stop me?" she asked quietly.
+
+"I will finish Jim Galloway out of hand," he told her savagely.  "It
+will no longer be the representative of the law against the lawbreaker;
+it will just be Norton and Galloway, both men!  I will accomplish the
+one other matter I have planned.  Both will require not over three or
+four days.  During that time . . .  I tell you, Virginia, I have grown
+into a free man, a man who does what he wants to do, who takes what he
+wants to take, who is not bound by flimsy shackles of other men's
+codes.  During those three or four days I shall see that you do no
+talking!"
+
+Once more, her voice quickened, she asked:
+
+"How will you stop me?"
+
+"We have come to a deadlock; argument does no good.  Either I must
+yield to you or you to me.  There is too much at stake to allow of a
+man being squeamish.  I don't care much for the job, but by high Heaven
+I am of no mind to watch life run by through the bars of a
+penitentiary.  After all action becomes simplified when a crisis comes;
+doesn't it?  There is just one answer, just one way out.  You will come
+with me, now.  I will put you where you will have no opportunity to do
+any talking for the few days in which I shall finish what I have to
+do."  His hand on Persis's rein drew the two horses still closer
+together.  "Give me your promise, Virginia; or come with me!"
+
+Her quick spurt of anger rose, flared, and dwindled away like a little
+flame extinguished by a splash of rain; the tears were stinging her
+eyes almost before the last word.  For she felt that here was no
+Roderick Norton speaking, but rather a bit of bone pressing upon the
+delicate machinery which is a man's brain.
+
+"Where would you take me?" she asked faintly.
+
+"To the King's Palace," he answered bitterly.  "Where we had one
+perfect, happy day, Virginia; where, I had hoped, we would have other
+perfect days.  Oh, girl, can't you see," and his voice went thrilling
+through her, "can't you see what I have hoped, what I have
+dreamed. . . ."
+
+"You might still hope," she told him steadily.  "You might still dream."
+
+"I will!"  His eyes shone at her, his erect form outlined against the
+black of the earth and the gleam of the stars was eloquent of mastery.
+"There will come a time when you will see life as I see it. . . .  And
+now, for the last time, will you give me your promise, Virginia?  It is
+forced upon you; you will be blameless in giving it.  Will you do so?"
+
+She only shook her head, her lips trembling, not trusting her
+voice. . . .  And then, in a sort of daze, she knew that they had
+turned off to the left, that no longer was San Juan ahead of them, that
+they were riding toward the gloomy bulwark of the mountains.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+FLUFF AND BLACK BILL
+
+Fluff and Black Bill were quarrelling.
+
+Elmer, while Norton and Virginia were on their way from San Juan to Las
+Estrellas, had dropped in at the hotel to see his sister.  He found
+upon her office table the card which she always left for him; this
+merely informed him that she was "out on a case at Las Estrellas."
+Elmer had come for her purposing to suggest a call upon the Engles.
+For not yet had he summoned the hardihood to present himself alone at
+Florrie's home.  Now, disgruntled, seeing plainly that Virginia would
+never get back in time, he went out on the veranda and took solace from
+the pipe to which he had grown fairly accustomed.  To him came the girl
+of whom he was thinking.  "Hello, Fluff," he said from the shadows.
+
+"Hello, Black Bill," she greeted him.  "Where's Virgie?"
+
+"Gone," he informed her, waving his pipe.  "On a case to Las Estrellas.
+I'm waiting for her.  Did you want to see her?"
+
+Florrie, coming down the veranda to him, giggled.
+
+"No," she told him flippantly.  "I'm looking for the Emperor of China.
+I never was so lonesome. . . ."
+
+"So'm I," said Elmer.  He pushed a chair forward with his foot.  "Sit
+down and we'll wait for her.  And I'll go in and bring out a couple of
+bottles of ginger ale or something."
+
+"Will she be back real soon?" asked Florrie pretending to hesitate.
+
+"Sure," he assured her positively.
+
+"All right then." Florrie with a great rustling of skirts sat down.
+"But you must be nice to me, Black Bill."
+
+"It's always you who starts it," he muttered at her.  "I'd be friends
+if you would.  What's the good of spatting like two kids, anyway?"
+
+"We're really not kids any longer, are we?" she agreed demurely.  "I
+feel terribly grown up sometimes, don't you?"
+
+From which point they got along swimmingly for perhaps five minutes
+longer than it had ever been possible for them to talk together without
+"starting something."  Elmer, very emphatic in his own mind concerning
+his matured status, yearned for her to understand it as he did.  With
+such purpose clearly before him . . . and before her, too, for that
+matter, since Miss Florrie had a keen little comprehension of her
+own . . . he spoke largely of himself and his blossoming plans.  He was
+a vaquero, to begin with; he had ridden fifty miles yesterday on range
+business; he was making money; he was putting part of that money away
+in Mr. Engle's bank.  There was a little ranch on the rim of Engle's
+big holding which belonged to an old half-breed; Elmer meant to acquire
+it himself one of these days.  And before so very long, too.  Mr. Engle
+had been approached and was looking into it, might be persuaded to
+advance the couple of thousand dollars for the property, taking as
+security a mortgage until Elmer could have squared for it.  Then Black
+Bill would begin stocking his place, a cow now, a horse, another cow,
+and so on.
+
+He had launched himself valiantly into his tale.  But at a certain
+point he began to swallow and catch at his words and smoke fast between
+sentences.  He had located a dandy spot for a house . . . the jolliest
+little spring of cold water you ever saw . . . a knoll with big trees
+upon it.
+
+"We'll make up a party with Virginia and Norton some day and ride out
+there," he said abruptly.  "I . . . I'd like to have you see it, Fluff."
+
+She was tremulously delighted.  She sensed the nearest thing to an
+out-and-out proposal which had ever sung in her ears.  She leaned
+forward eagerly, her hands clasped to keep them from trembling.  She
+was sixteen, he eighteen . . . and she had his assurance of a moment
+ago that they were no longer just "kids."  And then and there their
+so-long-delayed quarrel began.  Just at the wrong time, after the
+time-honored fashion of quarrels.  He was ready to twine the vine about
+the veranda posts of the house on the knoll where the spring and the
+big trees were, she was ready to plant the fig-tree.  Then she had
+glimpsed something just too funny for anything in the idea of Elmer
+raising pigs . . . for he had gone on to that, sagely anticipating a
+high market another season . . . and she laughed at him and all
+unintentionally wounded his feelings.  In a flash he was Black Bill
+again and on his mettle, ready with the quick retort stung from him;
+and she, parrying his thrust, was at once Fluff, the mercuric.  The
+spat was on . . . they would call it a spat to-morrow if to-morrow were
+kind to them . . . and Elmer's ranch and house and cow, horse and pigs
+were laughed to scorn.
+
+Florrie departed leaving her cruellest laughter to ring in his ears.
+This might have been a repetition of any one of a dozen episodes
+familiar to them both, but never, perhaps, had Elmer's ears burned so
+or Florrie's heart so disturbed her with its beating.  For, she thought
+regretfully as she hurried out into the street, they had been getting
+along so nicely. . . .
+
+She had no business out alone at this time of night and she knew it.
+So she hurried on, anxious to get home before her father, who was
+returning late from a visit to one of his ranches.  Abreast of the Casa
+Blanca she slowed up, looking in curiously.  Then, as again she was
+hastening on, she heard Jim Galloway's deep voice in a quiet "Good
+evening, Miss Florence."
+
+"Good evening!" gasped Florrie aloud.  And "Oh!" said Florrie under her
+breath.  For Galloway's figure had separated itself from the shadows at
+the side of his open door and had come out into the street, while
+Galloway was saying in a matter-of-fact way: "I'll see you home."
+
+She wanted to run and could not.  She hung a moment balancing upon a
+high heel in indecision.  Galloway stepped forward swiftly, coming to
+her side.  "Oh, dear," the inner Florrie was saying.  A glance over her
+shoulder showed her Black Bill standing out in front of Struve's hotel.
+Well, there were compensations.
+
+She started to hurry on, and had Jim Galloway been less sure of
+himself, troubled with the diffidence of youth as was Elmer, he must
+have either given over his purpose or else fairly run to keep up with
+her.  But being Jim Galloway, he laid a gentle but none the less
+restraining hand upon her arm.
+
+"Please," he said quietly.  "I want to talk with you.  May I?"
+
+Florrie's arm burned where he had touched her.  She was all in a
+flutter, half frightened and the other half flattered.  A shade more
+leisurely they walked on toward the cottonwoods.  Here, in the shadows,
+Galloway stopped and Florrie, although beginning to tremble, stopped
+with him.
+
+"Men have given me a black name here," he was saying as he faced her.
+"They've made me somewhat worse than I am.  I feel that I have few
+friends, certainly very few of my own class.  I like to think of you as
+a friend.  May I?"
+
+It was distinctly pleasant to have a big man like Galloway, a man whom
+for good or for bad the whole State knew, pleading with her.  It gave a
+new sort of assurance to her theory that she was "grown up"; it added
+to her importance in her own eyes.
+
+"Why, yes," said Florrie.
+
+"I am going away," he continued gravely.  "For just how long I don't
+know.  A week, perhaps a month, maybe longer.  It is a business matter
+of considerable importance, Florence.  Nor is it entirely without
+danger.  It will take me down below the border, and an American in
+Mexico right now takes his life entirely into his own hands.  You know
+that, don't you?"
+
+"Then why do you go?"
+
+Galloway smiled down at her.
+
+"If I held back every time a danger-signal was thrown out," he said
+lightly, "I wouldn't travel very far.  Oh, I'll come back all right; a
+man may go through fire itself and return if he has the incentive which
+I have."  His tone altered subtly.  Florrie started.
+
+"But before I go," went on Galloway, "I am going to tell you something
+which I think you know already.  You do, don't you, Florence?"
+
+She would not have been Florrie at all, but some very different,
+unromantic, and unimaginative creature, had she failed of
+comprehension.  Jim Galloway was actually making love to her!
+
+"What do you mean, Mr. Galloway?" she managed to stammer.
+
+"I mean that what I am telling you is for your ears alone.  I am
+placing a confidence in you, the greatest confidence a man can place in
+a girl.  Or in a woman, Florence.  I am trusting that what I say will
+remain just between you and me for the present. . . .  When I come back
+I will be no longer just Jim Galloway of the Casa Blanca, but Galloway
+of one of the biggest grants in Mexico, with mile after mile of fertile
+lands, with a small army of servants, vaqueros, and retainers, a sort
+of ruler of my own State!  It sounds like a fairy-tale, Florence, but
+it is the sober truth made possible by conditions below the border.  My
+estates will run down to the blue water of the Gulf; I shall have my
+own fleet of ocean-going yachts; there is a port upon my own land.
+There will be a home overlooking the sea like a king's palace.  Will
+you think of all that while I am gone?  Will you think of me a little,
+too?  Will you remember that my little kingdom is crying out for its
+queen? . . .  No; I am not asking you to answer me now.  I am just
+asking that you hold this as our secret until I come back.  Until I
+come back for you! . . .  I shall stand here until you reach your
+home," he broke off suddenly.  "Good night, my dear."
+
+"Good night," said Florence faintly, a little dazed by all that he had
+said to her.  Then, running through the shadows to her home, she was
+thinking of the boy who had wished to propose to her and of the man who
+had done so; of Elmer's little home upon the knoll surrounded by a cow,
+a horse, and some pigs . . . and of a big house like a palace looking
+out to sea across the swaying masts of white-sailed, sea-going yachts!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+A CRISIS
+
+Like Norton, Virginia found life simplifying itself in a crisis.  Upon
+three hundred and sixty days or more of the average year each
+individual has before him scores of avenues open to his thoughts or to
+his act; he may turn wheresoever he will.  But in the supreme moments
+of his life, with brief time for hesitation granted him, he may be
+forced to do one of two things: he must leap back or plunge forward to
+escape the destiny rushing down upon him like a speeding engine
+threatening him who has come to stand upon the crossing.  Now Virginia
+saw clearly that she must submit to Norton's mastery and remain silent
+in the King's Palace or she must seek to escape and tell what she knew
+or . . .  Was there a remaining alternative?  If so it must present
+itself as clearly as the others.  Action was stripped down to
+essentials, bared to its component elements.  True vision must
+necessarily result, since no side issues cluttered the view.
+
+She sat upon a saddle-blanket upon the rock floor of the main chamber
+of the series of ancient dwelling-rooms, staring at the fire which
+Norton had builded against a wall where it might not be seen from
+without.  The horses were in the meadow down by the stream; she and
+Norton had tethered them among the trees where they were fairly free
+from the chance of being seen.  Norton was coming up, mounting the
+deep-worn steps in the cliff side.  He had gone for water; he had not
+been out of sight nor away five minutes.  And yet when she looked up to
+see him coming through the irregular doorway she had decided.
+
+She saw in him both the man and the gentleman.  Her anger had died down
+long ago, smothered in the ashes of her distress; now she summoned to
+the fore all that she might in extenuation of what he did.  She did not
+blame him for the crimes which she knew he had committed because she
+was so confident that the chief crime of all had been the act resulting
+from Caleb Patten's abysmal ignorance.  Nor now could she blame Norton
+that, embarked upon this flood of his life, he saw himself forced to
+make her his prisoner for a few hours.  It was a man's birthright to
+protect himself, to guard his freedom.  And her heart gave him high
+praise that toward her he acted with all deference, that with things as
+they were, while he was man enough to hold her here, he was too much
+the gentleman to make love to her.  Would she have resisted, would she
+have opposed calm argument against a hot avowal?  She did not know.
+
+"Virginia," he said gravely as he slumped down upon the far side of the
+fire, "I feel the brute.  But . . ."
+
+Yes, she had decided, fully decided, whether if be for better or for
+worse.  Now she surprised him with one of her quick, bright, friendly
+smiles while she interrupted:
+
+"Let us make the best of a bad situation," she said swiftly.  "I am not
+unhappy right now; I have no wish to run half-way to meet any
+unhappiness which may be coming our way.  You are not the brute toward
+me; what you do, I do not so much as censure you for.  I am not going
+to quarrel with you; were I in your boots I imagine I'd do just exactly
+as you are doing.  I hope I'd be as nice about it, too.  And now,
+before we drop the subject for good and all, let me say this: no matter
+what I do, should it even be the betraying you into the hands of your
+enemies, to put it quite tragically, I want you to know that I wish you
+well and that is why I do it.  Can you understand me?"
+
+"Yes," he said slowly.  "It's sweet of you, Virginia.  If you got my
+gun and shot my head off, I don't know who should blame you.  I
+shouldn't!" he concluded with a forced attempt to match her smile.
+
+"Then we understand each other?  As long as each does the best he can
+see his way to do, the other finds no fault?"  And when he nodded she
+rose quickly and came to him, putting out her hand as he rose.  "Rod
+Norton," she said simply, and her eyes shone steady and clear into his,
+"I wish you the best there is.  I think we should both pray a little to
+God to help us to-night. . . .  And now, if you will run up to your
+Treasure Chamber and bring down the coffee, I'll promise to be here
+when you get back.  And to make you a good hot drink; I feel the need
+of it and so do you."
+
+He went out without an answer, his face grave and troubled again.  As
+her eyes followed him they were no longer gay but wistful, and then
+filled with a sadness which she had not shown to him, and then suddenly
+wet.  But before he had gone half a dozen steps from the door she
+dashed a hasty hand across her eyes and went swiftly to the smallest of
+the three black leather cases he had brought up here after her.
+
+"This is the one way out, Rod Norton!" she whispered.  "The one way out
+if God is with us."
+
+Her quick fingers sought and found the tiny phial with its small white
+tablets . . . labelled _Hyoscine_ . . . and secreted it in her bosom.
+She was laying fresh twigs upon the blaze when he came back with the
+coffee-pot, can of coffee, and a tin cup.  She greeted him with another
+quick smile.  He saw that her cheeks were flushed rosily, that there
+was subdued excitement in her eyes.  And yet matters just as they were
+would sufficiently explain these phenomena without causing him to quest
+farther.  He thought merely that he had never seen her so delightfully
+pretty.
+
+"Virginia Page," he told her as his own eyes grew bright with the new
+light leaping up into them, "some day . . ."
+
+"Sh!" she commanded, her color deepened.  "Let us wait until that day
+comes.  Now you just obey orders; lie there and smoke while I make the
+coffee."
+
+He wanted to wait on her, but when she insisted he withdrew to the wall
+a few feet away, sat down, filled his pipe, and watched her.  And while
+he filled his eyes with her he marvelled afresh.  For it seemed to him
+that her mood was one of unqualified happiness.  She did all of the
+talking, her words came in a ceaseless bright flow, she laughed readily
+and often, her eyes were dancing, the warm color stood high in her
+cheeks.  That her heart was beating like mad, that the intoxication of
+an intent he could not read had swept into her brain, that she was
+vastly more in the mood to weep than to smile . . . all of this lay
+hidden to him behind her woman's wit.  For, having decided, there would
+be no going back.
+
+With the coffee boiling in the old black and spoutless pot from
+Norton's cache in the Treasure Chamber, she poured what was left of the
+ground coffee from its tin to the flat surface of a bit of stone.  This
+tin was to serve Norton as his cup.
+
+"It's to be our night-cap," she laughed at him as she put the
+improvised cup by the other.  "I refuse to sit up any later; a
+saddle-blanket for bunk, and then to sleep.  That is my room yonder,
+isn't it?"  She nodded toward the black entrance to the second of the
+chambers of the King's Palace.  "And you will sleep here?  Well, while
+the coffee cools, I'm going to make my bed."  She carried her blanket
+on past him, was gone into the yawning darkness, was back in a moment.
+
+"My bed's ready," she told him gayly.  "This kind of housekeeping just
+suits me!  Now for the coffee. . . .  Rod Norton, will you do as you
+are told or not?  You are to sit still and let me wait on you; who's
+hostess here, I'd like to know?"
+
+While out of his sight she had slipped one of the hyoscine tablets into
+her palm; now, as she poured the ink-black beverage, she let it drop
+into the tin can which she presented to Norton.
+
+"Don't say it doesn't taste right!" she admonished him in a voice in
+which at last he detected the nervous note.
+
+He stood up, holding his coffee-can in his hand, meeting her strained
+levity with a deep gravity.
+
+"Virginia," he began.
+
+"It's too late to cut in on my monologue!" she cried gayly.  "Pledge me
+in the drink I have made for you, Mr. Norton!  Just say: 'Virginia,
+here's looking at you!'  Or: 'I wish you well in all that you
+undertake.'  Or: 'For all that you have said to me, for whatever you
+may say or do in the future, I forgive you!'  That's all."
+
+"Virginia," he said gently, "I love you, my dear."
+
+She laughed nervously.
+
+"That's the nice way to say everything all at once!"  He saw that her
+hand shook, that a little of her coffee spilled, and that again she
+grew steady.  "Now our night-cap and good night!"
+
+She drank hurriedly.  Thereafter she yawned and made her little
+pretense of increased drowsiness.
+
+"It's been such a long day," she said.  "You'll forgive me if I tumble
+right straight into sleepy-land?"
+
+Again they said good night and she left him, going down among the eerie
+dancing shadows to her own quarter, drawing his moody eyes after her.
+When she had gone, he threw down his own blanket across the main
+entrance of the King's Palace, filled his pipe again, and sat staring
+out into the night.
+
+The fire cast up its red flare spasmodically, licked at the last of the
+dead branches which, rolling apart, burned out upon the rock floor.
+The darkness once more blotted out all detail saving the few
+smouldering coals, the knobs of stone in the small flickering circles
+of light, the quiet form of the man silhouetted against the lesser dark
+of the night without.  Virginia, rigid and motionless at the spot to
+which she had stolen noiselessly, watched him breathlessly.
+
+For only a little he sat smoking.  Then, as though he experienced
+something of that weariness of which she had made pretense, he laid his
+pipe aside and stretched out upon his blanket, leaning upon an elbow.
+She heard him sigh, vaguely made out when he let his head slip down
+upon an arm, saw that he had grown still, and was lying stretched out
+across the main threshold.
+
+Now she must stand motionless while every fibre of her being demanded
+action; now she must curb impetuosity to the call of caution.  As the
+seconds passed, all but insupportable in their tedious slowness, she
+stood rigid and tense, waiting.  But soon she knew that the drug had
+had its will with him, that he was steeped in deep sleep, that no
+longer must she wait, that now at length she might act.
+
+Carrying her saddle-blanket she came to him and stood quietly looking
+down into his upturned face.  At last she could let the tears burst
+into her eyes unchecked, now she could suddenly go down on her knees
+beside him, for an instant laying her cheek lightly against his in the
+first caress.  Would it be the last?  He stirred a little and sighed
+again.  She drew back, still upon her knees again breathlessly rigid.
+But his stupor clung heavily to him, and she knew that it would hold
+him thus for hours.
+
+A score of burning questions clamoring in her mind she disposed of
+briefly, since time was of the essence.
+
+"If I let you have your way, Rod Norton," she whispered, "you will go
+on from crime to tragedy.  If I hand you over to the law, I will be
+betraying you for no end; for your type of man finds the way to break
+jail and so force his own hand to further violence.  There is the one
+way out. . . .  And God help me to succeed.  God forgive me if I fail!"
+
+She stole by him and stepped upon the outer ledge.  She was leaving him
+helpless . . . the thought presented itself that she would have another
+thing to answer for if one of the many men with such cause to hate him
+should come upon him thus.  Well, that was but one of the more remote
+chances she must take.  There was scant enough likelihood that any one
+should come here before she could race into Las Estrellas and back.
+
+Then it was that she saw Patten.  She did not know at first that it was
+Patten, but just that within a few feet of her upon the ledge which she
+must travel to the steps a man was standing, his body jerking back,
+pressed against the rocks as he saw her.  She drew back swiftly, her
+blood in riotous tumult.
+
+But now, above aught else, the one thought in her mind was that there
+was no time for loitering, that the dawn would come all too soon, that
+there must be no delay.  She stooped quickly and drew from its holster
+Norton's heavy revolver.  Her saddle-blanket over her left arm, the gun
+gripped in her right hand, she was once more upon the ledge, moving
+cautiously toward the figure seen a moment ago, gone now.
+
+That it was Patten she knew only when she had gone down the steps and
+had overtaken him there.  Retreating thus far, reassured when he had
+made out that it was the girl alone, he waited for her.  And as she
+demanded nervously, "Who is it?" it was Patten's disagreeable laugh
+which answered her.
+
+"So," he jeered at her, "this is the sort of thing you do when you are
+supposed to be out on a case all night!"
+
+Patten here!  Had God sent him . . . or the devil?  His insult she
+passed over.  She was not thinking of herself right now, of convention,
+of wagging tongues.  She was just seeking to understand how this latest
+incident might simplify or make more complex her problem.
+
+"I've had my suspicions all along," he laughed evilly.  "To-night I
+followed and made sure.  And now, my fine little white dove, what have
+you to say for yourself?"
+
+Might she use Patten?  She was but now on her way to Las Estrellas for
+aid.  She would operate herself, she would take that upon herself, with
+no more regard for ethics than for Patten's gossiping tongue.  She
+believed that she could do it successfully; at the least she must make
+the attempt, though Norton died under her hand.  The right?  She had
+the right!  The right because she loved him, because he loved her,
+because his whole future was at stake.  But she must have assistance so
+that she submit him to no needless danger, so that she give him every
+chance under such circumstances as these.  She would have brought a man
+from Las Estrellas, she would have let him think what pleased him, just
+saying that Norton had met with an accident, that an operation was
+necessary.  And now Patten was here.
+
+Could she use him?
+
+"You followed us?" she said, gaining time for her thoughts.
+
+"Yes; I followed you.  I saw you come here.  I watched while he
+unsaddled, how he came up to you.  What I could not see through the
+rock walls I could guess!  And now . . ."
+
+"Well, now?" she repeated after him, so that Patten must have marvelled
+at her lack of emotion.  "Now what?"
+
+"Now," he spat at her venomously, "I think I have found the fact to
+shut Roderick Norton's blabbing mouth for him!"
+
+"I don't understand . . ."
+
+"You don't?  You mean that he hasn't done any talking to you about me?"
+
+"Oh!"  And now suddenly she did understand.  "You mean how you are not
+Caleb Patten at all but Charles?  How you are no physician but liable
+to prosecution for illegal practising?"
+
+Could she use him or could she not?  That was what she was thinking,
+over and over.
+
+"Where is he?" demanded Patten a little suspiciously.  "What is he
+doing?  What are you doing out here alone?"
+
+"He is asleep," she told him.
+
+Patten laughed again.
+
+"Your little parties are growing commonplace then!"
+
+"Charles Patten," she cut in coolly, "I have stood enough of your
+insult.  Be still a moment and let me think."
+
+He stared at her but for a little; his own mind busy, was silent.
+Could she make use of this blind instrument which fate had thrust into
+her hand?  She began to believe that she could.
+
+"Charles Patten," she went on, a new vigor in her tone, "Mr. Norton
+knows enough concerning you to make you a deal of trouble.  Just how
+long a term in the State prison he can get for you I don't know.
+But . . ."
+
+"Haven't I found the way to shut his mouth!" he said sharply.
+
+"I think not.  Before your slanders could travel far we could have
+found Father Jose and have been married.  But let me finish.  You have
+practised here for upward of two years, haven't you?  You have made
+money, you have a ranch of your own.  That is one thing to keep in
+mind.  The other is that more than one of your patients have died.  I
+believe, Charles Patten, that it would be a simple matter to have the
+district attorney convict you of murder.  That's the second thing to
+remember."
+
+Patten shifted uneasily.  Then she knew that it had been God who had
+sent him.  When he sought to bluster, she cut him short.
+
+"In the morning, as soon as there is light enough," she said, wondering
+at her own calmness, "I am going to perform a capital operation upon
+Mr. Norton.  It will be without his knowledge and consent.  If he lives
+and you will give up your practice and retire to your ranch or what
+business pleases you, I will guarantee that he does not prosecute you
+for what has passed.  If he dies . . ."
+
+"If he dies"--he snatched the words from her--"it will be murder!"
+
+". . . you would be free from prosecution," she continued, quite as
+though he had made no interruption, "I rather imagine that I should
+die, too.  And, as you say, I would be liable for murder.  He is asleep
+now because I have drugged him.  I shall chloroform him before he
+wakes.  I should have no defense in the law-courts.  Yes, it would be
+murder."
+
+He drew a step back from her as though from one suddenly gone mad.
+
+"What are you operating for?" he demanded.
+
+"For your blunder," she said simply.  "And you are going to help me."
+
+"Am I?" he jeered.  "Not by a damned sight!  If you think that I am
+going to let myself in for that sort of thing . . ."
+
+Until now he had not seen the gun in her hand.  Her quick gesture
+showed it to him.
+
+"Charles Patten," she told him emphatically, "I am risking Mr. Norton's
+life; I am therefore risking my own.  Understand what that means.
+Understand just what you have got to win or lose by to-night's work.
+Consider that I pledge you my word not to implicate you in what you do;
+that if worse came to worse, you could claim and I would admit that you
+were forced at the point of a gun to do as I told you.  Oh, I can shoot
+straight!  And finally, I will shoot straight, as God watches me,
+rather than let you go now and stop what I have undertaken!  Think of
+it well, Charles Patten!"
+
+Patten, being as weak of mind as he was pudgy of hand, having besides
+that peculiar form of craft which is vouchsafed his type, furthermore
+more or less of a coward, saw matters quite as Virginia wished him.
+Together they awaited the coming of the dawn.  The girl, realizing to
+the uttermost what lay before her, forced herself to rest, lying still
+under the stars, schooling herself to the steady-nerved action which
+was to have its supreme test.
+
+Just before the dawn they had coffee and a bite to eat from Norton's
+little pack.  Close to the drugged man they builded a rude low table by
+dragging the squared blocks of fallen stone from their place by the
+wall.  Upon this Virginia placed the saddle-blankets, neatly folded.
+Already Patten was showing signs of nervousness.  Looking into her face
+he saw that it was white and drawn but very calm.  Patten was asking
+himself countless questions, many of them impossible of answer yet.
+She was closing her mind to everything but the one supreme matter.
+
+He helped her give the chloroform when she told him that there was
+sufficient light and that she was ready.  He brought water, placed
+instruments, stood by to do what she told him.  His nervousness had
+grown into fear; he started now and then, jerking about guiltily, as
+though he foresaw an interruption.
+
+Together they got Norton's inert form upon the folded blankets.
+Patten's hands shook a little; he asked for a sip of brandy from her
+flask.  She granted it, and while Patten drank she cut away the hair
+from the unconscious man's scalp.  Long ago her fingers had made their
+examination, were assured that her diagnosis was correct.  Her hands
+were as untrembling as the steel of her knife.  She made the first
+incision, drawing back the flap of skin and flesh, revealing the bone
+of the skull. . . .
+
+For forty-five minutes she worked, her hands swift, sure, capable,
+unerring.  It was done.  She was right.  The under-table of the skull
+had been fractured; there was the bone pressure upon the underlying
+area of brain-tissue.  She had removed the pressure and with it any
+true pathological cause of the theft impulse.
+
+She drew a bandage about the sleeping eyes.  She made Patten bring his
+own saddle-blanket; it was fixed across the entrance of the anteroom of
+the King's Palace, darkening it.  Then she went to the ledge just
+outside and stood there, staring with wide eyes across the little
+meadow with its flowers and birds and water, down the slope of the
+mountain, to the miles of desert.  She had now but to await the
+awakening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE BEGINNING OF THE END
+
+When Norton stirred and would have opened his eyes but for the bandage
+drawn over them, she was at his side.  She had been kneeling there for
+a long time, waiting.  Her hand was on his where it had crept softly
+from his wrist.
+
+"You must lie very still," she commanded gently.  "I am with you and
+everything is all right.  There was . . . an accident.  No, don't try
+to move the cloth; please, Roderick."  She pushed his hand back down to
+his side.  "We are in the King's Palace, just you and I, and everything
+is all right."
+
+He was feverish, and she soothed him; sick, and she mothered him and
+nursed him; troubled, uncertain, perplexed, and she comforted him.  At
+the first she went no further than saying that there had been an
+accident; that already she had sent to San Juan for all that was needed
+to make him comfortable; that Mr. Engle had been instructed to speed a
+man to the railroad for further necessities; that now for his own sake,
+for her sake, he must just lie very still . . . try not even to think.
+
+He was listless, seeming without volition, quite willing to surrender
+himself into her keeping.  What dazed thoughts were his upon this first
+awakening were lost, forgotten in the brief doze into which she
+succeeded in luring him.  When again he stirred and woke she was still
+at his side, kneeling upon the hard rock floor beside him. . . .  She
+had had Patten help her to lift him down from the table before she
+despatched Patten with the note for John Engle.  Again she pleaded with
+him to lie still and just trust to her.
+
+He was very still.  She knew that he was trying to piece together his
+fragmentary thoughts and impressions, seeking to bridge over from last
+night to to-day.  So she talked softly with him, soothing him alike
+with the tenderness of her voice and the pressure and gentle stroke of
+her hand upon his hand and arm.  He had had an accident but was going
+to be all right from now on.  But he must not be moved for a little.
+Therefore Engle would come soon, and perhaps Mrs. Engle with him.  And
+a wagon bringing a real bed and fresh clean sheets and all of those
+articles which she had listed.  It would not be very long now until
+Engle came.
+
+But at last when she paused his hand shut down upon hers and he asked
+quietly:
+
+"I didn't dream it all, did I, Virginia?  It is hard to know just what
+I did and what I dreamed I did.  But it seems more than a dream. . . .
+Was it I who robbed Kemble of the Quigley mines?"
+
+"Yes," she told him lightly, as though it were a matter of small
+moment.  "But you were not responsible for what you did."
+
+"And there were other robberies?  I even tried to steal from you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered again.
+
+"And you wanted to have me submit to an operation?  And I would not?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And then . . . then you . . . you did it?"
+
+So she explained, feeling that certainty would be less harmful to him
+now than a continual struggle to penetrate the curtain of semidarkness
+obscuring his memory.
+
+"I took it upon myself," she told him at the end.  "I took the chance
+that you might die; that it might be I who had killed you.  Perhaps I
+had no right to do it.  But I have succeeded; I have drawn you back
+from kleptomania to your own clear moral strength.  You will get well,
+Rod Norton; you will be an honest man.  But I took it upon myself to
+take the chances for you.  Now . . . do you think that you can forgive
+me?"
+
+He appeared to be pondering the matter.  When his reply came it was
+couched in the form of a question:
+
+"Would you have done it, Virginia . . . if you didn't love me a little
+as I love you?"
+
+And her answer comforted him.  He was sleeping when the Engles came.
+
+
+Later came the big wagon, one of Engle's men driving, Ignacio Chavez
+and two other Mexicans accompanying on horseback.  Virginia had
+forgotten nothing.  Quick hands did her bidding now, altering the
+anteroom of the King's Palace into a big airy bedroom.  There was a
+great rug upon the floor, a white-sheeted and counterpaned bed, fresh
+pajamas, table, chair, alcohol-stove, glasses and cups and
+water-pitchers.  There were cloths for fresh bandages, wide palm-leaf
+fans . . . there was even ice and the promise of further ice to come.
+The sun was shut out by heavy curtains across the main entrance and the
+broken-out holes in the easterly wall.
+
+"My dear," said Mrs. Engle, taking both of Virginia's hands into her
+own, "I don't know just what has happened and I don't care to know
+until you get good and ready to tell me about it.  But I can see by
+looking at you that you are at the end of your tether.  I'm going to
+take care of Roddy now while you sleep at least a couple of hours."
+
+She and Engle had asked themselves the question as soon as Virginia's
+note came to them: "What in the world were she and Norton doing on the
+mountainside at that time of night?"  But they had no intention of
+asking it of any one else.  Rather John Engle hastened to answer it for
+others.
+
+"_Muchachos_" he said to the men when he sent them back to San Juan,
+"there was an accident last night.  Señor Norton had a fall from his
+horse, striking his head.  My cousin, Miss Page, together with Señor
+Norton and Señor Patten, was taking a short cut this way to make a call
+at Pozo.  Señor Patten and Miss Page succeeded in getting Señor Norton
+here, where they had to operate upon him immediately.  He is doing well
+now, thanks to their prompt action; he will be well soon.  You may tell
+his friends."
+
+And then, seeing little that he could do here and much that he might
+accomplish elsewhere, John Engle rode on his spurs back to San Juan to
+lay down the law to Patten.
+
+
+Throughout the days and nights which followed, Virginia and Mrs. Engle
+nursed Norton back into a semblance of strength.  One of them was
+always at his side.  When at last the bandage might be removed from the
+blindfolded eyes Norton's questing glance found Virginia first of all.
+
+"Virginia," he said quietly, "thanks to you I can start in all over
+now."
+
+She understood.  So did Mrs. Engle.  For Norton had explained to both
+the banker and his wife, holding nothing back from them, telling them
+frankly of crimes committed, of his attempted abduction of the girl who
+in turn had "abducted him."  He had restitutions to make without the
+least unnecessary delay.  He must square himself and he thanked God
+that he could square himself, that his crimes had been bloodless, that
+he had but to return the stolen moneys.  And, to wipe his slate clean,
+he stood ready to pay to the full for what he had done, to offer his
+confession openly, to accept without a murmur whatever decree the court
+might award him.
+
+Again John Engle did his bit.  He went to the county-seat and saw the
+district attorney, an upright man, but one who saw clearly.  The lawyer
+laid his work aside and came immediately with Engle to the King's
+Palace.
+
+"Any court, having the full evidence," he said crisply, "would hold you
+blameless.  Give me the money you have taken; I shall see that it is
+returned and that no questions are asked.  And if you've got any
+idiotic compulsion about open confession . . .  Well, think of somebody
+besides yourself for a change.  Try thinking about the Wonder Girl a
+little, it will be good for you."
+
+For he never called her anything but that, the Wonder Girl.  When he
+had heard everything, he came to her after his straightforward fashion
+and gripped her hand until he hurt her.
+
+"I didn't know they made girls like you," he told her before she even
+knew who he was.
+
+It was he who, summoning all of his forensic eloquence, finally quieted
+Norton's disturbed mind.  Norton in his weakened condition was all for
+making a clean breast before the world, for acknowledging himself unfit
+for his office, for resigning.  But in the end when he was told curtly
+that he owed vastly more to the county than to his stupid conscience,
+that he had been chosen to get Jim Galloway, that that was his job,
+that he could do all the resigning he wanted to afterward, and that
+finally he was not to consider his own personal feelings until he had
+thought of Virginia's, Norton gave over his regrets and merely waxed
+impatient for the time when he could finish his work and go back to Las
+Flores rancho.  For it was understood that he would not go alone.
+
+"I'll free del Rio because I have to, not because I want to," said the
+lawyer at the end.  "Trusting to you to bring him in again later.  He
+is one of Galloway's crowd and I know it, despite his big bluffs.
+Galloway is away right now, somewhere below the border.  Just what he
+is up to I don't know.  I think del Rio does.  When Galloway gets back
+you keep your eye on the two of them."
+
+After the county attorney's departure Rod Norton rested more easily.
+He was making restitution for all that he had done, he was getting well
+and strong again, he had been given such proof as comes to few men of
+the utter devotion of a woman.  Through many a bright hour he and
+Virginia, daring to look confidently ahead, talked of life as it might
+be lived upon Las Flores when the lake was made, the lower lands
+irrigated, the big home built.
+
+"And," she confessed to him at the last, her face hidden against his
+breast, "I never want to see a surgeon's lancet again in all of my
+life, Rod Norton!"
+
+
+When at length the sheriff could bestride a horse he wondered
+impatiently what it could be that kept Jim Galloway so long away.  And
+if he was never coming back.  But he knew that high up among the
+cliffs, hidden away in the ancient caves, Jim Galloway's rifles were
+still lying.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE STRONG HAND OF GALLOWAY
+
+"Oh, you will all dance and shout together very soon," said Ignacio
+wisely to his six bells in the old Mission garden.  "You will see!
+Captain and the Dancer and Lolita, the Little One, La Golondrina, and
+Ignacio Chavez, all of you together until far out across the desert men
+hear.  For it is in the air that things will happen.  And then, when it
+is all done . . .  Why then, amigos, who but me is going to build a
+little roof over you that runs down both ways, to save you from the hot
+sun and the rains? . . .  Oh, one knows.  It is in the air.  You will
+see!"
+
+For Jim Galloway had returned, a new Galloway, a Galloway who carried
+himself up and down the street with bright, victorious eyes, and the
+stride of full confidence, who, at least in the eyes of Ignacio Chavez,
+was like a blood-lusting lion "screwing up his muscles" to spring.
+Galloway's return brought to Roderick Norton a fresh vigilance, to
+Virginia a sleepless anxiety, to Florence Engle unrest, uncertainty,
+very nearly pure panic.  During the first few days of his absence she
+had allowed herself the romantic joy of floating unchecked upon the
+tide of a girlish fancy, dreaming dreams after the approved fashion
+which is youth's, dancing lightly upon foamy crests, seeing only blue
+water and no rocks under her.  Then, with the potency of the man's
+character removed with the removal of his physical being, she grew to
+see the shoals and to draw back from them, shuddering somewhat
+pleasurably.  Now that he was again in San Juan and that her eyes had
+been held by his in the first meeting upon the street, her heart
+fluttered, her vision clouded, she wondered what she would do.
+
+There was to be no lost action in Galloway's campaign now.  Within half
+a dozen hours of his arrival there was a gathering of various of his
+henchmen at the Casa Blanca.  Just what passed was not to be known; it
+was significant, however, that among those who had come to his call
+were the Mexican, del Rio, Antone, Kid Rickard, and a handful of the
+other most restless spirits of the county.  Norton accepted the act in
+all that it implied to his suspicions and sent out word to Cutter,
+Brocky Lane, and those of his own and Brocky's cowboys whom he counted
+on.
+
+Galloway's second step, known only to himself and Florrie, was a
+private meeting with the banker's daughter.  It occurred upon the
+second evening following his return, just after dark among the
+cottonwoods, but a hundred yards from her home.  He had made the
+opportunity with the despatch which marked him now; he had watched for
+her during the day, had appeared merely to pass her by chance on the
+street, and had paused just long enough to ask her to meet him.
+
+"I have done all that I planned to do," he announced triumphantly, his
+eyes holding hers, forcing upon her spirit the mastery of his own.
+"The power in Mexico is going to be Francisco Villa.  I have seen him.
+Let me talk with you to-night, Florence.  History is in the making; it
+may be you and I together who shape the destiny of a people."
+
+After all, she was but a little over sixteen, her head filled with the
+bright stuff of romance, and he was a forceful man who for his own
+purposes had long studied her.  She came to the tryst, albeit half in
+trembling, a dozen tremulous times ready for a fleeing retreat.
+
+Again he was all deference to her.  He builded cunningly upon the fact
+that he trusted her; that he, a strong man, put his faith in her, a
+woman.  He flattered her as she had never been flattered, not too
+subtly, yet not so broadly as to arouse her suspicion of his intent.
+He spoke quietly at first, then his voice seeming charged with his
+leaping ambition set responsive chords within her thrilling.  He
+pictured to her the state he was going to found, organize, rule, an
+uncertain number of fair miles stretching along a tropical coast; he
+made her see again a palatial dwelling with servants in livery, the
+blue waters of the Gulf, the white of dancing sails.  He spoke of a
+peace which was going to be declared between warring factions below the
+border within thirty days, of the magnificence to be Francisco Villa's,
+of the position to be occupied by Jim Galloway at Villa's side.  His
+planned development of a gold-mine he mentioned merely casually.
+
+And then at length when Florrie was prepared for the passionate
+declaration he humbled himself at her feet, lifted his hands to her in
+supplication, told her in burning words of his love.  Whether the man
+did love her with all of the strength of his nature or whether he but
+meant to strike through her at John Engle, the richest man of this
+section of the State, it was for Jim Galloway alone to know.  Certainly
+not for Florrie, who listened wide-eyed. . . .  Once she thought that
+he was about to sweep her up into his arms; they had lifted suddenly
+from his sides.  She had drawn back, crying sharply: "No, no!"  But he
+had waited, had again grown deeply deferential, swerving immediately to
+further vividly colored pictures of life as it might be, of power and
+pomp, of a secure position from which a man and a woman might direct
+policies of state, shaping the lives of other men and women.
+
+And in the end of that ardent interview Jim Galloway's caution was
+still with him, his knowledge of the girl's nature clear in his mind.
+He did not ask her answer; he merely sought a third opportunity to
+speak with her, suggesting that upon the next night she slip out and
+meet him.  He would have a horse for her, one for himself; they could
+ride for a half-hour.  He had so much to tell her.
+
+Perhaps a much more important factor than she realized in her action
+was Florrie's new riding-habit.  It had been acquired but three days
+before and she knew very well just how she looked in it.  There would
+be a moon, almost at the full.  The full moon and the new riding-habit
+were the allies given by fate to Jim Galloway.
+
+Besides all of this, she had not seen Elmer Page for a month.  Further,
+she knew that Elmer had gone riding upon at least one occasion with a
+girl of Las Palmas, Superintendent Kemble's daughter.  And finally,
+there lies much rich adventure in just doing that which we know we
+should leave alone.  So Florrie, while her mother and father thought
+that she had gone early to bed, was on her way to meet Galloway.
+
+They rode out of the cottonwood fringed arroyo just before moonrise,
+circling the town, Florrie scarcely marking whether they rode north or
+south.  But Galloway knew what he was doing and they turned slowly
+toward the southwest.  As they rode, his horse drawn in close to hers,
+he talked as he had never talked before; his voice rang from the first
+word with triumphant assurance.
+
+"When he calls she will follow!" Virginia had thought fearfully of
+them.  To-night he was calling eloquently, she was following,
+frightened and yet obedient to his mastery.
+
+Galloway's influence over the girl, that of a strong will over a weak
+and fluttering one, was quite naturally the stronger when they were
+alone together.  She had always been willing, sometimes a bit eager, to
+make a hero of him; he had long thoroughly understood her.  To-night
+was the brief battle of wills, with him summoning all of his strength,
+flushed with victory.  Abruptly now he urged that she marry him; a
+moment later his insistent pleading was subtly tinged with command.  He
+was the arbiter of the hour; he told her of a priest waiting for them
+at a little village a dozen miles away.  They would be married
+to-night; they were eloping even at this palpitant instant!
+
+When Florence would have stopped, of two balancing minds, he urged the
+horses on.  When she would have procrastinated, he beat down her
+opposition with the rush of his words.  Even while she struggled she
+was yielding; Galloway was quick to see how her resistance was growing
+fainter.  And all the time, while he spoke vehemently and she for the
+most part listened in a fascinated silence, they were riding on through
+the moonlit night. . . .  It seemed to her that surely he must love her
+as few men had loved before. . . .
+
+
+The village he had promised her was in reality but two poor houses at a
+crossroads, inhabited by two Mexican men and dowdy women.  On the way
+they encountered but one horseman; Galloway turned his own and
+Florence's animals out so that, though seen, they might escape
+recognition.  At the nearest of the two hovels he dismounted, raising
+his arms to her.  When she cried out and shrank back trembling, he
+laughed softly, caught her in his arms, and lifted her free of the
+saddle; when he would have kissed her she put her face into her two
+hands.
+
+"I . . . I want to go back!" she whispered.  "I am afraid!  Please, Mr.
+Galloway, please let me go home."
+
+Dogs were barking, a man and woman came out.  The man laughed.  Then he
+gathered up the bridle-reins and led the horses to the barn.  Florrie,
+shrinking out of Galloway's embrace, looked particularly little and
+helpless in her pretty riding-habit.
+
+She went with Galloway into the lamplighted room.  The woman looked at
+her curiously, then to Galloway, something of wonder and upstanding
+admiration in her beady eyes.
+
+"Has the priest come?" demanded Galloway.
+
+"No, señor.  Not yet."
+
+She added by way of explanation that word had been sent; that the
+priest was delayed; a man was dying and he must stay a little at the
+bedside.  She muttered the tale like a child repeating a lesson.
+Galloway, watching Florence, who sat rigid in her chair by the table,
+waited for her to finish.
+
+At the end he gave the woman a sharp, significant look.  She said
+something about a cup of coffee for the señorita and went hastily into
+the kitchen.  Florrie sprang to her feet, her hands clasped.
+
+"You must let me go," she cried wildly.  "The priest isn't here.  I am
+going home."
+
+"No," said Galloway steadily.  "You are not going home, Florence.  You
+must listen to me.  I love you more than anything else In the world, my
+dear.  I want you, want you all for mine."
+
+She saw a sudden light flare up in his eyes and it seemed to her that
+her heart would beat through the walls of her breast.  "I am not a boy,
+but a man.  A strong man, a man who, when he wants a thing, wants it
+with his whole heart and body and soul, a man who takes what he wants.
+Wait; just listen to me!  You love me now; you will love me more and
+more when I give you all that I have promised you.  To-night, in an
+hour, I will have made the beginning; I will have gathered about me
+fifty men who will do exactly what I tell them to do!  Then they will
+go with us down into Mexico; they will be the beginning of a little
+army whose one thought will be loyalty . . . loyalty to you and to me."
+
+"No," said Florence, her voice shaking.  "I am going. . . ."
+
+"You will marry me when the priest comes," he cut in sternly.
+"Otherwise, if you make me, I will take you with me anyway, unmarried.
+And I will make you marry me when we have crossed the border.  And
+now . . . now you will kiss me.  I have waited long, Florence."
+
+He came toward her; she slipped behind the table, crying out to him to
+stop.  But he came on, caught her, drew her into his arms.  And
+Florrie, some new passionate, terrified Florrie, beat at him with her
+fists, tore at him with her nails, hid her face from him, and with the
+agility born of her terror slipped away from him again, again put the
+table between them.  Galloway, a thin line of blood across his cheek,
+thrust the table aside.  As he did so the man came back into the room
+and stood watching, a twisted smile upon his lips.  Galloway lifted his
+thick shoulders in a shrug and stood staring at the girl cowering in
+her corner.
+
+"Married or unmarried, you go with me," he told her.  "Your kisses you
+may save for me.  Think it over.  You had better ask for the priest
+when I come back."  He turned toward the Mexican.  "All ready, Feliz?"
+
+The man nodded.
+
+"Tell Castro, then.  It's time to be in the saddle."
+
+With no other word to Florrie he went out.  But his last look was for
+her, the look of a victor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+IN THE OPEN
+
+Roderick Norton, every fibre of his body alive and eager, his blood
+riotous with the certain knowledge that the long-delayed hour had come,
+rode a foam-flecked horse into San Juan shortly after moonrise.
+Galloway was striking at last; at last might Norton lift his own hand
+to strike back.  As he flung himself down from the saddle he was
+thinking almost equally of Jim Galloway, striking the supreme blow of
+his career, and of Billy Norton, whose death had come to him at
+Galloway's command.  Galloway was gathering his forces, had delivered
+an initial blow, was staking everything upon the one throw of the dice.
+And he must believe them loaded.
+
+At the clank of spur-chain and rowel Struve came hastily into the
+hallway from his office.  He saw the look in the sheriff's, eyes and
+demanded quickly:
+
+"What is it?  What's happened?"
+
+There were grim lines about Norton's mouth, his quiet voice had an
+ominous ring to it.
+
+"Hell's to pay, Julius," he retorted.  "And there's little telling
+where it'll end unless we're on the jump to meet it.  Galloway's come
+out into the open.  Kid Rickard and ten men with him, all Mexicans or
+breeds, crossed over into the next county yesterday, raided the county
+jail late this afternoon, shot poor Roberts, freed Moraga, and got away
+in a couple of big new touring-cars.  Every man of them carried a rifle
+and side-arms."
+
+"Killed Roberts, huh?" Struve's frown gathered.
+
+"He's badly hurt, if not dead.  The Kid did the shooting."
+
+"Sure it's Galloway's work and not just the Kid's?"
+
+"Yes.  Only a couple of hours ago a lot of Galloway's crowd was
+gathering up in the mountains.  They've gone to his cache for the
+rifles.  I have sent word for Brocky Lane and his and my cowboys.  It
+begins to look as though he were up to something bigger than we've been
+looking for.  And he's sure of himself, Struve, or he wouldn't have
+started things by daylight."
+
+Virginia had heard and came into the hallway from her room, her face
+white, her eyes filled with trouble.  Struve turned back into his room
+abruptly, going for his rifle.
+
+"You heard?" asked Norton quietly.  "It's the big fight at last,
+Virginia.  But we've known it was coming all along."
+
+"Yes, Rod." she said half listlessly.  "I'll be glad when it's all
+over."
+
+He sketched for her briefly what little more he knew and suspected.
+Throughout the county where there was telephone communication the wires
+were buzzing.  Over them the word had come to him of Kid Rickard's
+attack on Roberts and the freeing of Moraga.  But in many places the
+lines were reported "out of order" and towns were isolated by cut
+wires.  Already men were riding sweating horses, carrying word from
+him.  He knew that del Rio had gathered a crowd of men at Las Vegas; he
+was certain that del Rio was working hand in glove with Galloway;
+further that the Mexican had been with Galloway on his recent trip
+below the border and among the revolutionists.
+
+"They're solid down there," concluded Norton.  "What they are up to is
+something big here, then a dash for safety, carrying their booty with
+them.  But we're going to be on time to put a stop to it all.  I am
+going down to see Engle now; will you come with me?"
+
+But before they left the hotel he swore Struve in as a deputy and sent
+him hastening to carry the word to other men to be counted on.  As they
+passed the Casa Blanca Norton paused a moment, looking in at the
+wide-open door; it was very quiet within, the place seeming deserted.
+
+"No use looking for Galloway here," he said as they went on.  "Nor for
+any of his gang.  But, when they come back . . . unless we head them
+off . . ."
+
+Her hand tightened on his arm.  She looked up into his thoughtful face
+with shining eyes.
+
+"You think that they would attempt further robbery and outlawry here?"
+
+"I am going to advise Engle to take the bulk of his money out of the
+bank, dig a hole, and hide it," he answered.  "Just to be sure in case
+we don't stop them."
+
+He knew that he had no time to waste tonight, and so as he and Virginia
+entered the Engles' living-room he began immediately telling the banker
+what had happened and what he feared was set to happen.  Engle listened
+gravely.
+
+"Galloway is making his getaway to-night," Norton said by way of
+conclusion.  "For every rifle he has a man.  He has no reason to like
+you and he knows that you carry more money in gold and bank-notes than
+any other man in the country.  The fact that Kid Rickard pulled the
+game the way he did this afternoon, shooting down Roberts when there
+was no need of bloodshed, ought to be enough to show us that they are
+not going to draw the line anywhere this side of old Mexico."
+
+"What are you planning?" asked Engle.
+
+"I've sent for Brocky and all the men he can bring.  They'll all come
+heeled and ready for trouble, every one sworn in as a sheriff's deputy.
+I'll get every dependable man in San Juan into the saddle with a rifle
+inside half an hour.  Before that we'll have further word; or, if not,
+we ride toward Mt. Temple.  I'm taking the gamble so far that that's
+their rendezvous; that the Kid and his crowd will show up there."
+
+It was unnecessary for him to continue.  Engle nodded and went for his
+rifle.  Norton, turning toward Mrs. Engle and Virginia, was shocked by
+the look he saw in the eyes of the banker's wife.
+
+"Florrie!" gasped Mrs. Engle, her hands gripped in front of her, her
+face paling.  "I thought she was in her room; when I missed her five
+minutes ago I thought that she had slipped out and run up to the hotel
+to see Virginia.  Virginia hasn't seen her."
+
+Norton smiled and patted the two clasped hands.
+
+"Oh, Florrie'll be all right, Mrs. Engle," he comforted her.  "We
+mustn't get nervous and begin to imagine things, must we?"
+
+But no lessening of that look of fear came into the mother's eyes.
+Galloway was striking, Florrie was not to be accounted for.  Though she
+turned quickly and went again through the house, the patio, and the
+rear gardens, she was apprehensively certain that she would not find
+Florence.  Virginia came hurriedly to Norton, whispering:
+
+"I'm afraid for her, Rod.  I'm afraid!  I have seen her and Jim
+Galloway together, I have known all along that he had an influence over
+her which he might exert if he wanted to.  And, just before Jim
+Galloway went to Mexico, Elmer saw them walk down the street together,
+stop and talk together under the trees. . . .  Oh, I'm afraid for her,
+Rod!"
+
+Engle's face was as white as chalk when a little later he came back
+into the room with his wife; his two hands were like rock upon his
+rifle.
+
+"Florence isn't in the house," he announced in a voice which, while
+calm, seemed not John Engle's voice.  "If she is in San Juan it won't
+take the half-hour to know it.  I'm rather inclined to think that I'm
+just a fool, Rod Norton.  My wife has told me that Galloway was looking
+at Florence in a way which meant no good.  I wouldn't believe.  And
+now, if . . ."
+
+Norton had no reply to make.  Florence's disappearance at a time like
+this might mean either a very great deal or nothing whatever.  But, as
+Engle had intimated, it would require but little time to learn if she
+were in San Juan and safe, and, as Norton had said, there was no time
+now to be wasted.  Engle would institute inquiries immediately; Norton,
+his own work looming large before him, would prepare to meet Galloway's
+latest play.
+
+The sheriff decided promptly that it would be unwise to leave the town
+absolutely drained of men in whom he could put faith.  It was always
+possible that either the entire crowd of Galloway's men or a smaller
+detachment might find their way here.  Julius Struve, four armed men
+aiding him, was to be responsible for the welfare of women and
+children.  If Galloway's stroke should turn out to be bolder and harder
+than was now known, then Struve and his men had horses saddled and were
+to get their wards out of danger by hard riding.  Norton was to post
+two men a few miles out as he rode north and they were to report back
+to Struve in case of necessity.
+
+These latter plans were made only at the moment before the sheriff's
+departure.  A man sent by Brocky Lane had raced into San Juan's street,
+bringing fresh word.  It began to appear that Galloway was working in
+conjunction with aid from below the border.  Del Rio with a score of
+men, Mexicans for the most part who had dribbled into the county during
+the last few months, was reported to have swept down upon John Engle's
+ranches, and to be gathering herds of cattle and horses, starting them
+southward on the run.  Three of Engle's cowboys had been shot down; a
+similar attack had been delivered upon other ranches.  The little town
+of Las Vegas had been looted, post-office, store, and saloon safes
+dynamited, stock driven off to augment del Rio's other herds.  Further,
+the cowboy sent by Lane reported that a signal-fire had been lighted in
+the mountains an hour ago and that there had been another fire like an
+answer leaping up from the desert in the south.  Word had also come to
+Lane that telephone messages hinted that Kid Rickard and his unit were
+working further outlawry along the county line, headed toward Mt.
+Temple.
+
+There were seventeen armed horsemen in the street waiting for the word
+from Norton.
+
+"I'll come back to you," he said quietly to Virginia.  "Because after
+what you have done for me, I belong to you . . . if you want me."
+
+"I want you, Rod," she answered steadily.  "And I know that you will
+come back to me.  And now . . . kiss me good night."
+
+She clung to him a moment, then pushed him from her and watched him
+swing up into the saddle and ride out among the men who were pledged
+and sworn to do his bidding.  As he did so Engle came to him.
+
+"Going with us, John?" asked Norton.
+
+"No," said Engle.  "We haven't found her yet, Rod.  I'll try to pick up
+a trace of her here.  And . . . you'll send a man to me if you find
+her?"
+
+"Yes," Norton promised.
+
+"And if Galloway has got her . . ."
+
+"I'll know what to do, John," said Norton gently.
+
+Then, without again looking back, he turned his horse toward the north.
+The seventeen men, riding two and three abreast, silent and grave for
+the most part, followed him.  The moon shone upon their rifle-barrels
+and made black, grotesque shadows underfoot.
+
+Against the northern sky Mt. Temple was lifted sharply outlined; from
+its crest a leaping flame was stabbing at the stars, a new signal-fire
+to be seen across many miles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE BATTLE IN THE ARROYO
+
+Straight toward that wavering plume of flame in the north they rode
+swiftly, each man with his own thoughts and with few words.  But
+whether a man thought of Florrie Engle gone or of the shooting of
+Sheriff Roberts or of the looting of Las Vegas or of a ranch raided, he
+was like his fellows in that he knew that at last Jim Galloway had come
+out into the open and that to-night must be Galloway's triumph or
+Galloway's death.  And perhaps he wondered if his own saddle would run
+empty under the stars before another dawn.
+
+Three or four miles from San Juan Norton made out an approaching rider,
+one who bent over his horse's mane, racing furiously.  The figure,
+growing rapidly distinct as it drew on from the north, grew erect as
+the horseman saw Norton's posse.  The rider jerked in his horse,
+pausing a moment as though in doubt whether he were meeting friend or
+foe.  Then, when again he came on at the same headlong gallop, Norton
+recognized him.  It was Elmer Page.
+
+"They're fighting back yonder!" cried the boy wildly, his eyes shining
+with his excitement.  "Brocky Lane sent me. . . .  I haven't a rifle,
+who will give me a rifle?  I'll give a man a hundred dollars for a
+rifle!"
+
+"Easy, Elmer," said Norton sharply.  "Tell us what Brocky sent you to
+say.  Where are they?"
+
+"Along the arroyo just off to the east of Mt. Temple.  About a mile
+from the mountain . . . you know where the biggest boulders are all
+strung out along the arroyo?  It's there.  Brocky and a lot of cowboys
+are making a stand there, heading off the Kid and del Rio.  So they
+can't get with the others, you know. . . .  Why didn't somebody tell me
+about this?" he broke off, his voice shrill.  "I haven't a rifle, just
+a cursed revolver.  Who will ..."
+
+Again Norton interrupted sternly.
+
+"Let's have it straight, Elmer," he commanded.  "Brocky and his men are
+along the arroyo, you say?  And they're trying to keep between del Rio
+and the Kid's crowd and the other crowd?  Some of the others are still
+on the mountain, then?"
+
+"The mountain is full of them.  They're pouring down and shooting as
+they come; Brocky's in between. . . ."
+
+"How many men are with him?"
+
+"About twenty.  But . . . my God!  Rickard's men and del Rio's are
+shooting from the east and the others are shooting from the west . . .
+poor old Tommy Rudge got shot in the stomach and Denny Blain is down
+and . . ."
+
+"Del Rio and Rickard didn't come in machines did they?"
+
+"No.  Brocky said tell you they'd left their cars, sent them on filled
+with loot toward the south, where a lot of other Greasers are waiting
+for them; then the Kid and del Rio and about fifty men altogether
+started a big herd of horses and cattle this way.  Brocky tried to
+stampede the herds, but the others are more than two to one, so he got
+his men in the arroyo and they're giving 'em hell from there."
+
+"Galloway's on the other side?"
+
+"No.  Brocky said tell you Galloway hadn't shown up yet.  We think he
+didn't expect things to get started so soon.  One of Brocky's men
+riding in a little while ago from the other side of San Juan thought
+that he had seen Galloway and some one that looked like a girl riding
+with him toward the old crossroads where the Denbar place used to be.
+Brocky thinks maybe you can come in and head Galloway off and bust up
+the whole play that way."
+
+So Galloway and "some one who looked like a girl" had ridden toward the
+old Denbar cross-roads.  And Galloway had not yet joined his forces.
+
+"Elmer," said Norton quickly, "ride on to San Juan.  Tell John Engle
+what you have told me about Galloway.  Tell him . . ."
+
+"I won't!" cried Elmer, on the verge of hysteria.  "I won't do it.  Do
+it yourself; send some one else.  I want to go with you; I want a
+rifle, I tell you!  Didn't I see Tommy Rudge go down with a bullet in
+his belly?  Didn't I see Denny when the Kid shot him?"
+
+Norton laid a hand on Elmer's arm, speaking quietly.
+
+"Listen, Elmer," he said.  "We will do what we can where Brocky is.
+But that isn't all of the devilment to-night.  Galloway got Florrie
+away somehow; she was the one riding with him toward the crossroads.
+It's up to you to ride on and ride like the devil and tell John
+Engle. . . .  Come on, boys!"
+
+Elmer sagged in his saddle as though he had been struck a heavy
+physical blow.
+
+"Galloway got Fluff!" he muttered dully.
+
+His gaze trailed along after the departing posse.  Norton on his big
+roan was setting the pace, the steady swinging gallop to eat up the
+miles swiftly and yet not kill the horses before the journey's end.
+The others followed him, stringing out single file to take advantage of
+the trail.  The moon picked them out with clear relief, a grim line of
+retribution.  And yet the boy, while his eyes wandered after them, saw
+only little Fluff struggling in Jim Galloway's arms. . . .
+
+Then suddenly he, too, was riding, but at a pace which took no heed of
+a horse's endurance, riding a gallant brute that stretched out its
+neck, nostrils flaring, hammering hoofs beating out the very staccato
+of urgent speed upon the flying sands.  Already his revolver was tight
+clinched in a lifted hand.  Already he had swerved a little from the
+distant lights of San Juan.  He was taking the shortest line which led
+to Denbar's crossroads.
+
+"Galloway's got Fluff," he said over and over, choking on the words.
+
+
+An hour later Norton heard the first spitting of rifles.  Another
+fifteen minutes of shod hoofs pounding through the broken hills and he
+saw the first spurts of flame cutting through the shadows where the
+trees clung to the arroyo.  As he drew in his horse the men behind him
+closed up about him.  He threw out his arm, pointing.
+
+"Brocky's boys must be right down there," he said sharply.  "The Kid
+and del Rio will be yonder; those are their horses.  Young Page says
+there are about fifty of them."
+
+A fusillade of rifle-shots interrupted him.  Along a fifty or sixty
+yard front the Kid's and del Rio's men had crept in closer to Brocky's
+arroyo, worming their way upon their stomachs, and now fired together.
+There came a rattling reply from the creek, the shouting of cowboys.
+
+"We'll take those fellows first," ordered Norton quickly.  "They will
+see us when we climb that little rise.  Spread out; go easy until we
+get to the top.  Then, boys, let's see who can give them hell first and
+fastest."
+
+They looked to their rifles for the last time and rode slowly up the
+short slope of the low-lying ridge.  Then, as the first man topped it,
+there came a shout from the shadows in front, another shout, and the
+whizzing of rifle-balls.  Norton used his spurs then; his big roan
+leaped forward and was racing down the farther slope; his men in a long
+line rode with him.  And as he rode he lifted his own gun and poured
+his lead into the thickest of the shadows.
+
+A wild shout of cheering broke from the arroyo; rifle-barrels grew hot
+in hot hands.  On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's
+posse, some of them firing as they rode, others saving their lead.  To
+be seen from afar now, they drew many a shot toward themselves.  And
+yet the target of a man riding swiftly over uneven ground and in the
+moonlight is not to be found overreadily by questing lead.  When Norton
+called to his men to stop and dismount, taking advantage of a row of
+scattered boulders, not a saddle was empty.
+
+[Illustration: On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's
+posse.]
+
+Every man as he dismounted threw his horsed reins to the ground; the
+animals might bolt or they might not, some of them might not stop for
+many a mile, others would be found a hundred yards away.  But they must
+all think less of that now than of what lay in front of them.
+
+"That you, Norton?" came a cheery voice booming suddenly through the
+silence which had shut down as the newcomers disappeared among the
+boulders.
+
+"Here, Brocky!" shouted Norton.  "All right down there?"
+
+"Pretty well," called Brocky.  "They've winged three or four of
+us . . . they're damned rotten shots, Roddy.  We've popped over a dozen
+of them."
+
+There were other shouts then, tenor Mexican voices for the most part
+with the Kid's unmistakable snarl running through them.  Men were
+calling in Spanish to their fellows across the arroyo.  Whatever it was
+that Brocky was trying to say was lost in the din.  And then again came
+a volley of rifle-shots.
+
+Norton rose slowly to his feet, studying the situation with frowning
+eyes.  A bullet hissed high overhead, another cut by his side, another
+went shrieking off into the night.  But while they whined in his ears
+he laid his rude plans.
+
+The arroyo wound and twisted this way and that through the broken
+uplands.  Where Brocky Lane had placed his men so as to defy the union
+of the two bands of outlaws it described a wide rude arc curving about
+the spur from Mt. Temple.  Here the cowboys, with some twenty or thirty
+feet separating each man from his nearest fellow, were extended along a
+line which must be about two hundred yards long.  The Mexicans to the
+eastward, where del Rio and Kid Rickard and Moraga were, were bunched
+in the protecting shadows of a field of boulders such as those where
+the sheriff's men lay.
+
+"We could stick here all night and get nothing done," said Norton to
+the men close to him.  "Rickard's gang could have charged down on
+Brocky long ago if they'd had the stomach for that sort of thing.
+They've got the numbers on us; they more than had the count on Brocky's
+outfit; with those jaspers on the mountainside they could have turned
+the trick.  But that sort hasn't the desire for a scrap unless they can
+pull it from behind a rock.  And, by the same token, they won't last
+five minutes in the face of a charge.  Get me?"
+
+"But the ginks on the mountain will pick us off pretty lively as we hit
+the trail down the slope here," said a thoughtful voice.
+
+Then Norton explained further.  He meant to eliminate the other crowd;
+it could be done.  When he gave the word every man was to jump to his
+feet and make the first half of his charge the bloodless one down into
+the arroyo toward Brocky Lane.  Then, Norton's men and Brocky's united,
+they could surge up the creek's banks and make their flying attack,
+coming in between the two other factions so that the men on the
+mountain must hold their fire or kill as many of their own crowd as of
+the others.
+
+The suggestion was accepted without discussion.  When Norton said
+"Ready," they were ready; when he jumped to his feet and ran down
+toward the arroyo, they ran with him.  A shout of laughter went up from
+each side of the dry water-course as jeering voices announced
+triumphantly that the Gringoes were afraid.  And with the shouts came
+rifle-shots.
+
+But to the last man of them they reached the arroyo safely, and ducking
+low, trotted on to join the cowboys.  In a moment more Norton had found
+Brocky Lane, had explained his plan, had had Brocky's silent nod for an
+answer.  In quiet voices the men passed the word along the line.  Those
+from the farther end drew in closer so that their whole body of
+something better than thirty men occupied but a brief section of the
+arroyo.
+
+"Get your wind first, boys," Norton admonished them.  "Better fill your
+clips, too, while you've got the chance.  And count on using a six gun
+before you're through.  All right?  Let's show 'em the sort of a scrap
+a Gringo _can_ put up."
+
+Then again they were running, the unwavering line of thirty men, but
+with a difference which the outlaws might not mistake.  And as they ran
+they held their fire for a little, knowing how useless and suicidal it
+would be to pause half-way.  But presently they were answering shot
+with shot, pausing, going down upon one knee, taking a moment's
+advantage of a friendly rock, pouring lead into the agitated groups
+among the boulders, springing up, running on again, every man fighting
+the fight his own way, the thirty of them making the air tingle with
+their shouts as they bore onward.
+
+Then it was man to man and often enough one man to two or three, dark
+forms struggling, men striking with clubbed guns, men snatching at
+their side-arms, going down, rising or half rising, firing as long as a
+charge was in a gun or strength in a body.  And as they fired and
+struck and called out after the fashion of the cowboy in a scrimmage
+the body of men before them wavered and broke and began to fall back.
+
+Norton swung his clubbed empty rifle up in both hands and beat down a
+man firing at him with a revolver.  All about him were struggling forms
+and he was sore beset now and then to know who was who.  A
+fierce-mustachioed, black-browed man thrust a rifle toward his breast
+and pulled the trigger and screamed out his curses as Norton put a
+revolver bullet through him.  A slender, boyish form sprang up upon a
+rock recklessly, training his rifle upon Brocky Lane.  It was the Kid.
+But the Kid had met a man quicker, surer, than himself, and Brocky
+fired first.  Kid Rickard spun and fell.  Norton saw him drop but lost
+sight of him before the body struck the earth.  He had found del Rio;
+del Rio had found him.
+
+Two smoking revolvers were jerked up, two guns spoke through the clamor
+as one gun.  The men were not ten feet apart as their guns spoke.
+Norton felt a bullet rip along his outer arm, the sensation that of a
+whip-lash cutting deep.  He saw del Rio stagger back under the impact
+of a forty-five-caliber bullet which must have merely grazed him, since
+it did not knock him off his feet.  Del Rio, his lips streaming his
+curses and hatred, fired again.  But his wound had been sorer than
+Norton's, his aim was less steady, and now as he gave back it was to
+fall heavily and lie still.
+
+It had lasted less than five minutes.  "It's Jim Galloway's fight and
+Galloway don't come!" some one had shouted.  They broke again, gave
+back and back . . . and then were running, every man of them scenting
+defeat and much worse than defeat unless he came to a horse before
+another five minutes.  And after them, firing now as they ran, came
+Brocky's cowboys and Norton's men.
+
+"They've got all of their horses over there together," yelled Brocky
+into Norton's ear.  "The horses for those Ginneys who have been hiding
+out in the mountains, too.  That's why I cut in between them that way.
+Now if we can only scatter their cayuses . . . why, Roddy, we'll have
+every damned one of 'em afoot to be rounded up when we get ready!"
+
+And Brocky, limping as he went, had raced along after the others.
+
+But Norton did not follow.  His eyes had gone to the horses which he
+and the San Juan men had left beyond the little line of boulders.  And,
+travelling that way, he had seen a lone horseman far off to the south,
+a horseman riding frantically, seeking to come to the lower slopes of
+Mt. Temple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE BELLS RING
+
+"Galloway!"
+
+It seemed almost as though some great voice had shouted it to him
+through the din.  Yonder, riding on his spurs, come at this late
+moment, was Jim Galloway.  The man responsible for all of to-night's
+bloodshed, for the disappearance of Florrie, for the death of Billy
+Norton.
+
+"Coming, Jim Galloway!"
+
+Did he say it?  Or again was it a voice shouting to him, urging him on?
+He looked off to the east.  Flying forms everywhere with other racing
+forms pursuing, firing as they ran.  Horses jerking back, rearing,
+breaking away from the few men guarding them.  Full defeat for Jim
+Galloway there.  But to the west?  Galloway coming on at top speed,
+shouting as he came, and, upon the mountain's lower slope the others of
+Galloway's men, armed and bloodthirsty.  If Galloway came to them,
+whipped them with his tongue, stirring them with his magnetism . . .
+why, then, the fight was all to be fought over.
+
+Now again Norton, too, was running, bearing down upon the straggling
+horses.  He caught up the first dragging reins to lay his hand to,
+swung up into the saddle, measured swiftly the distance between
+Galloway and the men on the mountain . . . and used his spurs.
+
+On came Jim Galloway, his wide, heavy shoulders not to be mistaken in
+the rich moonlight, his hat gone, his head up, a rifle across the
+saddle in front of him.  Norton lost sight of him as he swept down into
+the bed of the arroyo, caught sight of him again from the farther side.
+Already Galloway was appreciably nearer his men, driving his horse
+mercilessly.
+
+"If he comes to his crowd before I can stop him," was Norton's thought,
+"he'll put his game across on us yet.  I've got to head him off and
+take the chances."
+
+Nor were the odds to be overlooked.  Galloway was still too far away to
+be stopped by a rifle-ball, and Norton, heading him off, would expose
+himself not only to Galloway's fire but to that of the men who were
+moving to a lower slope to meet their leader.  And yet, with fate in
+the balance, here was no time for hesitation.
+
+Now Galloway had seen him, had recognized him, perhaps, the thought
+coming naturally to him that it would be Roderick Norton who rode to
+cut him off.  He shifted his rifle so that his right hand was on the
+grip, the barrel caught in his left; he had dropped his horse's reins.
+Norton was slipping a fresh clip into his gun, his own reins now upon
+his horse's neck.  And now both men knew that unless a bullet stopped
+him Norton would cut across Galloway's path before he could come to his
+men.
+
+"At him, Roddy, old boy!  We're coming!"
+
+Norton glanced over his shoulder and pressed on.  Brocky had missed
+him, had seen, had called back a half dozen of his men and was
+following.  Well, if he dropped, maybe Brocky and the others could get
+Jim Galloway.  It really began to look as though Galloway had played
+out his string.
+
+They were firing from the mountainside now, the bullets thus far flying
+wild of their rushing target.  Norton shook his head and urged his
+horse to fresh endeavor.  In a moment he would be fairly between
+Galloway and Galloway's last chance.  His eye picked out the spot where
+he would dismount at that moment, a tumble of big boulders.  He would
+swing down so that they would be between him and the mountain, so that
+nothing but moonlit open space lay between him and Jim Galloway.
+
+While rifles cracked and spat fire and sprayed lead over him and about
+him he rode the last fifty yards.  He reached the boulders, set his
+horse up, threw himself from the saddle, and with his back to the rock,
+his face toward Galloway, he lifted his rifle.  Galloway, almost at the
+same instant, jerked in his own horse.  He was so close that Norton
+caught his cry of rage.
+
+"Hands up, Galloway!" cried the sheriff.  "Hands up or I'll drop you."
+
+But at last Galloway had come out into the open; at last there was no
+subterfuge to stand forth at his need; at last, gambler that he was, he
+accepted the even break of man to man.  As Norton's voice rang out
+Galloway fired.
+
+He shot twice before Norton pulled the trigger.  Norton shot but the
+once.  Galloway dropped his rifle, sat rigid a moment, toppled from the
+saddle.  And his men, seeing him go down, cried out to one another and
+drew back into the mountain cañons.
+
+
+"Funny thing," said Brocky Lane afterward.  "Had the picture of a kid
+of a girl in his pocket!  Must have carted it around for a year.  Old
+Roddy's bullet tore right square through it."
+
+It was a picture of Florrie Engle, taken years before.  As Brocky said:
+"Just a kid of a girl."  Where he got it nobody knew.  But then there
+were other things about Jim Galloway which no one knew.  Perhaps . . .
+Quien sabe!
+
+
+During the late hours of the night and the following forenoon the thing
+was ended.  Sheriff Roberts's deputies with a posse in automobiles had
+raced southward, intercepting those other cars despatched toward the
+border by the Kid and del Rio.  Brocky Lane with a score of men had
+swept down upon the stolen herds, scattered them, fired fifty shots,
+emptied some three or four saddles, and sent the escaping rustlers
+flying toward the Mexican line.  Singly and in small groups other men,
+farmers, cowboys, miners, and the dwellers of small settlements, joined
+with Norton's men, giving battle to those of Galloway's crowd who had
+drawn back into the fastnesses of Mt. Temple.  In the afternoon Norton,
+with the aid of a handful of cowboys from Brocky's outfit and from Las
+Flores, escorted fifteen anxious-faced prisoners to the county-seat,
+where jail capacity was to be taxed.  And night had come again, serene
+and peaceful with the glory of the moon and stars, when he rode once
+more into San Juan, sore and saddle-weary.
+
+At the hotel he learned that Virginia had gone to the Engles.  He left
+his jaded horse with Ignacio and walked down the street.  In front of
+the Casa Blanca he stopped a moment, staring musingly at the solid
+adobe walls gleaming white in the moonlight.  The place was quiet,
+deserted.  No single light winked at him through door or window.  It
+seemed to him to be brooding over the passing of Jim Galloway.
+
+He found Florrie and Elmer strolling under the cottonwoods.  They had
+scant interest in him, little time to bestow upon a mere mortal.
+Florrie could only cry ecstatically that Black Bill was a hero!  He,
+all alone, had terrorized the Mexican woman guarding her, had saved
+her, had brought her back.  And Elmer could only look pleased and
+stammer and whisper to Fluff to be still.
+
+Virginia had heard his voice, the voice she had been listening for
+throughout so many long hours, and met him before he had come to the
+door.
+
+"Oh, thank God, thank God!" she cried softly.  "But . . . you are hurt?"
+
+He forgot his wound as both arms closed about her.  From somewhere at
+the rear of the house he heard Mrs. Engle's voice crying eagerly; "It's
+Roddy!"  She was hurrying to greet him.  What he had to say must be
+said briefly.
+
+"My work is done," he said quickly.  "I have put in my resignation this
+afternoon.  They can get a new sheriff.  I am going to be a rancher, my
+dear.  And, Virginia . . ."
+
+He was whispering to her, his lips close to her hair.  And Virginia,
+though her face was suddenly hot with the flush mounting to her brow,
+gave him steadily for answer:
+
+"Whenever you wish, Rod Norton!"
+
+So it was only twenty-four hours later that Ignacio Chavez stood in the
+old Mission garden and made his bells talk, just the three upon the
+western arch, the Little One, La Golondrina, and Ignacio Chavez, the
+golden-throated trio that tinkled to the touch of his cunning hand and
+seemed to laugh and sing and proclaim the gladdest of glad tidings.
+Then Ignacio drew his enrapt gaze earthward from the full moon and made
+out a man and a girl riding out into the night, riding toward the Ranch
+of the Flowers.  And he made the bells laugh again.
+
+"And to-morrow," vowed Ignacio solemnly, "not later than to-morrow or
+the day thereafter, you shall have your reward, _amigos_.  You have
+told the world of heavy doings; you have rung for Jim Galloway dead;
+you have made the music for the wedding of _el_ Señor Nortone.  And it
+shall be I who will make a little roof like a house over you.  You will
+see!"
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN***
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+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Bells of San Juan, by Jackson Gregory</title>
+<STYLE TYPE="text/css">
+BODY { color: Black;
+       background: White;
+       margin-right: 10%;
+       margin-left: 10%;
+       font-size: medium;
+       font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
+       text-align: justify }
+
+P {text-indent: 4% }
+
+P.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
+hr.full { width: 100%;
+          height: 5px; }
+pre      {font-size: 8pt;}
+
+
+</STYLE>
+</head>
+<body>
+<center>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Bells of San Juan, by Jackson Gregory,
+Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson</h1>
+</center>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: The Bells of San Juan</p>
+<p>Author: Jackson Gregory</p>
+<p>Release Date: March 22, 2005  [eBook #15438]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN***</p>
+<br><br><center><h3>E-text prepared by Al Haines</h3></center><br><br>
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<br>
+<br>
+<A NAME="img-front"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-front.jpg" ALT="Frontispiece" BORDER="2" WIDTH="352" HEIGHT="564">
+<H5>
+Frontispiece: Having come closer he reined in his horse,<br>
+stared at her a moment in surprised wonderment.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</H5>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN
+</H1>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+BY
+</H3>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+JACKSON GREGORY
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+AUTHOR OF
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<i>JUDITH OF BLUE LAKE RANCH</i>, <i>THE JOYOUS TROUBLE MAKER</i>,<br><i>MAN TO MAN</i>, ETC.
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+ILLUSTRATED BY
+</H3>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+FRANK TENNEY JOHNSON
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H6 ALIGN="center">
+NEW YORK<br>
+GROSSET & DUNLAP<br>
+PUBLISHERS
+</H6>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+1919
+</H5>
+
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+TO
+</H4>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+RODERICK NORTON GREGORY
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+CONTENTS
+</H2>
+
+
+<H3>
+<A HREF="#chap00">
+FOREWORD--THE BELLS
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H4>
+CHAPTER
+</H4>
+
+<TABLE>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">I.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap01">THE BELLS RING</A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">II.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap02"> THE SHERIFF OF SAN JUAN</A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">III.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap03">A MAN'S BOOTS</A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">IV.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap04">AT THE BANKER'S HOME </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">V.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap05">IN THE DARKNESS OF THE PATIO  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">VI.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap06">A RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">VII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap07">IN THE HOME OF CLIFF-DWELLERS  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">VIII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap08">JIM GALLOWAY'S GAME </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">IX.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap09">YOUNG PAGE COMES TO TOWN</A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">X.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap10">A BRIBE AND A THREAT  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XI.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap11">THE FIGHT AT LA CASA BLANCA  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap12">WAVERING IN THE BALANCE  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XIII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap13">CONCEALMENT  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XIV.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap14">A FREE MAN </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XV.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap15"> THE KING'S PALACE  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XVI.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap16">THE MEXICAN FROM MEXICO  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XVII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap17">A STACK OF GOLD PIECES  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XVIII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap18">DESIRE OUTWEIGHS DISCRETION  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XIX.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap19">DEADLOCK  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XX.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap20">FLUFF AND BLACK BILL  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XXI.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap21">A CRISIS  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XXII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap22">THE BEGINNING OF THE END  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XXIII.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap23">THE STRONG HAND OF GALLOWAY  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XXIV.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap24">IN THE OPEN  </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XXV.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap25">THE BATTLE IN THE ARROYO </A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+<TR ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top">
+<TD ALIGN="right" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="10%">XXVI.</TD>
+<TD ALIGN="left" VALIGN="top" WIDTH="90%">
+<A HREF="#chap26">THE BELLS RING</A>
+</TD>
+</TR>
+
+</TABLE>
+
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+</H2>
+
+<H3>
+<a href="#img-front">
+Having come closer he reined in his horse, stared at her a moment in
+surprised wonderment&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Frontispiece
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<a href="#img-142">
+Then came the second meeting with Jim Galloway
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<a href="#img-214">
+"Come, and I'll share my secret with you"
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<H3>
+<a href="#img-326">
+On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's posse
+</A>
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap00"></A>
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+The Bells of San Juan
+</H2>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+<I>A Novel</I>
+</H4>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+FOREWORD
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE BELLS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER I
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE BELLS RING
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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 <I>cigarita</I> 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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. a place which
+invited, lured, held, and frequently enough finally damned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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, <I>amigo mío</I>.  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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ignacio, having meditatively enjoyed his whiskey and listened smilingly
+to the tinkle of a mandolin in the <I>patio</I> under a grape-vine arbor,
+had rolled his cigarette and turned his back square upon the
+devil&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 <I>lluvia de oro</I> which his own hands had planted
+here, and stood with legs well apart considering the three bells upon
+the easterly arch.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Que hay, amigos</I>?" 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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. that was the biggest of the
+bells&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 "<I>maldito</I>!" 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is a fine day, señorita," he told her, displaying two glistening
+rows of superb teeth friendliwise.  "And the garden&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  <I>Ah, que hay
+más bonito en todo el mundo</I>?  You like it, no?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 <I>d</I> in his mouth became a softened <I>th</I>; 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ignacio looked properly horrified.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I saw an angel here in the garden, señorita," he exclaimed, "would
+I say <I>zape</I> to it?  No, no, señorita; here you shall stay a thousand
+years if you wish.  I swear it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. she glanced through the
+tangle of the garden to the tiny graveyard and shook her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have just come to San Juan?" he asked.  "To-day?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," she told him.  "On the stage at noon."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You have friends here?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again she shook her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The third time she shook her head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have come to live here," she returned quietly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But not all alone, señorita!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes."  She smiled at him again.  "All alone."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>La gente</I>?  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 <I>residencia</I> 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+<I>Seguro</I>; sure, he was the one.  A gunman?  Ignacio shrugged.  He was
+sheriff, and what must a sheriff be if not a gunman?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"On the stage," continued the girl, "was a man they called Doc; and
+another named Galloway.  They are San Juan men, are they not?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 <I>la gente</I>, 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 <I>el señor doctor</I>.  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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  She went
+quickly the way Ignacio had gone, calling out to him:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What is it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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, <I>no</I>?
+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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man dead?" the girl repeated, unwilling to grasp fully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You will see," returned Ignacio.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap02"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER II
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE SHERIFF OF SAN JUAN
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's mañana-land, after all," she told herself with a quick smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Half an hour later she found a spot where the trees stood in a denser
+growth, looking greener, more vigorous&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is all right," she said lightly.  "I imagined that you had made a
+mistake."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"One doesn't see strangers often around San Juan," he explained.  "As
+for a girl&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."  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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again he was calling to her, again, swinging about, he had ridden to
+her side.  Now his voice like his eyes, was ominously stern.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who is it?" he demanded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  I didn't wait.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap03"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER III
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+A MAN'S BOOTS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. it was the sheepman
+from Las Palmas&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. lay in an adjoining card-room, stark under the
+blanket which the large hands of Jim Galloway had drawn over him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who is it this time?" he demanded sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Bisbee, from Las Palmas," they told him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was the Kid," some one answered, and was continuing, "He says it
+was self-defense&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;." when Norton cut in bluntly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Was Galloway here when it happened?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where's Galloway now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was noteworthy that he asked for Jim Galloway rather than for Kid
+Rickard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Open up, Galloway.  It's Norton."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hello, Norton," said Galloway tonelessly.  "Glad you showed up.
+There's been trouble."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Another man down, Galloway," said Norton with an ominous sternness.
+"And in your place.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  How long do you think that you can keep out
+from under?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Norton's eyes was blazing hatred, in Galloway's mere steady,
+unwinking boldness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You saw the killing?" the sheriff asked curtly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," said Galloway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The Kid there did it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. or murder&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," retorted the Kid, his surly voice little better than a snarl.
+"I got him and be damned to him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Bad luck cursing a dead man, Rickard," said Norton coldly.  "What did
+you kill him for?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Kid Rickard's tongue ran back and forth between his colorless lips
+before he replied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He tried to get me first," he said defiantly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who saw the shooting?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Jim Galloway.  And Antone."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rod Norton grunted his disgust with the situation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Give me your gun," he commanded tersely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How many times did you shoot?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't know.  Two or three, I guess.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Damn it, do you imagine a
+man counts 'em?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What were you and Galloway doing alone in here with the door locked?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway cut in sharply:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't want any more trouble; I was afraid somebody&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Shut up, will you?" cried the sheriff fiercely.  "I'll give you all
+the chance you want to talk pretty soon.  Answer me, Rickard."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton turned briefly to the crowded room behind him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Anybody know where Cutter is?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I want you boys to do me a favor," he said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Antone, come here."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The short, squat half-breed standing behind the bar lifted his heavy
+black brows, demanding:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Y porqué</I>?  What am I to do?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now," he said quickly, "who fired the first shot.  Galloway?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Trying the case already, Judge Norton?" he inquired equably.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you answer?" Norton said coolly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where was he standing?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway pointed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Right there."  The spot indicated was about three or four feet from
+where Norton stood, near the second card-room door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where was the Kid?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Over there."  Again Galloway pointed.  "Clean across the room, where
+the chair is tumbled over against the table."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How many times did Bisbee shoot?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway seemed to be trying to remember.  He drank his whiskey slowly,
+reached over the bar for a cigar, and answered:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Twice or three times."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How many times did Rickard shoot?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm not sure.  I'd say about the same; two or three times."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where was Antone standing?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Behind the bar; down at the far end, nearest the door."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where were you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Leaning against the bar, talking to Antone."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What were you talking about?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't remember," he replied at last.  "Some trifle.  The shooting,
+coming suddenly that way&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What started the ruction?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Missing every time, of course?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You'll remember I said he was carrying enough of a load to make his
+aim bad."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton asked half a dozen further questions and then said abruptly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's all.  As you go out will you tell the boys to send Antone in?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again a hint of color crept slowly, dully, into Galloway's cheeks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're going pretty far, Rod Norton," he said tonelessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway stood motionless, his cigar clamped tight in his big square
+teeth.  Then he shrugged and went to the door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Rod Norton's face went a flaming red with anger, his hand grew white
+upon the butt of the gun at his side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Some day, Jim Galloway," he said steadily, "I'll get you just as sure
+as you got Billy Norton!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway laughed and went out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Antone was giving his replies as guardedly as Galloway had done.  He
+took his time now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because," he began finally, "I do not belief when Señor Galloway speak
+that&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go on," prompted the sheriff.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's all, Antone," Norton said.  "Send the Kid in."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The Kid shrugged insolently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't watch 'em," he returned briefly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Bisbee had a lot of money on him.  What happened to it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In there."  Galloway nodded toward the card-room whose door had
+remained closed.  "In his pocket."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How many men of you know where Bisbee always carried his money when he
+was on his way to bank?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In his boots!" answered two voices together.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come this way, boys.  Take a look at his boots, will you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as they crowded about the table, sensing some new development,
+Galloway pushing well to the fore, Norton's vibrant voice rang out:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Tell me, Jim Galloway, how does it happen that the right boot is on the
+left foot?"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap04"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+AT THE BANKER'S HOME
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Later on we'll get 'em, Roddy&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. mebbe," he said finally.  "But not
+now.  If you pulled the Kid it would just be running up the county
+expense all for nothing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was looking for Dr. Page.  Is he in now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," she told him gravely.  "Come in, please."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But for a moment he bestowed upon her merely a slow look of question.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You don't mean that you are Dr. Page?" he asked.  Then, believing that
+he understood: "You're the nurse?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's a peculiar cut&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. not a knife cut, is it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," he answered humorously.  "Did it on a piece of lead.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  How
+much is it, Doctor?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He laid two silver dollars in her palm, hesitated a moment and then
+went out.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Funny she should come to a place like
+this, anyhow.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Wonder what the V stands for?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 "<I>la gente</I>" 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the Engles', however, his garb struck her for a moment of the first
+shock of contrast, as almost grotesquely out of place.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hello, Florrie," Norton was saying quietly.  "I have brought a caller
+for your mother.  Miss Engle, Miss Page."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Virginia Page, aren't you?  As if any one in the world would have to
+tell me who <I>you</I> 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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't know&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;." she began haltingly, only to be cut short by
+Mrs. Engle crying to her husband:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's Virginia Page, John.  Wouldn't you have known her anywhere?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle, who had come, dragging his chair after him, to join them,
+laughed amusedly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"John," interposed Mrs. Engle, "aren't you giving Virginia rather a
+sombre side of things?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia thought of Ignacio Chavez.  He, had he been here, would have
+answered:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In the end there will be the ringing of the bells for a man dead.  You
+will see!  Which one?  <I>Quien sabe</I>!  The bells will ring."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap05"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER V
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IN THE DARKNESS OF THE PATIO
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And in the end," smiled Engle, "there are no bells with the sweet tone
+of old Mission bells, or with their soft eloquence."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Dr. Patten," Engle was saying, "this is our cousin, Virginia Page."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton stared at him steadily and finally said soberly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When a disease has fastened itself upon the body of a community it
+takes time to work a cure, Dr. Patten."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I imagine you haven't seen Jim Galloway since you got in, have you?"
+Norton returned quietly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," said Patten.  "Why?  What has Galloway got to do with it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ask him.  He says Rickard killed Bisbee in self-defense."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh," said Patten.  And then, shifting in his chair: "If Galloway says
+so, I guess you are right in letting the Kid go."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"By the way, Patten," the banker observed when there came a pause,
+"you've got a rival in town.  Had you heard?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you mean?" asked the physician.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When I introduced you just now to our Cousin Virginia, I should have
+told you; she is Dr. Page, M.D."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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
+<I>lady</I> doctor, eh?" and laughed, the case would not have been altered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She understood his meaning and, though a thrill of excitement ran
+through her blood, answered laughingly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Again she felt Florence Engle's eyes fixed upon her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Florence is prepared at the beginning to dislike me," she thought.
+"Why?  Just because I walked with him from the hotel?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 <I>muy malo</I>, that he had pains and that he
+prayed that the doctor cure him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten grunted his disgust.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While she said good night Engle got his hat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You could give me all that Ignacio pays you," chuckled Engle, "and
+never miss it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The boy had passed on through the shadows and now was to be seen on the
+street.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I guess you know you can count on me, Rod," said Engle quietly.  "What
+now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hm," said Engle.  "I think you're mistaken there, my boy."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course I'll do what you ask," Engle said.  "Is there anything else?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. or she will not, and I'll have to take a chance
+on Patten."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who is it?" demanded Engle sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll slip around the back way to the hotel," said Norton.  "I'll be
+ready when Miss Page comes in.  Good night, John."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Silently, without awaiting promise or protest from the girl, he was
+gone into the deeper shadows of the cottonwoods.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap06"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+A RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Ignacio Chavez, because thus he could be of service to <I>el señor</I>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You can ride, can't you, Virginia?" he had asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," she assured him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then I'll send Persis around; she's the prettiest thing in horseflesh
+you ever saw.  And the gamest.  And, Virginia&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He hesitated.  "Well?" she asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You are to come with me," said the hotel keeper softly.  "He is
+waiting with the horses."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I suppose," said Norton at last, "that it's up to me to explain."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then begin," said Virginia, "by telling me where we are going."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He swung up his arm, pointing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Before the night
+is out you'll know rather a good deal about what is going on, Miss
+Page," he added thoughtfully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"More than you'd have been willing for me to know if circumstance
+hadn't forced your hand?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You wish me to say nothing of to-night's ride?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In particular you don't want Jim Galloway to know?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But if the man who shot him is one of Galloway's crowd, as you
+say.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She shuddered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then Brocky Lane and Tom Cutter were together on Mt. Temple?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Near enough for Tom to hear the shooting."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Or less than an hour.  For now again, wandering out far across the open
+lands, came the heavy mourning of the bell.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How far can one hear it?" she asked, surprised that from so far its
+ringing came so clearly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Give Persis her head," Norton advised her.  "She'll find her way and
+follow me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," she answered.  "I was just in the mood to ride."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Fifteen minutes more," said the sheriff, "and we're there.  We'll use
+the first five minutes of it for a rest, too."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nearly midnight," he told her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yet somehow&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. she did not definitely formulate the thought of which
+she was at the time but dimly, vaguely conscious&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton knocked out his pipe.  Together they got to their feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"More careful than ever now," he cautioned her.  "Look out for each
+step and go slowly.  We're there in ten minutes.  Ready?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ready," she answered.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap07"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IN THE HOME OF CLIFF-DWELLERS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That you, Rod?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Who's that?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia came forward quickly and went down on her knees at Lane's side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm Dr. Page," she said quietly.  "Now if you'll tell me where you're
+hit&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and if Mr. Norton will get me some sort of a light.  A fire
+will have to do.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another little grunt came from Brocky Lane's tortured lips, this time a
+wordless expression of his unmeasured amazement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you get the fire started immediately, Mr. Norton?" asked Virginia
+somewhat sharply.  "Mr. Lane has waited long enough as it is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you'll keep perfectly still," Virginia admonished him quickly,
+"I'll do all the talking that is necessary.  Where is the wound?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia's hands found the rude bandage, damp and sticky.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's nonsense about not having a light," she said, turning toward
+Norton.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look here, Rod.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;." expostulated Brocky.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look out," called Norton sharply.  "Watch where you step now.  Go
+slow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Throw the light to the left now," commanded Norton.  "See what looks
+like the entrance to a cave?  We go in there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Back there," said Norton, "you'll find blankets.  I'll hold him while
+you spread some out for him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Hold the lantern for me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Open that bottle," she directed coolly.  "One tablet into the water.
+That box has cotton and gauze in it&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. don't touch them!  I want
+everything clean; just open the box and set it where I can get it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You're mighty good to take all this trouble.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  I'm sure a hundred
+times obliged.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then he broke off and again his eyes, like Norton's, asked their
+question.  This time she answered it, speaking slowly and thoughtfully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When you add to that combination," he muttered, "a sure-enough angel
+come to doctor a man.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This way," said Norton, taking up the lantern.  "We can really make
+you more comfortable than you'd think."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good night," she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whereupon she blew out her lantern, smiled faintly at the stars shining
+upon her, sighed wearily and went to sleep.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap08"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER VIII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+JIM GALLOWAY'S GAME
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good morning," she said brightly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Time to eat and ride," said Norton, turning again to his task.  "Bacon
+and coffee and exercise.  Have you rested?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Perfectly.  And Mr. Lane?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Me?" said Brocky.  "Feeling fine."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"About Galloway?" she asked quickly.  "Explaining what you meant by
+Galloway's hang-out?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes.  And more than that."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a little she stood, looking at him very gravely.  Then she spoke in
+utter frankness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You don't know Caleb Patten yet!" growled Brocky a bit savagely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Norton shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. all of us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Had mine, thanks," answered Brocky.  "Spin the yarn, Rod."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton put down his frying-pan, the bacon brown and crisp, and rose to
+his feet.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you come this way a moment, Miss Page?" he asked.  "To begin
+with, seeing is believing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In here," he said.  "Just look."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It looks like a young revolution!" she cried, her gaze held, her eyes
+fascinated by the unexpected.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But they'll see that you have been here.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"With a gang like that at his back, a man of Galloway's type has grown
+pretty strong.  Strong enough to plan&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. yes, and by the Lord, carry
+out!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the kind of game he's playing right now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. or his worst, as you please&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia stared at him, half incredulously.  But the look in Norton's
+eyes, the same look in Brocky Lane's, assured her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But," she objected breathlessly, "if he should strike before you are
+ready?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She sat silent, staring into the embers of the dying fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whereupon Brocky Lane grew promptly crimson and tongue-tied.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And now the view, Mr. Norton, and I am ready to go."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He led the way to the outer ledge from which last night they had
+entered the cave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and then there was
+silence; when the falling stone reached the bottom no sound came back
+to tell her how far it had dropped.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When you told me last night&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. when you put your rope around me and
+said that I might fall half a dozen feet.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Five minutes later they were making their way down the cliffs toward
+the horses.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap09"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER IX
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+YOUNG PAGE COMES TO TOWN
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?  <I>Quien sabe</I>!  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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and a civilization it
+truly was&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and of the signs left for posterity to puzzle over.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But won't he guess something when he misses Moraga?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You understand why I must leave you here," he said.  "Yonder, beyond
+those trees straight ahead&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you will see it from that little
+ridge&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Florence Engle," she thought.  "Who, no doubt, will cut me dead if I
+give her the opportunity."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hello, Cousin Virginia," said Florence.  "May I come in?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And," ran on Florrie, forestalling a possible interruption, "I was
+ready to poke fun at you last night just for being something capable
+and&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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,'&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am sorry," said Virginia, smiling a little, "if on my account&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you know what I mean, from South Africa or
+somewhere, you know&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia's prompt assurance was incomplete when Florrie flitted out,
+banging the door after her, headed toward the lounging-chairs on the
+veranda.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Do
+you wonder that I am just wild about him?  Isn't he a perfect dear?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and there are times when
+I think we are!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because I am so young?" cried Florrie.  "Oh, I don't know; girls marry
+young here.  Now there is Tita&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. she is our cook's sister&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. she
+has two babies already and she is only four months older than I am.
+And&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Isn't he distinguished!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sis," said Elmer, "this is Mr. Rickard.  Mr. Rickard, shake hands with
+my sister, Miss Page."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come, Elmer," she said hastily.  "I want you to know Miss Florence
+Engle; she is a sort of cousin of ours."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure," said Elmer off-handedly.  "Come on, Rickard."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't think much of your friends," remarked Florrie, sensing sudden
+opposition and flying half-way to meet it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you refer to Mr. Rickard," he said aloofly, "I may say that he is
+not a friend&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. yet.  I just met him this afternoon.  But, although
+he hasn't had the social advantages, perhaps, still he is a man of
+parts."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Florrie sniffed and tossed her head.  Virginia bit her lips and watched
+them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was a sparkle of excitement in Elmer's eyes as he swung about to
+answer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and
+what a blundering rummy the fool sheriff is."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway?" queried Virginia uneasily.  "You know him too, already?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure," replied Elmer.  "He's a good sort, too, You'll like him.  I
+asked him around."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For goodness' sake, Elmer, when did you get to San Juan?  Have you
+been here a week or just a few hours?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man!" giggled Florrie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But he is handsome&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and distinguished looking!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap10"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER X
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+A BRIBE AND A THREAT
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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 <I>el Rancho de las Flores</I>.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yes, Norton "got" him.  No man in the southwest harbored more bitter
+ill-will for the lawless than Jim Galloway&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-142"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-142.jpg" ALT="Then came the second meeting with Jim Galloway" BORDER="2" WIDTH="336" HEIGHT="564">
+<H5>
+[Illustration: Then came the second meeting with Jim Galloway.]
+</H5>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?" demanded Norton.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. why, then, go to it!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway eased himself in the saddle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you've got the sand," said Norton, "you don't have to wait!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you mean?" snapped Galloway sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and certainty of
+himself.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Before we start anything," began Galloway.  But Norton cut him short.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton's uplifted hand came down swiftly, his thumb catching in his
+belt.  There was a contemptuous glitter in his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It will probably be neither; what are they?  I've got a day's ride
+ahead of me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And I'm going to get him; as much as anything for the sake of swatting
+the devil around the stump."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You've said it all now, have you?" he demanded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," said Galloway.  "It's up to you this time.  What's the word?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton laughed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway shrugged and swung his horse back into the trail.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So long," he said colorlessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So long," Norton returned.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap11"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE FIGHT AT LA CASA BLANCA
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't believe," returned Virginia, "that I ever had him smile at me,
+Florrie."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia laughed, failing to picture Florrie grown murderous.  But
+Florrie merely pursed her lips as her eyes followed Galloway down the
+street.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia started.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You don't mean&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;." she began quickly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Florrie laughed, but the other girl noted wonderingly a fresher tint of
+color in her cool cheeks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. if he called with the look in his
+eyes now, with the tone he knew to put into his voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In Tecolote, a straggling village of many dogs and swarthy, grimy-faced
+children, he tarried until well after dark, making his meal of coffee,
+<I>frijoles</I>, and <I>chili con carne</I>, 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hello, Pete," Norton returned quietly.  "Haven't seen Vidal lately,
+have you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton allowed himself the luxury of a mystifying smile as Pete Nuñez
+lifted probing eyes to his face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What's this about Vidal being here?" Cutter asked sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They're waiting for me," was Norton's quick thought.  "Galloway knew
+I'd come."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Shoot, Galloway!" cried Norton.  "Shoot, damn you, shoot!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All right, Nort?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway is not here yet," he snapped.  And, lifting his voice: "Come
+on, Galloway."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Come out, Galloway," said Struve coldly.  "I've got you covered."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"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.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+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
+hair.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap12"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+WAVERING IN THE BALANCE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Ignacio Chavez, waiting to ask no questions, had raced away through the
+darkness to beat out a wild alarm upon his bells.  Later he would learn
+how many were dead and would set the Captain mourning.  But already had
+San Juan poured out her handful of citizens upon the street.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Keep those men where they are," called Tom Cutter to Struve.  "Every
+damned one of them; there'll be an answer wanted for to-night's work.
+Get a doctor, somebody; Patten or Miss Page."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Candles were brought; presently a lamp was found and set on the bar.
+The curious began to desert Struve and his prisoners outside, and to
+crowd about Cutter and the two forms lying still in the corner.  Kid
+Rickard, cursing now and then, had dragged himself a little away and
+grew quiet, half propped up against the wall.  Struve, as the fire of
+fagots and grass began to burn low, commanded Galloway to lead the way
+back into the barroom and herded five other men after him, the shotgun
+promising a mutilated body to any man of them who sought to run for it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nuñez is dead," reported the deputy sheriff, getting up from his
+knees.  "Norton is alive and that's about all.  A shot along the side
+of the head."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He turned slowly toward Galloway who, with steady hands and his face
+set in hard, inscrutable lines, was pouring himself a generous glass of
+whiskey.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Looks like you'd got him, Jim," he said harshly, his eyes glittering.
+"And it looks like I'd got you.  Where I want you, by God!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway drank his whiskey and made no reply.  He was thinking,
+thinking fast.  His eyes were never still now, but roved from Rod
+Norton's white face to the faces of Tom Cutter, Struve, and the other
+men gathering in the room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Borne upon one of the Casa Blanca's doors Norton was carried to
+Struve's hotel, the nearest place where an attempt could be made to
+care for him.  Word came in that Virginia Page had been summoned upon
+one of her rare calls and was in Las Estrellas.  Patten, however, would
+be on hand in a moment.  It was suggested that Kid Rickard also be
+carried to the hotel.  But he himself asked to be left where he was
+until Patten came, and Cutter raised no objection.  It was clear that
+the Kid was too badly hurt to think of making an escape, were such his
+desire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway and Antone alone were put under arrest, the others merely
+advised to be on hand if they were wanted later.  Galloway coolly
+demanded the charge against him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Resisting an officer is as good as any right now," snapped Cutter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As quiet claimed the town again Caleb Patten became the most important
+figure in San Juan.  At such moments he seemed to swell visibly.  He
+drove the curious from the room while he examined the unconscious
+sheriff and, when he had finished, merely shook his head, looked grave,
+and refused to commit himself.  He ordered Norton undressed and put to
+bed, went down the street to see Kid Rickard, probed the wound in the
+upper chest, ordered him to bed, and returned to Norton at the hotel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well?" asked John Engle who had arrived, talked with Struve, and now
+looked anxiously to Patten.  Patten shrugged.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Heavy-caliber bullet ripped along the side of his head," he said
+thoughtfully.  "I am going to make a second examination now.  Doubtless
+just the shock stunned him.  That or striking his head as he pitched
+forward; there's another slight wound, a scalp wound, showing where his
+head hit as he fell."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A moment later Tom Cutter came in hastily, stood for a little staring
+with frowning, troubled eyes at the quiet form on the bed, and went
+away, tugging at his lip, his frown deepening.  He had his hands full
+to-night, had Tom Cutter, and no one but himself knew how he wanted Rod
+Norton to tell him just what to do, to show him the way to make no
+mistake.  Leaving the room he had gone no farther than the front door
+when he swung about and returned.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"May I have a word with you, Mr. Engle?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle nodded and followed him silently.  Out in the street, in the full
+light of Struve's porch-lamp, Cutter stopped, glancing about him to
+make sure that he was not overheard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You know all about the shooting of Brocky Lane up in the mountains,"
+he said hurriedly.  "Rod told me you did.  Well, I just gathered in
+Moraga!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Moraga?" muttered Engle.  "He has seen Galloway, then?  And told him
+all about our knowing the rifles were cached in the old caves?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I found him at the Casa Blanca," said Cutter, the worried look in his
+eyes.  "Somebody shot out the light when the mix-up started, you know.
+I've a notion it was Moraga.  He was in one of the little
+card-rooms&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. putting on his shoes!  I got his gun; he'd fired just
+one shot.  The muzzle of it was bloody."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If he has told Galloway.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But I don't believe he has.  Struve says that just as Norton started
+things he saw a man run in from the cottonwoods and duck into the
+house.  It was Struve's job to see that nobody got out and he let him
+go by.  If it wasn't Moraga, who was it?  And, when I grabbed him just
+now, the first thing he said was: 'I want to talk with Galloway.'"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You didn't let him?" demanded Engle quickly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  A couple of the boys have walked him off down the road.  I've got
+Galloway and Antone in the jail.  Now, what I want is some advice.
+What am I going to do with this job until Rod Norton comes to and takes
+a hand&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. if he ever does," he muttered heavily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's clear that you've got to keep Moraga away from Galloway; if they
+haven't already had a chance to talk it's a pure Godsend and it's up to
+you that they don't get that chance."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes,", admitted Cutter slowly.  "But I'm the first man to admit that
+I'm all muggled up.  What did Moraga have his shoes off for?  If he
+shot out the light, why did he do it?  And how'd he get blood on his
+gun?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All questions for the district attorney later, Tom," he answered.
+"But, if you want any advice from me, here it is: Get Moraga out of the
+way on the jump.  He is supposed to be in jail in the next county; he
+must have broken out.  Send a man to Las Palmas to telephone to Sheriff
+Roberts; send Moraga along with him.  And, whatever you do, keep Jim
+Galloway where you've got him.  I think we've got our case against him
+to-night."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's what I've been thinking.  I guess that's what Norton would do,
+eh?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure of it," said Engle promptly.  "Find out, if you can, whether
+Moraga got a chance to talk with Galloway.  I'm going back to the house
+to let my wife and Florrie know what has happened."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle hurried to his home, told what had happened, and, leaving his
+wife anxious, his daughter weeping hysterically, returned to the hotel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've done all that any one could do for him," said Patten, as though
+defending himself because of Norton's continued unconsciousness.  "He's
+in pretty bad shape, Engle.  Oh, I guess I can pull him through, but at
+that it's going to be a close squeak.  Lucky I was right on hand,
+though."  And he grew technical, spoke of blood pressures taken, of
+traumatism superinducing prolonged coma, of this and that which made no
+impression on the banker.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You mentioned two wounds," Engle reminded him.  "The one made by the
+bullet and another.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"By his head striking as he fell?  Yes; that would have completed the
+work of the first shock in knocking him unconscious.  But it is a
+negligible affair now; he wouldn't know anything about it in the
+morning if it weren't for the lump that'll be there.  And since the
+other injury, the long gouging cut made by the bullet, has just plowed
+along the outer surface of the skull, I think that I can promise you
+he'll be all right pretty soon now.  We ought to have some ice, but
+I've made cold compresses do."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle went again to look in upon Norton.  The sheriff lay as before, on
+his back, his limbs lax, his face deathly white, a bandage about his
+head.  A lump came into the banker's throat and he turned away.  For he
+remembered that just so had Billy Norton lain, that Billy Norton had
+never regained consciousness&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and that the blow then as now had
+been struck by Galloway or Galloway's man.  The sudden fear was upon
+him that Rod Norton was even more badly hurt than Caleb Patten
+admitted.  The fear did not lessen as the night drew on and finally
+brightened into another day.  When the sun flared up out of the
+flatlands lying beyond Tecolote the wounded man at Struve's hotel lay
+as he had done all night giving no sign to tell whether he was life's
+or death's.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap13"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+CONCEALMENT
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+The eyes of San Juan were upon Caleb Patten throughout the night and
+during the long hours of the following day.  Under them his inflated
+ego grew further distended while, waxing more technical than ever, he
+explained how a man in Rod Norton's condition could live and yet lie
+like a man dead.  So prolific and involved were his medical phrases
+that men like John Engle and Struve began to ask themselves if Patten
+understood his case.  When, after twelve hours, the wounded man awoke
+to a troubled consciousness Patten's relief was scarcely less visible
+than that of Norton's friends.  Patten felt his prestige taking unto
+itself new wings and immediately grew more wisely verbose than ever.
+It was a rare privilege to have the most talked of and generally liked
+man of the community under his hands; it was wine to Patten's soul to
+have that man show signs of recovering under his skill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So he drove well-wishers from the room, drew the shades, commanded
+quiet and came and went eternally, doing nothing whatever and appearing
+to be fighting, sleeves rolled up, for a threatened life.  Long before
+noon there were those who had laughed at Patten before, but who now
+accused themselves of having failed to do him justice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia Page had remained all night with her patient in Las Estrellas.
+The first rumor she had of the fight in the Casa Blanca was borne to
+her ears by Ignacio's bell as she rode back toward San Juan.  Only a
+few hours ago she had talked with Galloway, watching him banter with
+Florrie Engle; but a little before that, earlier in the same day, she
+had seen Rod Norton.  Before she galloped up to the old Mission garden
+her heart was beating excitedly, and she was asking herself, a little
+fearfully: "Is it Galloway or is it Rod Norton?"  For she was so sure
+that in the end Ignacio would ring the Captain for one of them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ignacio told her the story.  Norton was lying in the hotel,
+unconscious, Patten working over him; Jim Galloway and Antone were in
+the little jail and soon would be taken to the county-seat; Kid Rickard
+was shot through the lung but would live, Patten said; Vidal Nuñez,
+over whom the whole thing had started, was dead.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If <I>mi amigo</I> Roderico die," mumbled Ignacio, "it will be two
+Nortones, two sheriffs, that die because of Galloway.  If Roderico
+live, then the next time he will kill Galloway.  You will see,
+<I>señorita</I>."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She made no answer as she rode slowly down the street.  She was
+thinking how, only a few weeks ago, she had heard the bells ring for
+the first time, how then Galloway and Norton had been but meaningless
+names to her, how she had been little moved by either the sound of
+pistol-shots or the Captain's heavy tolling.  Now things were
+different.  Just in what were they "different" and to what degree?  She
+could not answer her own question before she was at the hotel.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Struve came immediately, noted her pale face, attributed it to a
+sleepless night, and made her take a cup of coffee.  He rounded out the
+information she already had from Ignacio.  Norton was still unconscious
+though, only a few minutes ago, Patten had reported signs of
+improvement.  Mrs. Engle had been with him, was still there acting
+nurse; he was being given every attention possible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten himself entered, drawn by the aroma of coffee.  He nodded
+carelessly to the girl and remarked to Struve, with a flash of triumph
+in his eyes, that at last he had "brought him around."  Norton was very
+weak, sick, dizzy, perhaps not yet out of danger.  But Patten had won
+in the initial skirmish with old man Death.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At least, so Struve was given to feel.  Virginia, with a quick look at
+Patten's complacent face, was moved with sudden, almost insistent
+longing, that Rod Norton's life might be given into her own hands
+rather than remain in the pudgy hands of a man she at once disliked as
+an individual and failed to admire as a physician.  For she had needed
+no long residence in San Juan to form her own estimate of the man's
+ability&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. or lack of ability.  But plainly this was Patten's case,
+not hers; she got up from the table and went into her own room.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Elmer she found lying fully dressed upon a couch in her office,
+sleeping heavily.  She stood over him a moment, her eyes tender; he was
+still, would always be, her baby brother.  Then she went to her own
+room and threw herself down upon her bed, worn out, anxious, vaguely
+fearful for the future.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a long day for San Juan.  Mrs. Engle came now and then to
+Virginia's room to wipe her eyes and force a hopeful smile; Florrie ran
+in like a young tempest to weep copiously and hyperbolically invest
+poor dear Roddy with all imaginable heroic attributes; Engle and Struve
+and Tom Cutter were grave-eyed and distressed.  Every hour Ignacio came
+to the hotel to ask quietly for news.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In his own way, it appeared that Elmer Page was as deeply concerned as
+any one.  It was long before he told Virginia that he had been in the
+Casa Blanca when the shooting occurred; haltingly he gave her his
+version of it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Don't you think, Elmer," suggested the girl somewhat wearily, "that
+you have gotten hold of the wrong end of things here?  I mean in
+choosing your friends?  Certainly after this you will have nothing to
+do with men like Galloway and Rickard?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ten minutes' talk with Elmer gave her a deeper understanding of his
+attitude than she had been able to guess until now.  Spontaneously he
+had leaned toward Kid Rickard because the Kid was a "killer" and Elmer
+was a boy; in other words, because young Page's imagination made of
+Rickard a truly picturesque figure.  Since Rickard admired Jim Galloway
+as he had never known how to admire aught else that breathed and
+walked, Elmer's eyes had from the first rested approvingly upon the
+massive figure of Casa Blanca's owner.  That both Galloway and Rickard
+were fighting against persecution, were merely individuals wronged by
+the law and too fearlessly independent to submit to the high hand of
+sheriff or judge, was easily implanted in the boy's mind.  Yesterday
+his fancies were ready to make heroes of Galloway and his crowd, to
+make of Norton a meddler hiding behind the bulwark of his office, and
+hounding those who were too manly to step aside for him.  But now Elmer
+was all at sea, no land in sight.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A gun in each hand, Sis," he cried warmly, his cheeks flushed, as the
+almost constantly recurring picture formed again in his memory.  "And
+if you could have only seen his eyes!  Talk about hiding behind
+anything&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. no sir!  And him only one against Galloway and the Kid
+and Nuñez and a whole room full."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Here was Elmer's trouble drawn to the surface; he was touched with
+leaping admiration for the man who lay now in the darkened room, he
+couldn't admire both Norton, the sheriff, and Galloway and Rickard, the
+sheriff's sworn enemies!  Which way should Elmer Page turn?  Virginia
+very wisely held her tongue.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Tom Cutter, having conferred with Engle and Struve, left San Juan in
+the early afternoon, convoying his prisoners to the greater security of
+the county jail.  It seemed the wisest step, the one which Norton would
+have taken.  Besides, Galloway insisted upon it and upon being allowed
+to send a message to his lawyer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am willing to stand trial," said Galloway indifferently.  "I'll
+arrange for bail to-morrow and be back to-morrow night."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The question which Tom Cutter, Struve, and Engle all asked of
+themselves and of each other, "Did Moraga get his chance to talk with
+Galloway?" went unanswered.  There was nothing to do but wait upon the
+future to know that, unless Moraga, now on his way back to Sheriff
+Roberts, could be made to talk.  And Moraga was not given to garrulity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Meantime Patten brought hourly reports of Norton.  He was still in
+danger, to be sure; but he was doing as well as could be expected.  No
+one must go into the room except Mrs. Engle as nurse.  Norton was fully
+conscious, but forbidden to talk; he recognized those about him, his
+eyes were clear, his temperature satisfactory, his strength no longer
+waning.  He had partaken of a bit of nourishment and to-morrow, if
+there were no unlooked-for complications, would be able to speak with
+John Engle for whom he had asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the days which followed, days in which Rod Norton lay quiet in a
+darkened room, Virginia Page was conscious of having awakened some form
+of interest in Caleb Patten.  His eyes followed her when she came and
+went, and, when she surprised them, were withdrawn swiftly, but not
+before she had seen in them a speculative thoughtfulness.  While she
+noted this she gave it little thought, so occupied was her mind with
+other matters.  She had postponed, as long as she could, a talk with
+Julius Struve, her spirit galled that she must in the end go to him
+"like a beggar," as she expressed it to herself.  But one day, her head
+erect, she followed the hotel keeper into his office.  In the hallway
+she encountered Patten.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"May I have a word with you?" Patten asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Virginia had steeled herself to the interview with Struve and would
+no longer set it aside, even for a moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If you care to wait on the veranda," she told Patten, "I'll be out in
+a minute.  I want to see Mr. Struve now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten stood aside and watched her pass, the shrewdly questioning look
+in his eyes.  When she disappeared in the office he remained where she
+had left him, listening.  When she began to speak with Struve, her
+voice rapid and hinting at nervousness, he came a quiet step nearer the
+door she had closed after her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am ashamed of myself, Mr. Struve," said Virginia, coming straight to
+the point.  "I owe you already for a month's board and room rent for
+myself and Elmer.  I&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's perfectly all right, Miss Virginia," said Struve hurriedly.  "I
+know the sort of job you've got on your hands making collections.  If
+you can wait I am willing to do so.  Glad to do so, in fact."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten, fingering his little mustache, then letting his thick fingers
+drop to the diamond in his tie, smiled with satisfaction.  Smiling, he
+tiptoed down the hall and went out upon the veranda where he smoked his
+cigar serenely.  When Virginia came out to him her face was flaming.
+Had he not beard Struve's words, he would have thought that his answer
+to her apology had been an angry demand for immediate payment.  Patten
+failed to understand how the girl's fine, independent nature writhed in
+a situation all but intolerable.  That she appreciated gratefully
+Struve's quick kindness did not minimize her own mortification.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten watched her seat herself; then he launched himself into his
+subject.  Virginia listened at first with faint interest, then with
+quickened wonder.  For the life of her she could not tell if the little
+man were seeking to flatter or insult her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have leased an old, deserted ranch-house just on the edge of town,"
+he told her.  "Got it for a song, too.  Some first-rate land goes with
+it; I'll probably buy the whole thing before long.  There's plenty of
+good water.  Now, what am I up to, eh?  Just the same thing all the
+time, if you want to know.  And that means making money."
+
+Leaning forward he knocked the ash from his cigar and brought himself
+confidentially nearer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"An open-air sanatorium," he announced triumphantly.  "For tuberculosis
+patients.  There are lots of them," and he waved his arm in a wide half
+circle, "coming out of the East on the run, scared to death, and with
+more or less money in their pockets.  It's a big proposition, a sure
+money-getter."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He grew more animated than she had ever dreamed he could be, as he
+sketched his plans.  While she was wondering why he had come to her
+with them he gave his explanation, made her his double offer.  Then it
+was that she was puzzled to know whether he meant to compliment her or
+merely to insult her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a word he assured her from the heights of superiority to which he
+had ascended these last few days of importance, the practice of
+medicine was no woman's work at best; certainly not in a land like
+this, where a man's endurance, breadth or mind, and keener innate
+ability to cope with big situations were indicated.  No work for a slip
+of a girl like Virginia Page.  Of that Caleb Patten assured her
+unhesitatingly.  But there was work for such as her and in a place
+which he would create for her.  Fairly bewildered at his audacity she
+found herself listening to his suggestion that she marry Caleb Patten
+and become a sort of head nurse in an institution which he would found!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In spite of her she was moved to sudden, impulsive laughter.  She had
+not meant to laugh at the man who might be sincere, who, it was
+possible, was merely a fool.  But laugh she did, so that her mirth
+reached Rod Norton where he lay upon his bed and made him stir
+restlessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you mean by that?" demanded Patten, a flush in his cheeks.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I mean," stammered Virginia at last, "that I thank you very much, Dr.
+Patten, but that I can avail myself of neither the opportunity of being
+your wife or your head nurse.  As for my inability to do for myself
+what I have set out to accomplish&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. well, I am not afraid yet.
+There is work to be done here and I don't quite agree with you that
+it's all man's work.  There's always a little left over for a woman,
+you know," she added brightly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Patten was obviously angered.  He flung to his feet and glared down
+at her.  Perhaps it had not entered his thought that she could make
+other than the answer he wanted; it had been very clear to him that he
+was offering to become responsible for one who was embarked upon a
+voyage already destined to failure, that he would support her, merely
+doing as many other men of his ilk did and make her work for all that
+she got.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's silly nonsense, your thinking you can make a living here," he
+said irritably.  "I'm already established, I'm a man, I can have all of
+the cases I want, you'll get only a few breeds who haven't a dollar to
+the dozen of them.  If you are already broke and can't even pay for
+your room and board&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who told you that?" she asked quickly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I can hear, can't I?" he demanded coarsely.  "Didn't you go just now
+to beg Struve to hold you over?  And&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She slipped out of her chair and stood a moment staring coldly and
+contemptuously at him.  Then she was gone, leaving Patten watching her
+departure incredulously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man who hasn't any more sense than Caleb Patten," she cried within
+herself, "has no business with a physician's license.  It's a sheer
+wonder he didn't kill Roderick Norton!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Already she had forgotten her words with Struve, or rather the matter
+for the present was shoved aside in her mind by another.  She had come
+here to make good, she had her fight before her, and she was going to
+make good.  She had to&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. for herself, for her own pride, for
+Elmer's sake.  She went straight to Elmer and made him sit down and
+listen while she sketched actual conditions briefly and emphatically.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was old enough to do something for himself in the world, continued
+idleness did him no earthly good and might do him no end of harm
+morally, mentally, and physically.  He had been her baby brother long
+enough; it was time that he became a man.  She had supported him until
+now, asking nothing of him in return save that he kept out of mischief
+a certain percentage of the time.  Now he was going to work and help
+out.  He could go to John Engle and get something to do upon one of
+Engle's ranches.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Somewhat to her surprise Elmer responded eagerly.  He had been thinking
+the matter over and it appealed to him.  What he did not tell her was
+that he had seen some of the vaqueros riding in from one of the
+outlying ranges, lean, brown, quick-eyed men who bestrode high-headed
+mounts and who wore spurs, wide hats, shaggy chaps, and who, perhaps,
+carried revolvers hidden away in their hip pockets, men who drank
+freely, spent their money as freely at dice and cards, and who, all in
+all, were a picturesque crowd.  Elmer took up his hat and went down to
+the bank and had a talk with John Engle.  Virginia's eyes followed him
+hopefully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That day Norton was allowed for the first time to receive callers.  He
+had his talk with Engle, limited to five minutes by Patten who hung
+about curiously until Norton said pointedly that he wanted to speak
+privately with the banker.  Later Florrie came with her mother,
+bringing an immense armful of roses culled by her own hands, excited,
+earnest, entering the shaded room like a frightened child, speaking
+only in hushed whispers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Won't you come in too for a moment, Virginia?" asked Mrs. Engle.
+"Roddy will be glad to see you; he has asked about you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Virginia made an excuse; it was Patten's case and after what had
+occurred between herself and Patten she had no intention of so much as
+seeming to overstep the professional lines.  The following day,
+however, she did go to see him.  Patten himself, stiff and boorish,
+asked her to.  His patient had asked for her several times, knowing
+that she was in the building and marking how she made an exception and
+refused to look in on him while all of his other friends were doing so,
+some of them coming many miles.  Patten told her that Norton was not
+well by any means yet and that he did not intend to have him worried up
+over an imagined slight.  So Virginia did as she was bid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Engle was in the room, bending over the bed with a dampened towel
+to lay upon Norton's forehead; he showed a sign of fever and his head
+ached constantly.  He looked about quickly as the girl came in, his
+hand stirring a little, offering itself.  She took it by way of
+greeting and sat down in the chair drawn up at his side.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's good of you to come!" he said quickly, his eyes brightening.  "I
+was beginning to wonder if I had offended you in some way?  You see,
+everybody has run in but you.  A man gets spoiled when he's laid up
+like this, doesn't he?  Especially when it's the first time he can
+remember when he has stuck in bed for upward of twenty-four hours
+running."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Despite her familiarity with the swift ravages of illness she received
+a positive shock as she looked at him; she had visualized him during
+these latter days as she had last seen him, brown, vitally robust, the
+embodiment of lean, clean strength.  Now sunless inaction had set its
+mark in his skin which had already grown sallow; his eyes burned into
+her own, his hand fell weakly to the coverlet as she removed her own,
+his fingers plucking nervously.  And yet she summoned a cheerful smile
+to answer his.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was satisfied just in hearing that you were doing well," she said.
+"And I know that the fewer people a sick man sees the better for him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He moved his head restlessly back and forth on his pillow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not for a man like me," he told her.  "I'm not used to this sort of
+business.  Just lying here with my eyes shut or staring at the ceiling,
+which is worse, drives a man mad.  I told Patten to-day that if he
+didn't let me see folks I'd get up and go out if I had to crawl."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia laughed, determined to be cheerful.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am afraid that you make a rather troublesome patient, don't you?"
+she asked lightly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton made no answer but lay motionless save for the constant plucking
+at his coverlet, his eyes moodily fixed upon the wall.  Mrs. Engle,
+finding the water-pitcher empty and saying that she would be back in
+two seconds, went out to fill it.  Promptly Norton's eyes returned to
+Virginia's face, resting there steadily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've been dizzy and sick and half out of my head a whole lot," he said
+abruptly.  "I've been thinking of you most of the time, dreaming about
+you, climbing cliffs with you.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He broke off suddenly, but did not remove his eyes from hers.  It was
+she who turned away, pretending to find it necessary to adjust the
+window-curtain.  It was impossible to sit quietly while he looked at
+her that way, his eyes all without warning filling with a look for any
+girl to read a look of glowing admiration, almost a look of pure
+love-making.  Norton sighed and again his head moved restlessly on his
+pillow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've had time to think here of late," he said after a little.  "More
+time to think than I've ever had before in my life.  About everything;
+myself and Jim Galloway and you.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  I have decided to send word to
+the district attorney to let Galloway go," he added, again watching
+her.  "I am not going to appear against him and there's no case if I
+don't."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;." she began, wondering.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There are no buts about it.  Suppose I can get him convicted, which I
+doubt; he'd get a light sentence, would appeal, at most would be out of
+the way a couple of years or so.  And then it would all be to do over
+again.  No; I want him out in the open, where he can go as far as he
+wants to go.  And then&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She saw how his body stiffened as he braced himself with his feet
+against the foot-board.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We won't talk shop," she said gently.  "It isn't good for you.  Don't
+think about such things any more than you have to."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've got to think about something," he said impatiently.  "Can I think
+about you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why not?" she answered as lightly as she had spoken before.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Maybe that isn't good for me either," he answered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Nonsense.  It's always good for us to think about our friends."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His eyes wandered from hers, rested a moment upon the little table near
+his bedhead and came back to her, narrowing a little.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will you set a chair against that window-shade?" he asked.  "The light
+at the side hurts my eyes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a natural request and she turned naturally to do what he asked.
+But, even with her back turned, she knew that he had reached out
+swiftly for something that lay on the table, that he had thrust it out
+of sight under his pillow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Mrs. Engle returned and Virginia, staying another minute, said good-by.
+As she went out she glanced down at the table.  In her room she asked
+herself what it was that he had snatched and hidden.  It seemed a
+strange thing to do and the question perplexed her; while she attached
+no importance to it, it was there like a pebble in one's shoe, refusing
+to be ignored.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That night, just as she was going to sleep, she knew.  Out of a half
+doze she had visualized the table with its couple of bottles, a
+withering rose, a scrap of note-paper, a fountain pen.  The pen&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+it was Patten's&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. had evidently leaked and had been wiped
+carelessly upon the sheet of paper, left lying with the paper half
+wrapped around it.  She had noted carelessly a few scrawled words in
+Patten's slovenly hand.  And she knew that it had been removed while
+she turned her back, removed by a hand which, in its haste, had slipped
+the pen with it under the pillow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She went to sleep incensed with herself that she gave the matter
+another thought.  But she kept asking herself what it was that Patten
+had written that Roderick Norton did not want her to read.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap14"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+A FREE MAN
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+"I am a free man, if you please."  The sheriff stood in the hotel
+doorway, looking down upon her as she sat in her favorite veranda
+chair.  "I have given my keeper his fee and sent him away.  May I watch
+you while you read?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of
+welcome.  He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low
+entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt
+and haggard.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I shouldn't be reading in this light, anyway," she said.  "I hadn't
+noticed that the sun was down.  It is good to be what you call free
+again, isn't it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He laughed softly, put back his head, filled his lungs.  Then he came
+on to her and stood leaning against the wall, his hat cocked to one
+side to hide the bandage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The world is good," he announced with gay positiveness.  "Especially
+when you've been away from it for a spell and weren't quite sure what
+was next.  And especially, too, when you've had time to think.  Did you
+ever take off a week and just do nothing but think?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"One doesn't have time for that sort of thing as a rule," she admitted.
+"There's a chair standing empty if you care to let me in on your
+deductions."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't want to sit down or lie down until I'm ready to drop," he
+grinned down at her.  "A bed makes me sick at my stomach and a chair is
+pretty nearly as bad.  I'd like almighty well to get a horse between my
+knees&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and <I>ride</I>!  Suppose I'd fall to pieces if I tried it
+right now?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure of it.  And not so sure that you haven't discharged your keeper
+prematurely.  You mustn't think of such things."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There you go.  Forbidding me to think again!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Believe I will sit
+down; would you believe that a full-grown man like me could get as weak
+as a cat this quick?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He took the chair just beyond her, tilted it back against the wall, his
+booted heels caught under its elevated legs, and glanced away from her
+to the colorful sky above San Juan's scattered houses in the west.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, sir," he continued his train of thought, "I'd like a horse
+between my knees; I'd like to ride out yonder into the sunset, to meet
+the night as it comes down; I'd like the feeling of nothing but the
+stars over me instead of the smothery roof of a house.  Doesn't it
+appeal to you, too?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," she said.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You on Persis, with me on my big roan, riding not as we rode that
+other night, but just for the fun of it.  I'd like to ride like the
+devil.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  You don't mind my saying what I mean, do you?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. to go
+scooting across the sage-brush letting out a yell at every jump, boring
+holes in the night with my gun, making all of the racket and dust that
+one man can make.  Ever feel that way? just like getting outside and
+making a noise?  Let me talk!  I'm the one who has been shut up for so
+long my tongue has started to grow fast to the roof of my mouth.  At
+first I could do nothing but lie flat on my back in a sort of fog,
+seeing nothing clearly, thinking not at all.  Then came the hours in
+which I could do nothing but think, under orders to keep still.  Think?
+Why, I thought about everything that ever happened, most things that
+might happen, and a whole lot that never will.  Now comes the third
+stage; I can talk better than I can walk.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Do you mind listening
+while a man raves?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not in the least."  She found his mood contagious and, smiling in that
+quick, bright way natural to her, showed for a moment the twin dimples
+of which together with a host of other things he had had ample time to
+think during his bedroom imprisonment.  "Please rave on."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In due course," he mused, "the fourth stage will arrive and I can be
+doing something besides talk, can't I?  Now let me tell you about the
+King's Palace."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You begin well."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The King's Palace is where we are going on our first outing.  That was
+decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M.  You and I and, if
+you like, Florrie and your kid brother.  We'll ride out there in the
+very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone.  We'll
+lunch and loaf there all day.  For lunch we will have bacon and coffee,
+cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms.  We will have some
+trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest
+mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about.  We will have cheese,
+perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert.  We'll ride home in the
+dusk and the dark."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The King's Palace?" she asked curiously.  "I never heard of such a
+place.  Are you making it all up?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not a bit of it.  It's all that's left of some of the old ruins of the
+same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Do you know
+why I am bound to get Jim Galloway's tag soon or late?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt
+digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other
+words, because he opposes the law and you represent it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Because he plays the game wrong!  Some more results of a long week of
+nothing to do but think things out.  There is just one way for a
+law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You mean that a man can get away with it?  Surely not for good?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But he nodded thoughtfully at the slowly fading strata of shaded colors
+splashed across the sky.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man can get away with it for keeps&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. if he plays the game right.
+Jim Galloway isn't that man and so I'll get him.  He has ignored the
+first necessary principle, which is the lone hand."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You mean he takes men into his confidence?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And he goes on and ignores the second necessary principle; a man must
+stop short of murder.  If he turns gangman and killer, he ties his own
+rope around his neck.  If a man like Galloway, a man with brains,
+power, without fear, without scruple, should decide to loot this corner
+of the world or any other corner, and set about it right, playing the
+lone hand invariably, he would be a man I couldn't bring in in a
+thousand years.  But Galloway has slipped up; he has too many Moragas
+and Antones and Vidals at his heels; he has been the cause, directly or
+indirectly, of too many killings.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  A theft will be forgotten in
+time, the hue and cry die down; spilled blood cries to heaven after ten
+years."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway is back in San Juan."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I know.  I wanted him back.  I wanted him free and unhampered.  He'll
+be bolder than ever now, won't he, if this case is dropped?  He's come
+out a little into the open already, he'll be tempted out a little
+farther.  There'll be more of his work soon, a robbery here or there,
+and he will grow so sure of himself that he'll get careless.  Then I'll
+get him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But have you the right?" she asked quickly.  "Knowing him a
+lawbreaker, have you the right to allow him to go farther and farther,
+just because in the end you hope to get him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He met her look with a smile which puzzled her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll answer your question when you define right and wrong for me," he
+said quietly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They grew silent together, watching the gradual sinking of day into
+twilight and early dusk.  Norton, for all his vaunted ravings, had
+grown thoughtful; Virginia turning her eyes toward him while his were
+staring out beyond the house-tops saw in them a look of deep, frowning
+speculation.  And through this look, like a little fire gleaming
+through a fog, was another look whose meaning baffled her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you think of Patten?" he asked.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Startled by his abruptness, characteristic of him though it was to-day,
+she asked in puzzled fashion:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you mean?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not as a man," he said, withdrawing his gaze from the sunset and
+bestowing it gravely upon her.  "As a physician.  Do you size him up as
+capable or as something of a quack?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She hesitated.  But finally she made the only reply possible.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Of course you don't expect any answer, knowing that you should not
+come to one member of a profession for an estimate of another.  And,
+besides, you realize that I know nothing whatever of Dr. Patten, either
+as a man or as a physician."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He laughed softly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hedging, pure, unadulterated hedging!  I didn't look for that from
+you.  Shall I tell you what we both think of him?  He is a farce and a
+fake, and I rather think that I am going to run him out of the State
+pretty soon.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  What would you say of a doctor who couldn't tell
+the difference between a wound made by a man bumping his head when he
+fell and by a smashing blow with a gun-barrel?  Patten doesn't guess
+yet that it was the blow Moraga gave me the other night which came so
+close to ringing down the sable curtains for me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Moraga?" she asked with quickened interest.  "Not the same Moraga who
+shot Brocky Lane?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The same little old Moraga," he assured her lightly.  "You needn't
+mention it abroad, of course; I don't think Galloway got a chance to
+talk with him and we are not sure yet that he even knows Moraga was
+here.  But I know somebody put me out in the dark by hammering me over
+the head; and Tom Cutter found blood on Moraga's revolver.  But we
+wander far afield.  Coming back to Patten, do we agree that he is
+something of a dub?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'd rather not discuss him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Exactly.  And I, being in the talkative way, am going to tell you that
+he has made blunders before now; that at least one man died under his
+nice little fat hands who shouldn't have died outside of jail; that
+long ago I had my suspicions and began instituting inquiries; that now
+I am fully prepared to learn that Caleb Patten has no more right to an
+M.D. after his name than I have."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must be mistaken.  I hope you are.  Men used to do that sort of
+thing, but under existing laws&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Under existing laws men do a good many things in and about San Juan
+which they shouldn't do.  I have found out that there was a Caleb
+Patten who was a young doctor; that there was a Charles Patten, his
+brother, who was a young scamp; that they both lived in Baltimore a few
+years ago; that from Baltimore they both went hastily no man knows
+where.  This gentleman whom we have with us might be either one of
+them.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Here comes Ignacio.  <I>Que hay</I>, Ignacio!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Que hay</I>, Roderico?" responded Ignacio, coming to lean languidly
+against the veranda post.  He removed his hat elaborately, his liquid
+eyes doing justice to Virginia's dainty charm.  "<I>Buenos tardes,
+señorita</I>," he greeted her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What is new, Ignacio?" queried Norton, "No bells for you to ring for
+the last ten days!  You grow fat in idleness, <I>amigo mio</I>."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Ignacio sighed and rolled his cigarette.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What is new, you ask?  No?  <I>Bueno</I>, this is new!"  He lifted his
+eyes suddenly and they were sparkling as with suppressed excitement.
+"The Devil himself has made a visit to San Juan.  <I>Si, señor; si,
+señorita</I>.  It is so."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia smiled; Norton gravely asked the explanation.  Why should his
+satanic majesty come to San Juan?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why?  <I>Quien sabe</I>?"  Ignacio shrugged all responsibility from his
+lazy shoulders.  "But he came and more bad will come from his visit,
+more and more of evil things.  One knows.  <I>Seguro que si</I>; one knows.
+But I will tell you and the señorita; no one else knows of it.  It was
+while in the Casa Blanca men are shooting, while Roderico Nortone will
+make his arrest of poor Vidal who is dead now."  He crossed himself and
+drew a thoughtful puff from his cigarette.  "I run fast to ring the
+bells.  I come into the garden and it is dark.  I come under the bells.
+And while my hand cannot find the rope&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  <I>Si, señor y
+señorita</I>!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. before I touch the rope the Captain begins to ring!
+Just a little; not long; low and quiet and&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. angry!  And then he
+stop and I shiver.  It is hard not to run out of the garden.  But I
+cross myself and find the ropes and make all the bells dance.  But I
+know; it was the Devil who was before me."
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap15"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE KING'S PALACE
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Not only was Galloway back in San Juan but, as Norton had predicted of
+him, he appeared to have every assurance that he stood in no unusual
+danger.  There had been a fight in a dark room and one man had been
+killed, certain others wounded.  The dead man was Galloway's friend,
+hence it was not to be thought that Galloway had killed him.  Kid
+Rickard was another friend.  As for the wound Rod Norton had received,
+who could swear that this man or that had given it to him?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The chances are," Galloway had already said in many quarters, "that
+Tom Cutter, getting excited, popped over his own sheriff."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+True, it was quite obvious that a charge lay at Galloway's door, that
+of harboring a fugitive from justice and of resisting an officer.  But
+with Galloway's money and influence, with the shrewdest technical
+lawyer in the State retained, with ample perjured testimony to be had
+as desired, the law-breaker saw no reason for present uneasiness.
+Perhaps more than anything else he regretted the death of Vidal Nuñez
+and the wounding of Kid Rickard.  For these matters vitally touched Jim
+Galloway and his swollen prestige among his henchmen; he had thrown the
+cloak of his protection about Vidal, had summoned him, promised him all
+safety&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and Vidal was dead.  He knew that men spoke of this over
+and over and hushed when he came upon them; that Vidal's brother, Pete,
+grumbled and muttered that Galloway was losing his grip, that soon or
+late he would fall, that falling he would drag others down with him.
+More than ever before the whole county watched for the final duello
+between Galloway and Norton.  In half a dozen small towns and
+mining-camps men laid bets upon the result.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For the first time, also, there was much barbed comment and criticism
+of the sheriff.  He had gotten this man and that, it was true.  And
+yet, after all this time, he seemed to be no nearer than at the
+beginning to getting the man who counted.  There were those who
+recalled the killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas, and reminded others that
+there had been no attempt at prosecution.  Now there had come forth
+from the Casa Blanca fresh defiance and lawlessness and still Jim
+Galloway came and went as he pleased.  Those who criticised said that
+Norton was losing his nerve, or else that he was merely incompetent
+when measured by the yardstick of swift, incisive action wedded to
+capability.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If he can't get Jim Galloway, let him step out of the way and give the
+chance to a man who can," was said many times and in many ways.  Even
+John Engle, Julius Struve, Tom Cutter, and Brocky Lane came to Norton
+at one time or another, telling him what they had heard, urging him to
+give some heed to popular clamor, and to begin legal action.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Put the skids under him, Roddy," pleaded Brocky Lane.  "We can't slide
+him far the first trip, maybe.  But a year or so in jail will break his
+grip here."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Norton shook his head.  He was playing the game his way.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The rifles are still in the cache," he told Brocky.  "He is getting
+ready, as we know; further, just as my friends are beginning to find
+fault with me, so are his hangers-on beginning to wonder if they
+haven't tied to the wrong man.  Just to save his own face he'll have to
+start something pretty pronto.  And we know about where he is going to
+strike.  It's up to us to hold our horses, Brocky."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Brocky growled a bit, but went away more than half-persuaded.  He
+called at the hotel, paid his respects to Virginia, and affording her a
+satisfaction which it was hard for her to conceal, also paid her for
+her services rendered him in the cliff-dweller's cave.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Often enough the man who tilts with the law is in most things not
+unlike his fellows, different alone perhaps in the one essential that
+he is born a few hundreds of years late in the advance of civilization.
+Going about that part of his business which has its claims to
+legitimacy, mingling freely with his fellows, he fails to stand out
+distinctly from them as a monster.  Given the slow passing of
+uneventful time, and it becomes hard and harder to consider him as a
+social menace.  When the man is of the Jim Galloway type, his plans
+large, his patience long, he may even pass out from the shadow of a
+gallows-tree and return to occupy his former place in the quiet
+community life, while his neighbors are prone to forget or condone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+As other days came and slipped by and the weeks grew out of them,
+Galloway's was a pleasant, untroubled face to be seen on the street, at
+the post-office, behind his own bar, on the country roads.  He ignored
+any animosity which San Juan might feel for him.  If a man looked at
+him stonily, Galloway did not care to let it be seen that he saw; if a
+woman turned out to avoid him, no evidence that he understood darkened
+his eyes.  He had a good-humored word to speak always; he lifted his
+hat to the banker's wife, as he had always done; he mingled with the
+crowd when there were "exercises" at the little schoolhouse; he warmly
+congratulated Miss Porter, the crabbed old-maid teacher, on the work
+she had accomplished and made her wonder fleetingly if there wasn't a
+bit of good in the man, after all.  Perhaps there was; there is in most
+men.  And Florrie Engle was beginning to wonder the same thing.  For
+Rod Norton, recovered and about his duties, was not quite the same
+touchingly heroic figure he had been while lying unconscious and in
+danger of his life.  Nor was it any part of Florrie Engle's nature to
+remain long either upon the heights or in the depths of an emotion.
+The night of the shooting she had cried out passionately against
+Galloway; as days went their placid way and she saw Galloway upon each
+one of them&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and did not see a great deal of Norton, who was
+either away or monopolizing Virginia,&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. she took the first step in
+the gambler's direction by beginning to be sorry for him.  First, it
+was too bad that Mr. Galloway did the sort of things which he did; no
+doubt he had had no mother to teach him when he was very young.  Next,
+it was a shame that he was blamed for everything that had to happen;
+maybe he was a&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. a bad man, but Florrie simply didn't believe he
+was responsible for half of the deeds laid at his door.  Finally,
+through a long and intricate chain of considerations, the girl reached
+the point where she nodded when Galloway lifted his hat.  The smile in
+the man's eyes was one of pure triumph.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, my dear!"  Florrie burst into Virginia's room, flushed and
+palpitant with her latest emotion.  "He has told me all about it, and
+do you know, I don't believe that we have the right to blame him?
+Doesn't it say in the Bible or&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. or somewhere, that greater praise
+or something shall no man have than he who gives his life for a friend?
+It's something like that, anyway.  Aren't people just horrid, always
+blaming other people, never stopping to consider their reasons and
+impulses and looking at it from their side?  Vidal Nuñez was a friend
+of Mr. Galloway's; he was in Mr. Galloway's house.  Of course&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought that you didn't speak to him any more."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't for a long time.  But if you could have only seen the way he
+always looks at me when I bump into him.  Virgie, I believe he is sad
+and lonely and that he would like to be good if people would only give
+him the chance.  Why, he is human, after all, you know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia began to ask herself if Galloway were merely amusing himself
+with Florrie or if the man were really interested in her.  It did not
+seem likely that a girl like Florrie would appeal to a man like him;
+and yet, why not?  There is at least a grain of truth, if no more, in
+the old saw of the attraction of opposites.  And it was scarcely more
+improbable that he should be interested in her than that she should
+allow herself to be ever so slightly moved by him.  Furthermore, in its
+final analysis, emotion is not always to be explained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia set herself the task of watching for any slightest development
+of the man's influence over the girl.  She saw Florrie almost daily,
+either at the hotel to which Florrie had acquired the habit of coming
+in the cool of the afternoons or at the Engle home.  And for the sake
+of her little friend, and at the same time for Elmer's sake, she threw
+the two youngsters together as much as possible.  They quarrelled
+rather a good deal, criticised each other with startling frankness, and
+grew to be better friends than either realized.  Elmer was a vaquero
+now, as he explained whenever need be or opportunity arose, wore chaps,
+a knotted handkerchief about a throat which daily grew more brown,
+spurs as large and noisy as were to be encountered on San Juan's
+street, and his right hip pocket bulged.  None of the details escaped
+Florrie's eyes&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. he called her "Fluff" now and she nicknamed him
+"Black Bill"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and she never failed to refer to them mockingly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They tell me, Black Bill," she said innocently, "that you fell off
+your horse yesterday.  I was so <I>sorry</I>."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had offered her sympathy during a lull in the conversation, drawing
+the attention of her father, mother, and Virginia to Elmer, whose face
+reddened promptly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Florrie!" chided Mrs. Engle, hiding the twinkle in her own eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, her," said Elmer with a wave of the hand.  "I don't mind what
+Fluff says.  She's just trying to kid me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Toward the end of the evening, having been thoughtful for ten minutes,
+Elmer adopted Florrie's tactics and remarked suddenly and in a voice to
+be heard much farther than his needed to carry:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Say, Fluff.  Saw an old friend of yours the other day."  And when
+Florrie, "gun-shy" as Elmer called her, was too wise to ask any
+questions, he hastened on: "Juanito Miranda it was.  Sent his best.  So
+did Mrs. Juanito."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whereupon it was Florrie's turn to turn a scarlet of mortification and
+anger.  For Juanito had soft black eyes and almost equally soft black
+mustaches, with probably a heart to match, and only a year ago Florrie
+had been busied making a hero of him when he, the blind one, took unto
+himself an Indian bride and in all innocence heaped shame high upon the
+blonde head.  How Elmer unearthed such ancient history was a mystery to
+Florrie; but none the less she "hated" him for it.  They saw a very
+great deal of each other, each serving as a sort of balance-wheel to
+the other's self-centred complacency.  Perhaps the one subject upon
+which they could agree was Jim Galloway; Elmer still liked to look upon
+the gambler as a colossal figure standing serene among wolves, while
+Florrie could admit to him, with no fear of a chiding, that she thought
+Mr. Galloway "simply splendid!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When one evening, after having failed to show himself for a full month,
+Rod Norton came to the Engles', found Elmer and Virginia there, and
+suggested the ride to the King's Palace, he awakened no end of
+enthusiasm.  Elmer had a day off, thanks to the generosity of his
+employer, Mr. Engle, and had just secretly purchased a fresh outfit
+consisting of a silver-mounted Spanish bit, a new pair of white and
+unspeakably shaggy, draggy chaps, a wide hat with a band of snake hide,
+and boots that were the final whisper in high-heeled discomfort.
+Florrie disappeared into her room to make her own little riding-costume
+as irresistible as possible.  They were to start with the first streaks
+of dawn to-morrow, just the four of them, since the banker and his
+wife, lukewarmly invited, had no desire for a forty-mile ride between
+morning and night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was Rod Norton's privilege to lead his merry party into what for
+them was wonderland.  Even Florrie, though so much other life had been
+passed in San Juan, had never before visited the King's Palace.
+Clattering through the street while most folk were asleep, they took
+advantage of the cool of the dawn and rode swiftly.  Elmer and Florrie
+racing on ahead laid aside their accustomed weapons and were, for the
+once, utterly flattering to each other.  Each wishing to be admired,
+admired the other, and was paid back in the coveted coin.  Norton and
+Virginia, at first a little inclined toward silence, soon grew as
+noisily merry as the others, drawing deep enjoyment from the moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And at the portals of the King's Palace, reached after four hours in
+the saddle, followed by thirty minutes on foot, they stood hushed with
+wonder.  High upon the southern slope of Mt. Temple they had come
+abruptly into the unexpected.  Here a rugged plateau had caught and
+held through the ages the soil which had weathered down from the cliffs
+above; here were trees to replace the weary gray brush, shade instead
+of glare, birds as welcome substitutes for droning insects, water and
+flowers to make the cañons doubly cool and fragrant for him who had
+ascended from the dry reaches of sand below the talus.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's just like fairy-land!" cried the ecstatic Florrie.  "Roddy
+Norton, I think you're real mean not to have brought me here ages ago!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ages ago, my dear miss," laughed Norton, "you were too little to
+appreciate it.  You should thank me for bringing you now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Down through the middle of the plateau from its hidden source ran the
+purling stream which was destined to yield to sun and thirsty earth
+long before it twisted down the lower slopes of the hills.  Along its
+edges the grass was thick and rich, shot through everywhere with little
+blue blossoms and the golden gleam of the starflowers.  Further promise
+of yellow beauty was given by the stalks of the evening-primrose
+scattered on every hand, the flowers furled now, sleeping.  In the
+groves were pines, small cedars, and a sprinkling of sturdy dwarf oaks.
+And from their shelter came the welcome sound of a bird's twitter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's always about as you see it," Norton explained.  "Too hard to get
+to, too small when one makes the climb to afford enough pasturage for
+sheep.  And now the Palace itself."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Straight ahead the cliffs overhung the farther rim of the plateau.  And
+there, under the out-jutting roof of rock, an ancient people had
+fashioned themselves a home which stood now as when their hands
+laboriously set it there.  The protected ledge which afforded eternal
+foundation was slightly above the plateau's level, to be reached by a
+series of "steps" in the rock, steps which were holes worn deep,
+perhaps five hundred years ago.  The climb was steep, hazardous unless
+one went with due precaution, but the four holiday-makers hurried to
+begin it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So close to the edge of the rock ledge did the walls of the ruin stand
+that there was barely room to edge along it to come to the narrow
+doorway.  Holding hands, Norton in the lead, Elmer in the rear, they
+made their breathless way.  And then they were in the hushed, shaded
+anteroom.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dust of untroubled ages lay upon the surprisingly smooth floor.
+Walls of cemented rock rose intact on two sides, broken here and there
+on a third, while the cliff itself made the fourth at the rear.  And
+unusually spacious, wide, and high-ceiled was this room, which may have
+had its use when time was younger as a council-chamber.  At one end was
+another door, small and dark and forbidding, leading to another room.
+Beyond lay other quarters, a long line of them, which might have housed
+scores in their time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While Florrie, letting out little shrieks now and then interspersed
+with gay cries of delight, led a half-timorous way and Elmer went with
+her upon the tour of discovery, Virginia and Norton stood a moment at
+the front entrance looking down upon the fertile plateau and across it
+to the level miles running out to San Juan and beyond.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Who were they?" asked Virginia, unconscious of a half-sigh as she
+withdrew abstracted eyes from the wide panorama which had filled the
+vision of so many other men and women and little children before the
+white man came to claim the New World.  "They who builded here and
+lived and died here.  What has become of them?  Where did they go?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All questions asked a thousand times and never answered.  I don't
+know.  But they were good builders, good engineers, good
+pottery-makers, good farmers and hunters and fighters; rather a goodly
+crowd, I take it.  Come, and I'll share my secret with you while
+Florrie and Elmer discover the skeleton a little farther on and stop to
+exclaim over it."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-214"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-214.jpg" ALT="Come, and I'll share my secret with you." BORDER="2" WIDTH="346" HEIGHT="560">
+<H5>
+[Illustration: "Come, and I'll share my secret with you."]
+</H5>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Norton's secret was a hidden room of the King's Palace.  While many men
+knew of the Palace itself, he believed that none other than himself had
+ever ferreted out this particular chamber which he called the Treasure
+Chamber.  It was to be reached by clambering through an orifice of the
+eastern wall, over a clutter of fallen blocks of stone and a score of
+feet along the narrowing ledge.  Just before they came to the point
+where the encroaching wall of cliff denied farther foothold they found
+a fissure in the rock itself wide enough to allow them to slip into it.
+Again they climbed, coming presently to a ledge smaller than the one
+below and hidden by an outthrust boulder.  Here was the last of the
+rooms of the King's Palace, cunningly masked, to be found only by
+accident, even the cramped door concealed by the branches of a tortured
+cedar.  Norton pushed them aside and they entered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have cached a few of my things here," he told her as they confronted
+each other in the gloom of the room's interior.  "And the joke of it is
+that my hiding-place is almost if not quite directly below the caves
+where Galloway's rifles are.  This is a secret, mind you!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  If
+you'll look around, you'll find some of the articles our friends the
+cliff-dwellers left behind them when they made their getaway."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In a dark corner she found a blackened coffee-pot and a frying-pan,
+proclaiming anachronistically that here was the twentieth century
+interloping upon the fifteenth, articles which Norton had hidden here.
+In another corner were jumbled the things which the ancient people had
+left to mark their passing, an earthenware water-jar, half a dozen
+spear and arrow points of stone, a clumsy-looking axe still fitted to
+its handle of century-seasoned cedar, bound with thongs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But," exclaimed the girl, "the wood, the raw-hide&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. they would
+have disintegrated long ago.  They must belong to the age of your
+coffee-pot and frying-pan!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The air is bone-dry," he reminded her.  "What little rain there is
+never gets in here.  Nothing decays; look yonder."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He showed her a basket made of withes, a graceful thing skilfully made,
+small, frail-looking, and as perfect as the day it had come from a pair
+of quick brown hands under a pair of quick black eyes.  She took it
+almost with a sense of awe upon her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Keep it, will you?" he asked lightly.  "As a memento.  Presented by a
+caveman through your friend the sheriff.  Now let's get back before
+they miss us.  I may have need of this place some time and I'd rather
+no one else knew of it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They made their way back as they had come and in silence, Virginia
+treasuring the token and with it the sense that her friend the sheriff
+had cared to share his secret with her.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+They made of the day an occasion to be remembered, to be considered
+wistfully in retrospect during the troubled hours so soon to come to
+each one of the four of them.  While Elmer and Florrie gathered
+fire-wood, Norton showed Virginia how simple a matter it was here in
+this seldom-visited mountain-stream to take a trout.  Cool, shaded
+pools under overhanging, gouged-out banks, tiny falls, and shimmering
+riffles all housed the quick speckled beauties.  Then, as Norton had
+predicted, the fish were fried, crisp and brown, in sizzling
+bacon-grease, while the thin wafers of bacon garnished the tin plate
+bedded in hot ashes.  They nooned in the shady grove, sipping their
+coffee that had the taste of some rare, black nectar.  And throughout
+the long lazy afternoon they loitered as it pleased them, picked
+flowers, wandered anew through the ruins of the King's Palace, lay by
+the singing water, and were quietly content.  It was only when the
+shadows had thickened over the world and the promise of the primroses
+was fulfilled that they made ready for the return ride.  Before they
+had gone down to their horses the moths were coming to the yellow
+flowers, tumbling about them, filling the air with the frail beating of
+their wings.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At Struve's hotel&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Elmer and Virginia had ridden on to Engle's
+home&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Virginia told Norton good night, thanking him for a perfect
+day.  As their hands met for a little she saw a new, deeply probing
+look in his eyes, a look to be understood.  He towered over her,
+physically superb.  As she had felt it before, so now did she
+experience that odd little thrill born from nearness to him go singing
+through her.  She withdrew her hand hastily and went in.  In her own
+room she stood a long time before her glass, seeking to read what lay
+in her own eyes.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Tom Cutter was waiting for Norton--merely to tell him that a stranger
+had come to San Juan, a Mexican with all the earmarks of a gentleman
+and a man of means.  The Mexican's name was Enrique del Rio.  He
+evidently came from below the border.  He had lost no time in finding
+Jim Galloway, with whom he had been all afternoon.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap16"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XVI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE MEXICAN FROM MEXICO
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Enrique del Rio promptly became known to San Juan as the Mexican from
+Mexico, this to distinguish him from the many Mexicans, as San Juan
+knew them, who had never seen that turbulent field of intrigue and
+revolt from which their sires had come.  He showed himself from the
+outset to be a gentleman of culture, discernment, and ability.  He was
+suave, he was polished, he gave certain signs of refinement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His first afternoon and evening he bestowed upon Jim Galloway.  The
+second day found him registered at Struve's hotel.  The following
+morning he presented himself with a sheaf of credentials at the bank,
+asking for John Engle.  With him came Ignacio Chavez in the rôle of
+interpreter.  Del Rio spoke absolutely no English and had informed
+himself that Engle's Spanish was inadequate for the occasion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He is Señor Don Enrique del Rio," explained Ignacio, touched by the
+spell of the other's munificence and immaculate clothes.  "He would
+like to shake the hand of Señor Engle to become acquainted and then
+friends.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  He brings papers to tell who and what he is in Mexico
+City, whence he has departed because of too damn much fight down there;
+he wishes to put some money here in the <I>banco</I>, which he can take
+away again to buy a big ranch and many cattle and horses.  He has the
+other money in a <I>banco</I> in New York, where he sent it out from Mexico
+two, three months ago."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And so on, while Engle gravely listened and shrewdly, after his fashion
+in business hours, probed for the inner man under the outer polish,
+while del Rio nodded and smiled and never withdrew his night-black eyes
+from Engle's face.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Del Rio, it appeared, had gone first to the Casa Blanca because he had
+heard of Jim Galloway as one of the most influential men of the county.
+Since arriving in San Juan, however, he had heard this and that, mere
+rumors, which caused him to come to Engle.  He, a stranger, could ill
+afford in the beginning to have his name coupled with that of any man
+not known for his spotless integrity.  Señor Engle understood?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Later, when del Rio had found the properties to his liking and had
+builded a home, his wife and two daughters would arrive.  Now they
+travelled in California.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In the end Engle accepted the Mexican's deposits, which amounted to
+approximately a thousand dollars, and which were to be drawn against
+merely as an expense account until del Rio found his ranch.  And the
+first item of expense was the purchase from Engle himself of a fine
+saddle-animal, a pure-blooded, clean-limbed young mare, sister to
+Persis.  After which the Mexican spent a great deal of his time riding
+about the country, looking at ranches.  He visited Engle's two places,
+called upon Norton at Las Flores, ferreting out prices, looking at
+water and feed, examining soil.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a bare fortnight after the coming of del Rio when out of Las
+Palmas came word of fresh lawlessness.  The superintendent of the three
+Quigley mines had been surprised the night before pay-day, forced at
+the point of a revolver to open his own safe, and robbed of several
+thousand dollars.  A man on horseback rushed word to San Juan, found
+Tom Cutter, who located Norton the same afternoon at his ranch at Las
+Flores.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Rod, old man," cried Cutter angrily, "this damned thing has got to
+stop!  You haven't a much better friend than I am, I guess, and I'm
+telling you straight that the whole county is getting sore on you.
+They will talk more than ever now, saying that it's up to you to get
+results and that you don't get them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The stick-up was last night?" asked the sheriff coolly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," snapped Cutter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You were in San Juan?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where was Jim Galloway?  Was he in town?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, he wasn't.  I don't know where he was.  But I do know where he
+ought to be.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Was that Mexican gent, del Rio, in town?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Cutter opened his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  I don't think so.  You haven't got anything on him, have you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Only what you told me.  Remember that his first day in San Juan he
+went to Galloway like a homing pigeon."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton went for his horse, saddled, and rode swiftly to Las Palmas.  In
+the mining-camp he went immediately to the office of Nate Kemble, the
+superintendent, whom he found cursing volubly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's up to you," were the sharp words of greeting as Kemble wheeled
+upon the sheriff.  "What the hell do you think you're for, anyway?
+Good Lord, man, if you can't cut the mustard, why don't you crawl out
+and let a man who <I>can</I> wear your star?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Easy there, Kemble," said Norton quietly.  "You can do your raring and
+pitching after I'm gone.  Tell me about it.  What time did it happen?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was hardly dark."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How many men jumped you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just one.  But&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just one, eh?"  He pondered the information.  "That isn't the usual
+brand of Galloway work, is it?  Get a good slant at him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"At his clothes," growled Kemble, slamming himself down dejectedly in
+his chair.  "His face was hid, of course."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Ever see a Mexican named del Rio?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Like Cutter before him, Kemble started.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Don't ask me what I mean," Norton cut him short.  "Del Rio is a pretty
+big man for a Mexican; was this highwayman about his size?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Kemble hesitated.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's hard to say just how big a man is when he comes in on you like
+that," he said at last.  "At a guess I'd say that the man who stuck me
+up was a little taller than del Rio.  But I wouldn't swear to it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It might have been del Rio himself, then?" Norton insisted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes.  Or it might have been the Devil's grandmother.  I don't&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"See anything of del Rio the last few days?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Saw him yesterday.  He was in camp.  Was talking mines."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"See anything of Galloway hereabouts of late?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  Haven't seen him for a month or two."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton asked a few other questions, kept his own thoughts to himself,
+and rode away.  Less than a mile from the camp he met Jim Galloway
+riding a sweat-wet horse.  The two men reined in sharply, each man's
+eyes matching the other's for hardness.  Galloway's face was red, the
+fiery red of anger.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Going back for what you forgot, Jim?" asked Norton.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a moment Galloway, staring back at him, seemed utterly speechless
+in the grip of his wrath.  Norton did not remember ever having seen
+such blazing anger in the prominent eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Between you and me, Rod Norton," muttered Galloway at last, "I have
+turned a trick or two in my time.  But this job is none of my doing and
+if I wise up as to who put it over he'll go under the sand or into the
+pen, and I'll put him there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton laughed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In other words, some free-lance has made a bid to break your corner on
+the crime market, eh?" he jeered.  "Put one over on you without your
+knowledge and consent?  And without splitting two ways?  That what you
+mean?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I mean that I'd pay five hundred dollars out of my own pocket right
+now for the dead-wood on the man who robbed Kemble."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Kid Rickard is around once more; sure he didn't do it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, I am.  Kid Rickard didn't do it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton eased himself in the saddle, thoughtfully regarding Galloway.
+And then, very abruptly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How about your friend, del Rio?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was the third time that he had mentioned del Rio's name in this
+connection and to the third man.  And now, but slightly different in
+degree only, he saw the same look in Galloway's eyes which he had
+brought into Cutter's and Kemble's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Del Rio?" repeated Galloway frowningly.  "What makes you say that?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll collect your five hundred later," was Norton's laughing response.
+Swerving out a little as he passed, he rode on.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap17"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XVII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+A STACK OF GOLD PIECES
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+John Engle rapidly came to assume the nature and proportions of a
+stubborn bulwark standing sturdily between Roderick Norton and the
+fires of criticism, which, springing from little, scattered flames were
+now a wide-spread blaze amply fed with the dry fuel of many fields.
+Again there had been a general excitement over a crime committed, much
+talk, various suspicions, and, in the end, no arrest made.  Men who had
+stood by the sheriff until now began to lose faith in him.  They
+recalled how, after the fight in the Casa Blanca, he had let Galloway
+go and with him Antone and the Kid; their memories trailed back to the
+killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas and the evidence of the boots.  They
+began to admit, at first reluctantly, then with angry eagerness, that
+Norton was not the man his father had been before him, not the man they
+had taken him to be.  And all of this hurt Norton's stanch friend, John
+Engle.  All the more that he, too, saw signs of hesitancy which he
+found it hard to condone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Let him alone," he said many a time.  "Give him his chance and a free
+hand.  He knows what he is doing."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From that point he began to make excuses, first to himself and then to
+others.  People were forgetting that only a short time ago the sheriff
+had lain many days at the point of death; that his system had been
+overtaxed; that not yet had his superb strength come back to him.  Wait
+until once more he was physically fit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was merely an excuse, and at the outset no man knew it better than
+the banker himself.  But as time went by without bringing results and
+tongues grew sharper and more insistent everywhere, Engle grew
+convinced that there was a grain of truth in his trumped-up argument.
+He invited Norton to his home, had him to dinner, watched him keenly,
+and came to the conclusion that Norton was riding on his nerves, that
+he had not taken sufficient time to recuperate before getting his feet
+back into the official stirrups, that the strain of his duties was
+telling on him, that he needed a rest and a change or would go to
+pieces.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Norton, the subject broached, merely shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm all right, John," he said a little hurriedly and nervously.  "I am
+run down at the heels a bit, I'll admit.  But I can't stop to rest
+right now.  One of these days I'll quit this job and go back to
+ranching.  Until then&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Well, let them talk.  We can't stop them
+very well."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Suspicion of the Quigley mines robbery had turned at first toward del
+Rio.  But he had established an alibi.  So had Galloway.  So had Antone
+and the Kid.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There is nothing to do but wait," Norton insisted.  "It won't be long
+now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle, having less than no faith in Patten's ability, went to Virginia
+Page.  She saw Norton often; what did she think?  Was he on the verge
+of a collapse?  Was he physically fit?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All of this criticism hurts him," said the banker thoughtfully.  "I
+know Rod and how he must take it, though he only shrugs.  It's gall and
+wormwood to him.  He's up against a hard proposition, as we all know;
+if he is half-sick, I wonder if the proposition isn't going to be too
+much for him?  Can't you advise him, persuade him to knock off for a
+couple of weeks and clear out?  Get into a city somewhere and forget
+his work.  Why, it's the most pitiful thing in the world to see a man
+like him lose his grip."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He is not quite himself," she admitted slowly.  "He is more nervous,
+inclined to be short and irritable, than he used to be.  You may be
+right; or it may be simply that his continued failure to stop these
+crimes is wearing him down.  I'll be glad to watch him, to talk with
+him if he will listen to me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But first she forced herself to what seemed a casual chat with Patten,
+finding him loitering upon the hotel veranda.  She suggested to him
+that Norton was beginning to show the strain, that he looked haggard
+under it, and wondered if he had quite recovered from his recent
+illness?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten, after his pompous way, leaned back in his chair, his thumbs in
+his armholes, his manner that of a most high judge.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's as well as I am," he announced positively.  "Thin, to be sure,
+just from being laid up those ten days.  And from a lot of hard riding
+and worry.  That's all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Out of Patten's vest-pocket peeped a lead-pencil.  Curiously enough, it
+carried her mind back to Patten's incompetence.  For it suggested the
+fountain pen which of old occupied the pencil's place and which the
+sheriff had taken in his haste to secrete a bit of paper with Patten's
+scrawl upon it.  She wondered again just what had been on that paper,
+and if it were meant to help Norton prove that Patten had no right to
+the M.D. after his name?  The incident, all but forgotten, remained
+prominently in her mind, soon to assume a position of transcendent
+importance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, one after the other, here and there throughout the county
+came fresh crimes which not only set men talking angrily but which drew
+the eyes of the State and then of the neighboring States upon this
+corner of the world.  Newspapers in the cities commented variously,
+most of them sweepingly condemning the county's sheriff for a
+figurehead and a boy who should never have been given a man's place in
+the sun.  New faces were seen in San Juan, in Las Estrellas, Las
+Palmas, Pozo, everywhere, and men said that the undesirable citizens of
+the whole Southwest were flocking here where they might reap with
+others of their ilk and go scot free.  Naturally, the Casa Blanca
+became headquarters for a large percentage of the newcomers.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The condition in and about San Juan," commented one of the most
+reputable and generally conservative of the attacking dailies, "has
+become acute, unprecedented for this time in our development.  The
+community has become the asylum of the lawless.  The authorities have
+shown themselves utterly unable to cope with the situation.  A
+well-known figure of the desert town who long ago should have gone to
+the gallows is daily growing bolder, attaching to himself the wildest
+of the insurging element, and is commonly looked upon as a crime
+dictator.  Unless there comes a stiffening in the moral fiber of the
+local officers, we dread to consider the logical outcome of these
+conditions."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And so forth from countless quarters.  Galloway openly jeered at
+Norton.  New faces, looking out from the Casa Blanca, grinned widely as
+the sheriff now and then rode past.  Engle and Struve and Tom Cutter,
+anxious and beginning to be afraid of what lurked in the future, met at
+the hotel and sought to hit upon a solution of the problem.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Norton has got something up his sleeve," growled the hotel keeper,
+"and he's as stubborn as a mule.  He's after Galloway, and it begins to
+look as though he were forgetting that his job is to serve the county
+first and his own private quarrels next.  I've jawed him up and down;
+it only makes him shake his head like a horse with flies after him."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The three, hoping that their combined arguments might have weight with
+Norton, went to him and did not leave him until they had made clear
+what their thoughts were, what the whole State was saying of him.  And,
+as Struve had predicted, he shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"These later robberies haven't been Galloway's work," he told them
+positively.  "They were pulled off by the same man who stuck up Kemble
+of the Quigley mines.  Inside of a week I'll get something done; I'll
+promise you that.  But let me do it my way."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle alone of the three drew a certain satisfaction from the interview.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He has promised something definite," he told them.  "Did you ever know
+him to do that and fail to keep his word?  Maybe we're getting a little
+excited, boys."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The latest crime had been the robbery of the little bank at Packard
+Springs.  The highwayman had gone in the night to the room of the
+cashier, forced him to dress, go to the bank, and open his safe.  The
+result was a theft of a couple of thousand dollars, no trace left
+behind, and a growing feeling of insecurity throughout the county.  It
+was for this crime that Norton meant and promised to make an arrest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Exactly seven days from the day of his promise Norton rode into San
+Juan and asked for Tom Cutter.  Struve, meeting him at the hotel door,
+looked at him sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Made that arrest yet, Norton?" he demanded.  Norton smiled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, I haven't," he admitted coolly.  "But I've got a few minutes
+before my week's up, haven't I?  Fix me up with something to eat and
+I'll have a talk with you and Tom while I attend to the inner man."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But over his meal, while Cutter and Struve watched him impatiently, he
+did little talking other than to ask carelessly where del Rio was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Damn it, man," cried Struve irritably.  "You've hinted at him before
+now.  If he's a crook, why don't you go grab him?  He's in his room."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton swung about upon Struve, his eyes suddenly filled with fire.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look here, Struve," he retorted, "I've had about a bellyful of
+badgering.  I'm running my job and it will be just as well for you to
+keep your hands off.  As for why I don't make an arrest&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Come on,
+Tom.  You, too, Julius," his smile coming back.  "I'm going to get del
+Rio."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't believe&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;." began Struve.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Seeing is believing," returned Norton lightly.  "Come on."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Followed by the two men, Norton went direct to del Rio's room, at the
+front of the house, just across the hall from Virginia's office.  At
+del Rio's quick "<I>Entra</I>," he threw open the door and went in.  Del
+Rio, seated smoking a cigar, looked up with curious eyes which did not
+miss the two men following the sheriff.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You are under arrest for the bank robbery at Packard Springs," said
+Norton crisply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Que quiere usted decir</I>?" demanded the Mexican, to whom the English
+words were meaningless.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton threw back his vest, showing his star.  And while he kept his
+eye upon del Rio he said quietly to Cutter:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look through his trunk and bags."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Del Rio, understanding quickly enough, sat smoking swiftly, his eyes
+narrowing as they clung steadily to Norton's.  Cutter, a rising hope in
+his breast that at last his superior had made good, went to the trunk
+in the corner.  Del Rio shrugged and remained silent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Cutter began tumbling out upon the floor an assortment of clothing,
+evincing little respect for the Mexican's finery.  Suddenly, when his
+hands had gone to the bottom, he sat back upon his heels, a leaping
+light in his eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Caught with the goods on, by God!" he cried.  "Look here, Struve!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had whipped out a canvas bag which gave forth the chink of gold.
+Another came after it.  And across each bag was stamped "Packard
+Springs Bank."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Del Rio's eyes had wandered a moment to Cutter and the evidence.  Then
+they came back to Norton, filled with black malevolence.  One did not
+need to understand the southern language to grasp the meaning of the
+words muttered under his breath.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Within the half-hour Strove, Cutter, and Engle had apologized to
+Norton; after this, they promised him to keep their hands off and their
+mouths shut.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+That evening Virginia and Norton sat long together on Struve's veranda.
+There was more silence than talk between them.  Norton seemed
+abstracted; the girl was plainly constrained, anxious, and found it
+difficult to keep her mind upon the thin thread of conversation joining
+their occasional remarks.  Abruptly, out of one of their wordless
+intervals, she said quickly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Congratulate me on being a rich woman!  I got a check from an old,
+almost forgotten, patient to-day.  A hundred dollars, all in one lump!
+It's a fortune in San Juan, isn't it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton laughed with her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I feel like spending it all in a breath," she ran on.  "I went right
+away to Mr. Engle and had him cash it so that I could see what five
+twenty-dollar gold pieces looked like.  And I chinked them and played
+with them like a child!  Do you think I am growing greedy for gold in
+my old age?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  You ought to see them piled up, though; five
+twenties.  Isn't gold a pretty thing?  I've a notion to go get them and
+show them to you; they're right on my table&nbsp;..."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She broke off suddenly, her hand on his arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did you see some one out there at the corner of the house?" she asked
+quickly.  "Do you think&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then she laughed again and settled back in her chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Already thinking somebody is going to steal my gold!  My five
+twenties.  Just to punish myself I am going to leave them on my office
+table all night; do you suppose I'll be wondering all the time if
+somebody is crawling in at a window and taking them?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Five minutes later she said good night and left him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll be up early in the morning," she said laughingly.  "Just to make
+sure that my gold is there!"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+An hour later Virginia Page, sitting fully dressed in the darkness of
+her bedroom, got quietly to her feet and went to the door leading to
+her office.  With wildly beating heart she stood listening, seeking to
+peer through the crack of the door she had left ajar.  She had heard
+the faint, expected sound of some one moving cautiously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now she heard it again, then the rustling of loose papers lying on her
+table, then the faint, golden chink of yellow-minted disks.  As she
+suddenly scratched the match in her hand, drawing it along the wall,
+she threw the door open.  The tiny flame, held high, retrieved the room
+from darkness into sufficient pale light.  The man at her table whirled
+upon her, an exclamation caught in his throat, one hand going to his
+hip, the other closing tight upon what it held.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She came in, her eyes steadily upon his, her face deathly pale.  As the
+match fell from her fingers she went to the open window and drew down
+the shade.  Then she lit a second match, set it to her lamp, and sank
+wearily into her chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Shall we thresh matters out, Mr. Norton?" she asked.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap18"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XVIII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+DESIRE OUTWEIGHS DISCRETION
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Following Virginia's barely audible words there was a long silence.
+Her eyes, dark with the trouble in them, rested upon Norton's face and
+saw the frown go from his brows while slowly the red seeped into his
+bronzed cheeks.  For the first time in her life she saw him staggered
+by the shock of surprise, held hesitant and uncertain.  For a little
+there was never a movement of his rigid muscles; one hand rested upon
+the butt of his revolver, the other was closed upon the stack of gold
+pieces.  When at last he found his tongue it was to accuse her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You trapped me," he said bitterly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"With golden bait," she admitted, her voice oddly spiritless.  "Yes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well," he challenged, "what are you going to do about it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do?  I don't know!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again they grew silent, studying each other intently.  Norton, his
+poise coming back to him as the unusual color receded from his face,
+smiled at her with an affectation of his old manner.  Suddenly he
+stepped back to her table, noiselessly set down the coins, eased
+himself into a chair.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You wished to thresh things out?  I am ready.  And in case we should
+be interrupted, you know, I have called on you in your official
+capacity.  We'll say that I am troubled by the old wound in the head;
+that will do as well as anything, won't it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It was you who robbed the bank at Pozo!" she cried softly, leaning
+toward him, the look in her eyes one of dread now.  "And the mine
+superintendent at Las Palmas?  And I don't know how many other people.
+It was you!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had startled him in the beginning; she knew she would not draw
+another sign of surprise from him.  He had himself under control, and
+long years of severe training made that control complete.  He merely
+looked interested under her sweeping accusation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must have a reason for a charge like that," he remarked evenly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Do you deny it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I deny nothing, I affirm nothing right now.  I say that you must have
+a reason for what you state."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You put the incriminating evidence in del Rio's trunk," she ran on
+hurriedly.  "The canvas bags of gold.  Didn't you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Reason?" he insisted equably.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You took Caleb Patten's fountain pen!  I saw you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He lifted his brows at her.  Then he laughed softly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In the first place," he replied thoughtfully, "I really believe that
+he is not Caleb at all but Charles Patten.  We'll talk of that later,
+however.  In the second place isn't it rather humorous to wind up by
+accusing a man with the theft of a fountain pen after your other
+charges?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Answer one question," she urged earnestly.  "Please.  It is only a
+small matter.  Give me your word of honor that you will answer it
+truthfully."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was very grave as he sat for a moment, head down, twirling his big
+hat in slow fingers.  Then he smiled again as he looked up.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Either truthfully or not at all," he promised her.  "My word of honor."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was plainly excited as she set him her question, seeming at once
+eager and afraid to have his response.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I saw you take Patten's fountain pen and a scrap of note-paper from
+the table by your bed when you were hurt--the first time I called to
+see how you were doing.  I thought that perhaps there was something of
+importance written on the paper, that, if nothing else, you wanted a
+bit of Patten's handwriting to use in your proof that he was not the
+man he pretended to be.  You slipped both pen and paper under your
+pillow.  Tell me just this: Was that paper of any importance whatever,
+of any interest even, to you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," he said steadily, without hesitation.  "It was not.  I did not so
+much as look at it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She leaned back in her chair with a long sigh, her eyes wide on his.
+And while he marvelled at it, he saw that now her look was one of pure
+pity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Just what has that got to do with the robberies you mention?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Everything!" she burst out.  "Everything!  Can't you see?  Oh, my God!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She dropped her face into her hands and he saw her shoulders lift and
+slump.  Glancing aside swiftly, he saw the five golden disks on the
+table, almost to be reached from where he sat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No doubt," he said hastily, as her head was lifted again, "you think
+that you would like to send me to jail?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Jail, no!  A thousand times no!  But you must, you must let me send
+you to a hospital!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He frowned at her while he gave over twirling his hat and grew very
+still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You think I am crazy?" he asked sharply.  "That it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  You are as sane as I am.  I don't think that at all.  But&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Oh, can't you understand?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, I can't.  You accuse me of this and that, you give no reasons for
+your wild suspicions, you end up by suggesting medical treatment.
+What's the answer, Virginia Page?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The answer, Roderick Norton, is a very simple one.  But first I am
+going to ask you another question or so.  You sought to commit a theft
+to-night, I saw you, so there is no use denying it to me, is there?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Go ahead.  What next?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"While you lay ill during a week or ten days you had time to think.
+You remember having told me that you had had time to think about
+everything in the world?  It was at that time, wasn't it, that you came
+to the decision which you mentioned to me that a man to commit crime
+and play safe at the same time must keep in mind two essential matters:
+First, the lone hand; second, not to kill?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought it out then; yes.  In fact, I suppose I told you so."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The crimes committed recently have been characterized by these two
+essentials, haven't they?  Nearly all of them?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He nodded, watching her keenly, holding back his answers for just a
+second or two each time.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I believe so."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Did you ever have an impulse to steal before you were knocked
+unconscious at the Casa Blanca?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And you have had that impulse almost all the time ever since?  Answer
+me, tell me the truth!  I am right, am I not?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now again he laughed softly at her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Virginia Page, the medico, speaks," he returned lightly.  "She has a
+theory.  A man may have such an accident, leaving such and such
+pressure on the brain, with the result that he becomes a thief or
+worse!  Virginia&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Theory!  It is no theory.  It is an established, undeniable, and
+undenied fact!  It has occurred time and again, physicians have
+observed, have made cures!  Can't you see now, Rod Norton?  Won't you
+see?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was upon her feet, her hands clasped before her, her eyes shining,
+her figure tense, her cheeks stained with the color of her excitement.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't care whether Patten is a physician or not," she ran on.  "He
+is a bungler.  It is a sheer wonder he did not let you die.  You told
+me yourself that he attributed the second wound to your fall and that
+you knew that Moraga had struck you a terrible blow with his
+gun-barrel.  Patten did not treat that wound; he cared for the lesser
+injury like a fool and allowed the major one to take care of itself.
+And the result&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Oh, dear God!  Think of what might have happened.
+If any one but me had learned what I have learned to-night."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He rose with her, stood still, regarding her with eyes like drills.
+Then he shook his head.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You are wrong, Virginia, dead wrong," he told her with quiet emphasis.
+"You have called me a thief?  Well, perhaps I am.  You have given your
+explanation; let me give mine."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He paused, shaping the matter in mind.  His face was stern and very,
+very grave.  Presently, his lowered voice guarded against any chance
+ears, he continued.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I lay on my bed a week, a long, utterly damnable week.  I could do
+nothing but think.  So I thought, as I told you, of everything.  Most
+of all I thought of you, Virginia Page.  Shall I tell you why?  No;
+we'll let that go until we understand each other.  I thought of myself,
+of my life, of my eternal striving with Jim Galloway.  Some day I
+should get Galloway or he would get me.  In either case, what good?
+Was not Galloway a wiser man than I?  He took what he wanted; I merely
+wasted my time chasing after such bigger men as he.  If he desired a
+thousand dollars or five, ten thousand, he went out for it like a man
+and took it.  Why shouldn't he?  Oh, I tell you I had the time to dwell
+upon the little meaningless words of honesty and dishonesty, honor and
+dishonor, and all of their progeny and forebears!  They are empty;
+empty, I tell you, Virginia!  When I stood on my feet again I was a
+free man.  I knew it then, I know it now.  Free, I tell you.  Free,
+most of all from shackles of empty ideas.  What I wanted I would take."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She looked at him helplessly, his dominant vigor for the moment seeming
+a thing not to be restricted or tamed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What you have done," she told him gently, "is to find argument to
+bolster up impulse.  That is generally very easy to do, isn't it?  If
+one wants a thing, it is not hard convincing himself that it is right
+that he should have it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"At least I have decided sanely what I wanted, there is no call for
+hospitals."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You sustained a fracture of the skull.  That fracture had improper
+treatment.  It is a wonder you did not die.  The wound healed and there
+remains a pressure of a bit of bone upon the brain.  Until that
+pressure is removed by an operation you are doomed to be a criminal.  A
+kleptomaniac," she said steadily, "if not much worse."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I believe that you mean what you say.  You are just mistaken, that is
+all.  I'd know if there were anything physically wrong."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She came closer, laid her hand upon his arm, and lifted her eyes
+pleadingly to his.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have had the best of medical training," she said slowly.  "I have
+specialized in brain disorders, interested in that branch of my work
+until I decided to bring Elmer out here.  I know what I am saying.
+Will you at least promise to do as I ask?  Have a thorough examination
+by a specialist?  And have the operation if he advises it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Such an operation is a serious matter?"
+
+"Yes.  It must be.  But think&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"A man might die under the hands of the surgeon?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes.  There is always the danger, there is always the chance of death
+resulting from any but the most minor of operations.  But you are not
+the man to be afraid, Rod Norton.  I know that."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You say that you have specialized In this sort of thing."  He was
+probing for her thoughts with keen, narrowed eyes.  "Would you be
+willing to perform that operation for me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She shrank back suddenly, her hand dropping from his arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," she cried.  "No, no."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He smiled triumphantly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then we'll let it go for a while.  If you wouldn't care to do it,
+afraid that I might die under your knife, I guess I don't want it done
+at all.  I am quite content with things as they are.  I see the way to
+gain the ends I desire; I am gaining them; if there is a brain
+pressure, well, I'm quite ready to thank God and Moraga for it!  Which
+you may take as absolutely final, Dr. Page!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was beaten then and she knew it.  She went back to her chair in a
+sort of bewildered despair, her hands dropping idly to her lap.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It would be just as well," he said presently, "if I left before any
+one came in.  Before I go, do you mind telling me what you mean to do?
+Shall you denounce me?  Are you going to spread your suspicions abroad?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you leave me to do?  Have I the right to sit still and say
+nothing?  You would go on as you have begun; you would commit fresh
+crimes.  In spite of your 'two essentials' you would be led to kill a
+man sooner or later.  Or you yourself would be killed.  Have I the
+right to allow all of that to continue?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then you have decided to accuse me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It is so hard to decide anything.  You make it so hard; can't you see
+that you do?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  But, after all, my part is clear; if you will
+consent to an examination and an operation I will say nothing of what
+has happened.  If you won't do that&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you will drive me to tell
+what I know."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Our trails divide to-night, then?  I had hoped for better than that,
+Virginia."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Though her cheeks flushed, she held her eyes steadily upon his.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I, too, had hoped for better than that," she confessed, finding this
+no time for faltering.  "I should continue to hope if you would just do
+your part."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He came a swift step toward her.  Then he stopped suddenly, his hands
+falling to his sides.  But the light in his eyes did not diminish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Denounce me to-morrow, if you wish," he said slowly, indifferently it
+seemed to her.  "Accept my promise that I will attempt no theft of more
+gold to-night; give me this one last chance to talk with you.  Before
+some one comes, come out with me.  You are not afraid of me; you admit
+that I am sane.  Then let us ride together.  And let me talk with you
+freely.  Will you, Virginia?  Will you do that one favor for me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The high desire was upon her to accede to his request; her calmer
+judgment forbade it.  But to-night was to-night; to-morrow would be
+to-morrow.  And, after all, in her talk with him, she might save the
+man to himself and to his truer manhood.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But even that hope was less than her desire when she answered him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Have my horse saddled," she said.  "I'll let Struve think I have to
+make a call at Las Estrellas.  I'll be out in five minutes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He thanked her with his eyes, opened the hall door, and went out.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap19"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XIX
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+DEADLOCK
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Virginia, having changed swiftly to her riding-togs, took up her little
+black emergency kit, which would lend an air of business urgency to her
+nocturnal ride with Norton, and stepped out into the hall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There's a call for you from Las Estrellas," said Struve, appearing
+from the front, whence his voice had come to her mingled with the
+excited tones of a Mexican.  "Tony Garcia has been hurt; pretty badly,
+I expect.  His brother says that Tony got his hand caught in some kind
+of machinery he was fooling with late this afternoon and crushed so
+that it's all but torn off."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Into the light cast by the hotel porch-lamp Norton, leading Persis,
+rode around the corner of the building.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I was just going out," said Virginia.  "But I'll go on this case
+first.  Mr. Norton is riding with me.  Please ask him to wait while I
+get my other bag."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In her room again, the lamp lighted on her table, she stood a moment
+frowning thoughtfully into vacancy.  Then with a quick shake of the
+head she snatched up the two other bags which might be needed in
+treating Tony's hurt and again hastened out.  Norton bending from his
+saddle took them from her.  As Struve relinquished into her gantletted
+hands the reins of Persis's bridle she swung lightly up to the mare's
+back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The poor fellow must be suffering all kinds of torture," she said as
+Norton reined in with her.  "Let's hurry."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He offered no answer as they clattered out of San Juan and turned out
+across the level lands toward Las Estrellas.  So, as upon another night
+when speeding upon a similar errand, they rode for a long time in
+silence.  Again they two alone were pushing out into the dark and the
+vast silence that was broken only by the soft thudding of their own
+horses' hoofs and the creak of saddle leather and jingle of spur and
+bit chains.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You wanted to talk with me?" suggested the girl after fifteen minutes
+of wordless restraint between them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," he answered.  "But not now.  That is, if you will give me a
+further chance after you have done what you can for poor old Tony.  You
+will hardly need to stay at Las Estrellas all night, I imagine.  When
+we leave you can listen to me.  Do you mind?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," she said slowly.  "I don't mind.  I'd rather it was then.  You
+and I have a good bit to think about before we do any talking.  Haven't
+we?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They fell silent again.  The soft beauty of the night over the southern
+desert lands&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and there is no other earthly beauty like it&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+touched the girl's soul now as it had never done before; perhaps,
+similarly, it disturbed shadows in the man's.  She was distressed by
+the position in which she found herself, and the night's infinite quiet
+and utter peace was grateful to her.  As she left the hotel her
+thoughts were in chaos; she was caught in a fearsome labyrinth whence
+there appeared no escape.  Now, though no way out suggested itself,
+still the stars were shining.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At last the twinkling lights of Las Estrellas, seeming at first fallen
+stars caught in the mesquite branches, swam into view.  Plainly Tony's
+accident had stimulated much local interest; among the few straggling
+houses men came and went, while a knot of women, children, and
+countless mongrel dogs had congregated just outside of the hut where
+the injured man lay.  A brush fire in the street crackled right
+merrily, its sparks dancing skyward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You promise me," said Norton as they drew their horses down to a trot,
+"not to say anything until we can have had time to talk?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I promise," she said wearily.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She entered the sufferer's room first, Norton delaying to tie the
+horses and lift down the instrument cases from the saddle-strings.  She
+stopped abruptly just beyond the threshold; the smell of chloroform was
+heavy upon the air, Tony lay whitefaced upon a table, Caleb Patten with
+coat off and sleeves rolled up was bending over him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, señorita!" cried a woman, hurrying forward, her hands twisting
+nervously in her apron.  And a torrential outpouring in Spanish greeted
+the mystified Virginia.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I thought that I was wanted here," she said, looking about her at the
+four or five grave faces.  "Tony's brother came for me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+One of the men shambled forward to explain.  "Tony want you," he said
+quickly.  "Tony ver' bad hurt.  Dr. Patten come in Las Estrellas by
+accident, he say got to cut off the arm, can't wait too long or Tony
+die.  He just beginnin' now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The woman, who, it appeared was Tony's wife and the mother of two of
+the ragged children out by the fire, joined her voice eagerly to the
+man's.  He translated.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Eloisa say she thank God you come; Tony want you, she want you.
+Patten charge one hundred dollar an'.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."  He shrugged eloquently.
+"She say you do for Tony; you do better than Patten."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia's eyes flashed upon Patten.  He came a step toward her, his
+attitude half belligerent.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The man has to be operated upon immediately," he said sharply.  "He
+was hurt in the afternoon out on the end of the ranch; has been all day
+getting in; fainted half a dozen times, I guess.  The arm has to come
+off at the elbow."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thank you," returned Virginia quietly, going to the table.  "I'll take
+the case now, Dr. Patten."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You?" Patten laughed, his eyes jeering.  "You operate?  Do you think
+that they want you to cut a skein of silk with a pair of scissors?  Cut
+off a man's arm&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. how far would you go before you fainted?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That'll be about all, Patten," came Norton's voice sternly from the
+door.  "This is Dr. Page's case.  Clear out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Thank you, Mr. Norton," said Virginia quickly.  She was already making
+an examination of the blood covered arm and hand, and did not look
+around.  "And please clear the room, will you?  Let Tony's wife stay,
+that is all.  Eloisa."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The woman came forward, her eyes wide and frightened.  Virginia smiled
+at her reassuringly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>No muy malo</I>," she said in the few Spanish words which she could
+summon for the occasion from those she had picked up from the desert
+people.  "<I>Muy bueno manana</I>.  And now get me some warm water&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+<I>agua caliente</I>.  Mr. Norton, if you will open my instrument
+case&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. no; the other one.  And then stand by to help with the
+anaesthetic if Patten hasn't already given him enough to keep him
+asleep all night!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She gave her directions concisely and was obeyed.  Norton put the last
+of the undesired onlookers out of the door, closed it after them, found
+another lamp and some candles, did all that he could think of to help
+and all that was asked of him.  Eloisa, having brought the water,
+withdrew to a corner and kept her fascinated eyes upon Virginia's face
+and stubbornly away from her husband's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia, when she had completed a very thorough examination, turned
+toward Norton, her eyes blazing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Patten has no more right to an M.D. after his name than you have," she
+cried angrily.  "Not so much, for he hasn't even any brains!  Cut the
+man's arm off!  Why, there is only a simple fracture above the wrist
+which won't cause a bit of trouble.  The hand is another matter; but
+even it isn't half as badly mangled as it looks.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  The second and
+third fingers are terribly crushed; they've got to come off.  We might
+as well do it now, while he is already under the chloroform.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Tell Eloisa just how matters stand and then send her out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Eloisa, already prepared for the greater operation, gasped her
+gratitude for the lesser and allowed herself to be gently thrust from
+the room.  Then Norton came back to the table, his eyes wonderingly
+upon Virginia.  He knew that she was capable; he had read that fact the
+first day when he had seen her hands.  But it struck him as rather
+unusual that a girl, any girl no matter what her training, should take
+hold as she was doing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And as she selected her instruments, laid them out upon a bit of
+sterilized gauze upon a chair, cleansed her hands and prepared to
+operate he began to feel a sense of utter confidence in her.  Rapidly
+his own anger rose at the thought of the crime Patten would have
+perpetrated.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Tony Garcia, when in due time his consciousness came back to him
+bringing the attendant dizzy nausea in its wake, looked down at his
+side curiously, wondering how it would be to go without an arm.  And
+when his Eloisa told him.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We are going to sell our cow and the goats to-morrow!" vowed Tony
+faintly.  "And give her all the money!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Si, si</I>, Tony," wept the wife.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Whereupon the small children, who were teaching the goats to pull a
+wagon, set up a wail of grief and rebellion.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+It struck both Virginia and Norton as a shade odd that Patten should be
+still in Las Estrellas when they rode out of it long after midnight.
+They saw him standing in the doorway of the one still lighted building
+of the village as they galloped past.  It was the Three Star saloon.
+Patten's horse was tied in front of it.  Since Patten neither drank nor
+played at dice or cards here might have been matter to ponder on.  But
+in neither mind was there place now for any interest other than that
+which again held them silent and constrained.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Las Estrellas lost behind them, they drew their horses down into a
+rocking trot, then to a slow walk.  Virginia rode with her head up, her
+eyes upon the field of stars.  Her face, as Norton kept close to her
+side, looked very white in the starlight.  He would have given much to
+have seen her eyes when a little later he began to talk.  And she was
+conscious of a kindred wish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Look yonder," she said.  "The late moon is coming up.  There will be a
+little more light then and.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  And I want to look at you, Rod
+Norton, while we thresh it out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The thin curved sliver of silver thrusting up over the edge of the
+world in the east, ghostly and pale, added little to the throbbing
+gleam of the stars; but the waiting for it had put Las Estrellas a mile
+behind them, had set them alone together out in the heart of the
+silences, had given them that last excuse to be had to set back an evil
+moment.  Virginia, with a sigh, brought her eyes down from the glitter
+of the wide heavens and sought Norton's.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am afraid," she said listlessly, "that there is no way out for us,
+Rod Norton."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There is a way!" he began quickly
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"There is no way unless you do what I say.  If you would only give me
+your word to take the stage to-morrow, to go to a competent surgeon, to
+submit to the operation.  If you would only give me your word.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I give you my word," he said sharply, "that that is just the thing
+which I will never do.  Virginia, breathe deep, fill your lungs with
+the wonder of the night; realize what it means to live; think what it
+means to die!  You say that I am not afraid of death; well, maybe not
+if it comes in a guise I have grown up to be familiar with.  But to lie
+as I saw Tony Garcia lying just now, powerless, unconscious, without
+will or knowledge of what was coming to me, and to let a man cut into
+me&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  I'd rather die, I think, standing upon my two feet and
+fighting it out with a gun!  You would go on and tell me that the
+chances would be highly in favor of my recovery; and yet you would
+admit that the danger would be grave."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then you are afraid, after all?  That is it?  That holds you back?"
+She found it hard to believe that he was telling her his true emotion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am merely measuring the chances," he said steadily.  "I am satisfied
+with life as I find it; I do not believe that there is anything wrong
+with me; I see at least the possibility of death and nothing to be
+gained by submitting to an operation."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then," she said again wearily, "there is no way out."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But there is!  My way, not the one you have thought of.  You have
+stumbled upon a thing which you must forget; that is all.  Give me the
+free swing to finish Jim Galloway, to complete certain other
+undertakings.  Promise me that you will do this; in return I will
+promise you not to&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And here he hesitated.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Not to commit another theft?"  She set the matter squarely before him.
+"Can you promise that, Rod Norton?  Could you keep the promise were it
+once made?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No!  You could not.  You don't understand or you won't understand.
+You would obey the impulse which would come just as certainly as the
+sun will rise and set again.  So I can neither accept your
+promise&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. nor give you mine."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You will tell what you have guessed?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Rather what I know!  Even if you were my own brother.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Or your lover?" he demanded, a challenge in his voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Or my lover.  For his sake if not for the sake of others."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For a little while he made no answer.  Again there was absolute silence
+between him, a troubled silence filled with pain.  Then suddenly he
+leaned close to her, threw out his hand for Persis's rein, jerked both
+horses back to a fretful standstill.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Can't you see what you force me to do?" he demanded half angrily.  "Do
+you picture what your denunciation would do for me?  Do you think that
+I can let you make it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His face was so near hers that she could see it clearly in the pallid
+light.  He could see hers and that it was lifted fearlessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How will you stop me?" she asked quietly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I will finish Jim Galloway out of hand," he told her savagely.  "It
+will no longer be the representative of the law against the lawbreaker;
+it will just be Norton and Galloway, both men!  I will accomplish the
+one other matter I have planned.  Both will require not over three or
+four days.  During that time&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  I tell you, Virginia, I have grown
+into a free man, a man who does what he wants to do, who takes what he
+wants to take, who is not bound by flimsy shackles of other men's
+codes.  During those three or four days I shall see that you do no
+talking!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Once more, her voice quickened, she asked:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How will you stop me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We have come to a deadlock; argument does no good.  Either I must
+yield to you or you to me.  There is too much at stake to allow of a
+man being squeamish.  I don't care much for the job, but by high Heaven
+I am of no mind to watch life run by through the bars of a
+penitentiary.  After all action becomes simplified when a crisis comes;
+doesn't it?  There is just one answer, just one way out.  You will come
+with me, now.  I will put you where you will have no opportunity to do
+any talking for the few days in which I shall finish what I have to
+do."  His hand on Persis's rein drew the two horses still closer
+together.  "Give me your promise, Virginia; or come with me!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her quick spurt of anger rose, flared, and dwindled away like a little
+flame extinguished by a splash of rain; the tears were stinging her
+eyes almost before the last word.  For she felt that here was no
+Roderick Norton speaking, but rather a bit of bone pressing upon the
+delicate machinery which is a man's brain.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where would you take me?" she asked faintly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"To the King's Palace," he answered bitterly.  "Where we had one
+perfect, happy day, Virginia; where, I had hoped, we would have other
+perfect days.  Oh, girl, can't you see," and his voice went thrilling
+through her, "can't you see what I have hoped, what I have
+dreamed.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You might still hope," she told him steadily.  "You might still dream."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I will!"  His eyes shone at her, his erect form outlined against the
+black of the earth and the gleam of the stars was eloquent of mastery.
+"There will come a time when you will see life as I see it.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  And
+now, for the last time, will you give me your promise, Virginia?  It is
+forced upon you; you will be blameless in giving it.  Will you do so?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She only shook her head, her lips trembling, not trusting her
+voice.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  And then, in a sort of daze, she knew that they had
+turned off to the left, that no longer was San Juan ahead of them, that
+they were riding toward the gloomy bulwark of the mountains.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap20"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XX
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+FLUFF AND BLACK BILL
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Fluff and Black Bill were quarrelling.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Elmer, while Norton and Virginia were on their way from San Juan to Las
+Estrellas, had dropped in at the hotel to see his sister.  He found
+upon her office table the card which she always left for him; this
+merely informed him that she was "out on a case at Las Estrellas."
+Elmer had come for her purposing to suggest a call upon the Engles.
+For not yet had he summoned the hardihood to present himself alone at
+Florrie's home.  Now, disgruntled, seeing plainly that Virginia would
+never get back in time, he went out on the veranda and took solace from
+the pipe to which he had grown fairly accustomed.  To him came the girl
+of whom he was thinking.  "Hello, Fluff," he said from the shadows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hello, Black Bill," she greeted him.  "Where's Virgie?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Gone," he informed her, waving his pipe.  "On a case to Las Estrellas.
+I'm waiting for her.  Did you want to see her?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Florrie, coming down the veranda to him, giggled.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," she told him flippantly.  "I'm looking for the Emperor of China.
+I never was so lonesome.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So'm I," said Elmer.  He pushed a chair forward with his foot.  "Sit
+down and we'll wait for her.  And I'll go in and bring out a couple of
+bottles of ginger ale or something."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Will she be back real soon?" asked Florrie pretending to hesitate.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure," he assured her positively.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"All right then." Florrie with a great rustling of skirts sat down.
+"But you must be nice to me, Black Bill."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's always you who starts it," he muttered at her.  "I'd be friends
+if you would.  What's the good of spatting like two kids, anyway?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We're really not kids any longer, are we?" she agreed demurely.  "I
+feel terribly grown up sometimes, don't you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+From which point they got along swimmingly for perhaps five minutes
+longer than it had ever been possible for them to talk together without
+"starting something."  Elmer, very emphatic in his own mind concerning
+his matured status, yearned for her to understand it as he did.  With
+such purpose clearly before him&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and before her, too, for that
+matter, since Miss Florrie had a keen little comprehension of her
+own&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. he spoke largely of himself and his blossoming plans.  He was
+a vaquero, to begin with; he had ridden fifty miles yesterday on range
+business; he was making money; he was putting part of that money away
+in Mr. Engle's bank.  There was a little ranch on the rim of Engle's
+big holding which belonged to an old half-breed; Elmer meant to acquire
+it himself one of these days.  And before so very long, too.  Mr. Engle
+had been approached and was looking into it, might be persuaded to
+advance the couple of thousand dollars for the property, taking as
+security a mortgage until Elmer could have squared for it.  Then Black
+Bill would begin stocking his place, a cow now, a horse, another cow,
+and so on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He had launched himself valiantly into his tale.  But at a certain
+point he began to swallow and catch at his words and smoke fast between
+sentences.  He had located a dandy spot for a house&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the jolliest
+little spring of cold water you ever saw&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. a knoll with big trees
+upon it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'll make up a party with Virginia and Norton some day and ride out
+there," he said abruptly.  "I&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I'd like to have you see it, Fluff."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She was tremulously delighted.  She sensed the nearest thing to an
+out-and-out proposal which had ever sung in her ears.  She leaned
+forward eagerly, her hands clasped to keep them from trembling.  She
+was sixteen, he eighteen&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and she had his assurance of a moment
+ago that they were no longer just "kids."  And then and there their
+so-long-delayed quarrel began.  Just at the wrong time, after the
+time-honored fashion of quarrels.  He was ready to twine the vine about
+the veranda posts of the house on the knoll where the spring and the
+big trees were, she was ready to plant the fig-tree.  Then she had
+glimpsed something just too funny for anything in the idea of Elmer
+raising pigs&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. for he had gone on to that, sagely anticipating a
+high market another season&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and she laughed at him and all
+unintentionally wounded his feelings.  In a flash he was Black Bill
+again and on his mettle, ready with the quick retort stung from him;
+and she, parrying his thrust, was at once Fluff, the mercuric.  The
+spat was on&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. they would call it a spat to-morrow if to-morrow were
+kind to them&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and Elmer's ranch and house and cow, horse and pigs
+were laughed to scorn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Florrie departed leaving her cruellest laughter to ring in his ears.
+This might have been a repetition of any one of a dozen episodes
+familiar to them both, but never, perhaps, had Elmer's ears burned so
+or Florrie's heart so disturbed her with its beating.  For, she thought
+regretfully as she hurried out into the street, they had been getting
+along so nicely.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She had no business out alone at this time of night and she knew it.
+So she hurried on, anxious to get home before her father, who was
+returning late from a visit to one of his ranches.  Abreast of the Casa
+Blanca she slowed up, looking in curiously.  Then, as again she was
+hastening on, she heard Jim Galloway's deep voice in a quiet "Good
+evening, Miss Florence."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good evening!" gasped Florrie aloud.  And "Oh!" said Florrie under her
+breath.  For Galloway's figure had separated itself from the shadows at
+the side of his open door and had come out into the street, while
+Galloway was saying in a matter-of-fact way: "I'll see you home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She wanted to run and could not.  She hung a moment balancing upon a
+high heel in indecision.  Galloway stepped forward swiftly, coming to
+her side.  "Oh, dear," the inner Florrie was saying.  A glance over her
+shoulder showed her Black Bill standing out in front of Struve's hotel.
+Well, there were compensations.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She started to hurry on, and had Jim Galloway been less sure of
+himself, troubled with the diffidence of youth as was Elmer, he must
+have either given over his purpose or else fairly run to keep up with
+her.  But being Jim Galloway, he laid a gentle but none the less
+restraining hand upon her arm.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Please," he said quietly.  "I want to talk with you.  May I?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Florrie's arm burned where he had touched her.  She was all in a
+flutter, half frightened and the other half flattered.  A shade more
+leisurely they walked on toward the cottonwoods.  Here, in the shadows,
+Galloway stopped and Florrie, although beginning to tremble, stopped
+with him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Men have given me a black name here," he was saying as he faced her.
+"They've made me somewhat worse than I am.  I feel that I have few
+friends, certainly very few of my own class.  I like to think of you as
+a friend.  May I?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was distinctly pleasant to have a big man like Galloway, a man whom
+for good or for bad the whole State knew, pleading with her.  It gave a
+new sort of assurance to her theory that she was "grown up"; it added
+to her importance in her own eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Why, yes," said Florrie.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am going away," he continued gravely.  "For just how long I don't
+know.  A week, perhaps a month, maybe longer.  It is a business matter
+of considerable importance, Florence.  Nor is it entirely without
+danger.  It will take me down below the border, and an American in
+Mexico right now takes his life entirely into his own hands.  You know
+that, don't you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then why do you go?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway smiled down at her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I held back every time a danger-signal was thrown out," he said
+lightly, "I wouldn't travel very far.  Oh, I'll come back all right; a
+man may go through fire itself and return if he has the incentive which
+I have."  His tone altered subtly.  Florrie started.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But before I go," went on Galloway, "I am going to tell you something
+which I think you know already.  You do, don't you, Florence?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She would not have been Florrie at all, but some very different,
+unromantic, and unimaginative creature, had she failed of
+comprehension.  Jim Galloway was actually making love to her!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What do you mean, Mr. Galloway?" she managed to stammer.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I mean that what I am telling you is for your ears alone.  I am
+placing a confidence in you, the greatest confidence a man can place in
+a girl.  Or in a woman, Florence.  I am trusting that what I say will
+remain just between you and me for the present.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  When I come back
+I will be no longer just Jim Galloway of the Casa Blanca, but Galloway
+of one of the biggest grants in Mexico, with mile after mile of fertile
+lands, with a small army of servants, vaqueros, and retainers, a sort
+of ruler of my own State!  It sounds like a fairy-tale, Florence, but
+it is the sober truth made possible by conditions below the border.  My
+estates will run down to the blue water of the Gulf; I shall have my
+own fleet of ocean-going yachts; there is a port upon my own land.
+There will be a home overlooking the sea like a king's palace.  Will
+you think of all that while I am gone?  Will you think of me a little,
+too?  Will you remember that my little kingdom is crying out for its
+queen?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  No; I am not asking you to answer me now.  I am just
+asking that you hold this as our secret until I come back.  Until I
+come back for you!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  I shall stand here until you reach your
+home," he broke off suddenly.  "Good night, my dear."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Good night," said Florence faintly, a little dazed by all that he had
+said to her.  Then, running through the shadows to her home, she was
+thinking of the boy who had wished to propose to her and of the man who
+had done so; of Elmer's little home upon the knoll surrounded by a cow,
+a horse, and some pigs&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and of a big house like a palace looking
+out to sea across the swaying masts of white-sailed, sea-going yachts!
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap21"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+A CRISIS
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Like Norton, Virginia found life simplifying itself in a crisis.  Upon
+three hundred and sixty days or more of the average year each
+individual has before him scores of avenues open to his thoughts or to
+his act; he may turn wheresoever he will.  But in the supreme moments
+of his life, with brief time for hesitation granted him, he may be
+forced to do one of two things: he must leap back or plunge forward to
+escape the destiny rushing down upon him like a speeding engine
+threatening him who has come to stand upon the crossing.  Now Virginia
+saw clearly that she must submit to Norton's mastery and remain silent
+in the King's Palace or she must seek to escape and tell what she knew
+or&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Was there a remaining alternative?  If so it must present
+itself as clearly as the others.  Action was stripped down to
+essentials, bared to its component elements.  True vision must
+necessarily result, since no side issues cluttered the view.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She sat upon a saddle-blanket upon the rock floor of the main chamber
+of the series of ancient dwelling-rooms, staring at the fire which
+Norton had builded against a wall where it might not be seen from
+without.  The horses were in the meadow down by the stream; she and
+Norton had tethered them among the trees where they were fairly free
+from the chance of being seen.  Norton was coming up, mounting the
+deep-worn steps in the cliff side.  He had gone for water; he had not
+been out of sight nor away five minutes.  And yet when she looked up to
+see him coming through the irregular doorway she had decided.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She saw in him both the man and the gentleman.  Her anger had died down
+long ago, smothered in the ashes of her distress; now she summoned to
+the fore all that she might in extenuation of what he did.  She did not
+blame him for the crimes which she knew he had committed because she
+was so confident that the chief crime of all had been the act resulting
+from Caleb Patten's abysmal ignorance.  Nor now could she blame Norton
+that, embarked upon this flood of his life, he saw himself forced to
+make her his prisoner for a few hours.  It was a man's birthright to
+protect himself, to guard his freedom.  And her heart gave him high
+praise that toward her he acted with all deference, that with things as
+they were, while he was man enough to hold her here, he was too much
+the gentleman to make love to her.  Would she have resisted, would she
+have opposed calm argument against a hot avowal?  She did not know.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Virginia," he said gravely as he slumped down upon the far side of the
+fire, "I feel the brute.  But&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Yes, she had decided, fully decided, whether if be for better or for
+worse.  Now she surprised him with one of her quick, bright, friendly
+smiles while she interrupted:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Let us make the best of a bad situation," she said swiftly.  "I am not
+unhappy right now; I have no wish to run half-way to meet any
+unhappiness which may be coming our way.  You are not the brute toward
+me; what you do, I do not so much as censure you for.  I am not going
+to quarrel with you; were I in your boots I imagine I'd do just exactly
+as you are doing.  I hope I'd be as nice about it, too.  And now,
+before we drop the subject for good and all, let me say this: no matter
+what I do, should it even be the betraying you into the hands of your
+enemies, to put it quite tragically, I want you to know that I wish you
+well and that is why I do it.  Can you understand me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," he said slowly.  "It's sweet of you, Virginia.  If you got my
+gun and shot my head off, I don't know who should blame you.  I
+shouldn't!" he concluded with a forced attempt to match her smile.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Then we understand each other?  As long as each does the best he can
+see his way to do, the other finds no fault?"  And when he nodded she
+rose quickly and came to him, putting out her hand as he rose.  "Rod
+Norton," she said simply, and her eyes shone steady and clear into his,
+"I wish you the best there is.  I think we should both pray a little to
+God to help us to-night.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  And now, if you will run up to your
+Treasure Chamber and bring down the coffee, I'll promise to be here
+when you get back.  And to make you a good hot drink; I feel the need
+of it and so do you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He went out without an answer, his face grave and troubled again.  As
+her eyes followed him they were no longer gay but wistful, and then
+filled with a sadness which she had not shown to him, and then suddenly
+wet.  But before he had gone half a dozen steps from the door she
+dashed a hasty hand across her eyes and went swiftly to the smallest of
+the three black leather cases he had brought up here after her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"This is the one way out, Rod Norton!" she whispered.  "The one way out
+if God is with us."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her quick fingers sought and found the tiny phial with its small white
+tablets&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. labelled <I>Hyoscine</I>&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and secreted it in her bosom.
+She was laying fresh twigs upon the blaze when he came back with the
+coffee-pot, can of coffee, and a tin cup.  She greeted him with another
+quick smile.  He saw that her cheeks were flushed rosily, that there
+was subdued excitement in her eyes.  And yet matters just as they were
+would sufficiently explain these phenomena without causing him to quest
+farther.  He thought merely that he had never seen her so delightfully
+pretty.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Virginia Page," he told her as his own eyes grew bright with the new
+light leaping up into them, "some day&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sh!" she commanded, her color deepened.  "Let us wait until that day
+comes.  Now you just obey orders; lie there and smoke while I make the
+coffee."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He wanted to wait on her, but when she insisted he withdrew to the wall
+a few feet away, sat down, filled his pipe, and watched her.  And while
+he filled his eyes with her he marvelled afresh.  For it seemed to him
+that her mood was one of unqualified happiness.  She did all of the
+talking, her words came in a ceaseless bright flow, she laughed readily
+and often, her eyes were dancing, the warm color stood high in her
+cheeks.  That her heart was beating like mad, that the intoxication of
+an intent he could not read had swept into her brain, that she was
+vastly more in the mood to weep than to smile&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. all of this lay
+hidden to him behind her woman's wit.  For, having decided, there would
+be no going back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With the coffee boiling in the old black and spoutless pot from
+Norton's cache in the Treasure Chamber, she poured what was left of the
+ground coffee from its tin to the flat surface of a bit of stone.  This
+tin was to serve Norton as his cup.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's to be our night-cap," she laughed at him as she put the
+improvised cup by the other.  "I refuse to sit up any later; a
+saddle-blanket for bunk, and then to sleep.  That is my room yonder,
+isn't it?"  She nodded toward the black entrance to the second of the
+chambers of the King's Palace.  "And you will sleep here?  Well, while
+the coffee cools, I'm going to make my bed."  She carried her blanket
+on past him, was gone into the yawning darkness, was back in a moment.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My bed's ready," she told him gayly.  "This kind of housekeeping just
+suits me!  Now for the coffee.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Rod Norton, will you do as you
+are told or not?  You are to sit still and let me wait on you; who's
+hostess here, I'd like to know?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While out of his sight she had slipped one of the hyoscine tablets into
+her palm; now, as she poured the ink-black beverage, she let it drop
+into the tin can which she presented to Norton.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Don't say it doesn't taste right!" she admonished him in a voice in
+which at last he detected the nervous note.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stood up, holding his coffee-can in his hand, meeting her strained
+levity with a deep gravity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Virginia," he began.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's too late to cut in on my monologue!" she cried gayly.  "Pledge me
+in the drink I have made for you, Mr. Norton!  Just say: 'Virginia,
+here's looking at you!'  Or: 'I wish you well in all that you
+undertake.'  Or: 'For all that you have said to me, for whatever you
+may say or do in the future, I forgive you!'  That's all."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Virginia," he said gently, "I love you, my dear."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She laughed nervously.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That's the nice way to say everything all at once!"  He saw that her
+hand shook, that a little of her coffee spilled, and that again she
+grew steady.  "Now our night-cap and good night!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She drank hurriedly.  Thereafter she yawned and made her little
+pretense of increased drowsiness.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"It's been such a long day," she said.  "You'll forgive me if I tumble
+right straight into sleepy-land?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again they said good night and she left him, going down among the eerie
+dancing shadows to her own quarter, drawing his moody eyes after her.
+When she had gone, he threw down his own blanket across the main
+entrance of the King's Palace, filled his pipe again, and sat staring
+out into the night.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The fire cast up its red flare spasmodically, licked at the last of the
+dead branches which, rolling apart, burned out upon the rock floor.
+The darkness once more blotted out all detail saving the few
+smouldering coals, the knobs of stone in the small flickering circles
+of light, the quiet form of the man silhouetted against the lesser dark
+of the night without.  Virginia, rigid and motionless at the spot to
+which she had stolen noiselessly, watched him breathlessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For only a little he sat smoking.  Then, as though he experienced
+something of that weariness of which she had made pretense, he laid his
+pipe aside and stretched out upon his blanket, leaning upon an elbow.
+She heard him sigh, vaguely made out when he let his head slip down
+upon an arm, saw that he had grown still, and was lying stretched out
+across the main threshold.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now she must stand motionless while every fibre of her being demanded
+action; now she must curb impetuosity to the call of caution.  As the
+seconds passed, all but insupportable in their tedious slowness, she
+stood rigid and tense, waiting.  But soon she knew that the drug had
+had its will with him, that he was steeped in deep sleep, that no
+longer must she wait, that now at length she might act.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Carrying her saddle-blanket she came to him and stood quietly looking
+down into his upturned face.  At last she could let the tears burst
+into her eyes unchecked, now she could suddenly go down on her knees
+beside him, for an instant laying her cheek lightly against his in the
+first caress.  Would it be the last?  He stirred a little and sighed
+again.  She drew back, still upon her knees again breathlessly rigid.
+But his stupor clung heavily to him, and she knew that it would hold
+him thus for hours.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A score of burning questions clamoring in her mind she disposed of
+briefly, since time was of the essence.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If I let you have your way, Rod Norton," she whispered, "you will go
+on from crime to tragedy.  If I hand you over to the law, I will be
+betraying you for no end; for your type of man finds the way to break
+jail and so force his own hand to further violence.  There is the one
+way out.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  And God help me to succeed.  God forgive me if I fail!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She stole by him and stepped upon the outer ledge.  She was leaving him
+helpless&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the thought presented itself that she would have another
+thing to answer for if one of the many men with such cause to hate him
+should come upon him thus.  Well, that was but one of the more remote
+chances she must take.  There was scant enough likelihood that any one
+should come here before she could race into Las Estrellas and back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then it was that she saw Patten.  She did not know at first that it was
+Patten, but just that within a few feet of her upon the ledge which she
+must travel to the steps a man was standing, his body jerking back,
+pressed against the rocks as he saw her.  She drew back swiftly, her
+blood in riotous tumult.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But now, above aught else, the one thought in her mind was that there
+was no time for loitering, that the dawn would come all too soon, that
+there must be no delay.  She stooped quickly and drew from its holster
+Norton's heavy revolver.  Her saddle-blanket over her left arm, the gun
+gripped in her right hand, she was once more upon the ledge, moving
+cautiously toward the figure seen a moment ago, gone now.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+That it was Patten she knew only when she had gone down the steps and
+had overtaken him there.  Retreating thus far, reassured when he had
+made out that it was the girl alone, he waited for her.  And as she
+demanded nervously, "Who is it?" it was Patten's disagreeable laugh
+which answered her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"So," he jeered at her, "this is the sort of thing you do when you are
+supposed to be out on a case all night!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten here!  Had God sent him&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. or the devil?  His insult she
+passed over.  She was not thinking of herself right now, of convention,
+of wagging tongues.  She was just seeking to understand how this latest
+incident might simplify or make more complex her problem.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've had my suspicions all along," he laughed evilly.  "To-night I
+followed and made sure.  And now, my fine little white dove, what have
+you to say for yourself?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Might she use Patten?  She was but now on her way to Las Estrellas for
+aid.  She would operate herself, she would take that upon herself, with
+no more regard for ethics than for Patten's gossiping tongue.  She
+believed that she could do it successfully; at the least she must make
+the attempt, though Norton died under her hand.  The right?  She had
+the right!  The right because she loved him, because he loved her,
+because his whole future was at stake.  But she must have assistance so
+that she submit him to no needless danger, so that she give him every
+chance under such circumstances as these.  She would have brought a man
+from Las Estrellas, she would have let him think what pleased him, just
+saying that Norton had met with an accident, that an operation was
+necessary.  And now Patten was here.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Could she use him?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You followed us?" she said, gaining time for her thoughts.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes; I followed you.  I saw you come here.  I watched while he
+unsaddled, how he came up to you.  What I could not see through the
+rock walls I could guess!  And now&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Well, now?" she repeated after him, so that Patten must have marvelled
+at her lack of emotion.  "Now what?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Now," he spat at her venomously, "I think I have found the fact to
+shut Roderick Norton's blabbing mouth for him!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I don't understand&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You don't?  You mean that he hasn't done any talking to you about me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh!"  And now suddenly she did understand.  "You mean how you are not
+Caleb Patten at all but Charles?  How you are no physician but liable
+to prosecution for illegal practising?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Could she use him or could she not?  That was what she was thinking,
+over and over.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Where is he?" demanded Patten a little suspiciously.  "What is he
+doing?  What are you doing out here alone?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He is asleep," she told him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten laughed again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Your little parties are growing commonplace then!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Charles Patten," she cut in coolly, "I have stood enough of your
+insult.  Be still a moment and let me think."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He stared at her but for a little; his own mind busy, was silent.
+Could she make use of this blind instrument which fate had thrust into
+her hand?  She began to believe that she could.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Charles Patten," she went on, a new vigor in her tone, "Mr. Norton
+knows enough concerning you to make you a deal of trouble.  Just how
+long a term in the State prison he can get for you I don't know.
+But&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Haven't I found the way to shut his mouth!" he said sharply.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I think not.  Before your slanders could travel far we could have
+found Father Jose and have been married.  But let me finish.  You have
+practised here for upward of two years, haven't you?  You have made
+money, you have a ranch of your own.  That is one thing to keep in
+mind.  The other is that more than one of your patients have died.  I
+believe, Charles Patten, that it would be a simple matter to have the
+district attorney convict you of murder.  That's the second thing to
+remember."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten shifted uneasily.  Then she knew that it had been God who had
+sent him.  When he sought to bluster, she cut him short.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"In the morning, as soon as there is light enough," she said, wondering
+at her own calmness, "I am going to perform a capital operation upon
+Mr. Norton.  It will be without his knowledge and consent.  If he lives
+and you will give up your practice and retire to your ranch or what
+business pleases you, I will guarantee that he does not prosecute you
+for what has passed.  If he dies&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If he dies"--he snatched the words from her--"it will be murder!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you would be free from prosecution," she continued, quite as
+though he had made no interruption, "I rather imagine that I should
+die, too.  And, as you say, I would be liable for murder.  He is asleep
+now because I have drugged him.  I shall chloroform him before he
+wakes.  I should have no defense in the law-courts.  Yes, it would be
+murder."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He drew a step back from her as though from one suddenly gone mad.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What are you operating for?" he demanded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"For your blunder," she said simply.  "And you are going to help me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Am I?" he jeered.  "Not by a damned sight!  If you think that I am
+going to let myself in for that sort of thing&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Until now he had not seen the gun in her hand.  Her quick gesture
+showed it to him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Charles Patten," she told him emphatically, "I am risking Mr. Norton's
+life; I am therefore risking my own.  Understand what that means.
+Understand just what you have got to win or lose by to-night's work.
+Consider that I pledge you my word not to implicate you in what you do;
+that if worse came to worse, you could claim and I would admit that you
+were forced at the point of a gun to do as I told you.  Oh, I can shoot
+straight!  And finally, I will shoot straight, as God watches me,
+rather than let you go now and stop what I have undertaken!  Think of
+it well, Charles Patten!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Patten, being as weak of mind as he was pudgy of hand, having besides
+that peculiar form of craft which is vouchsafed his type, furthermore
+more or less of a coward, saw matters quite as Virginia wished him.
+Together they awaited the coming of the dawn.  The girl, realizing to
+the uttermost what lay before her, forced herself to rest, lying still
+under the stars, schooling herself to the steady-nerved action which
+was to have its supreme test.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Just before the dawn they had coffee and a bite to eat from Norton's
+little pack.  Close to the drugged man they builded a rude low table by
+dragging the squared blocks of fallen stone from their place by the
+wall.  Upon this Virginia placed the saddle-blankets, neatly folded.
+Already Patten was showing signs of nervousness.  Looking into her face
+he saw that it was white and drawn but very calm.  Patten was asking
+himself countless questions, many of them impossible of answer yet.
+She was closing her mind to everything but the one supreme matter.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He helped her give the chloroform when she told him that there was
+sufficient light and that she was ready.  He brought water, placed
+instruments, stood by to do what she told him.  His nervousness had
+grown into fear; he started now and then, jerking about guiltily, as
+though he foresaw an interruption.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Together they got Norton's inert form upon the folded blankets.
+Patten's hands shook a little; he asked for a sip of brandy from her
+flask.  She granted it, and while Patten drank she cut away the hair
+from the unconscious man's scalp.  Long ago her fingers had made their
+examination, were assured that her diagnosis was correct.  Her hands
+were as untrembling as the steel of her knife.  She made the first
+incision, drawing back the flap of skin and flesh, revealing the bone
+of the skull.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For forty-five minutes she worked, her hands swift, sure, capable,
+unerring.  It was done.  She was right.  The under-table of the skull
+had been fractured; there was the bone pressure upon the underlying
+area of brain-tissue.  She had removed the pressure and with it any
+true pathological cause of the theft impulse.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She drew a bandage about the sleeping eyes.  She made Patten bring his
+own saddle-blanket; it was fixed across the entrance of the anteroom of
+the King's Palace, darkening it.  Then she went to the ledge just
+outside and stood there, staring with wide eyes across the little
+meadow with its flowers and birds and water, down the slope of the
+mountain, to the miles of desert.  She had now but to await the
+awakening.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap22"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE BEGINNING OF THE END
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+When Norton stirred and would have opened his eyes but for the bandage
+drawn over them, she was at his side.  She had been kneeling there for
+a long time, waiting.  Her hand was on his where it had crept softly
+from his wrist.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must lie very still," she commanded gently.  "I am with you and
+everything is all right.  There was&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. an accident.  No, don't try
+to move the cloth; please, Roderick."  She pushed his hand back down to
+his side.  "We are in the King's Palace, just you and I, and everything
+is all right."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was feverish, and she soothed him; sick, and she mothered him and
+nursed him; troubled, uncertain, perplexed, and she comforted him.  At
+the first she went no further than saying that there had been an
+accident; that already she had sent to San Juan for all that was needed
+to make him comfortable; that Mr. Engle had been instructed to speed a
+man to the railroad for further necessities; that now for his own sake,
+for her sake, he must just lie very still&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. try not even to think.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was listless, seeming without volition, quite willing to surrender
+himself into her keeping.  What dazed thoughts were his upon this first
+awakening were lost, forgotten in the brief doze into which she
+succeeded in luring him.  When again he stirred and woke she was still
+at his side, kneeling upon the hard rock floor beside him.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  She
+had had Patten help her to lift him down from the table before she
+despatched Patten with the note for John Engle.  Again she pleaded with
+him to lie still and just trust to her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was very still.  She knew that he was trying to piece together his
+fragmentary thoughts and impressions, seeking to bridge over from last
+night to to-day.  So she talked softly with him, soothing him alike
+with the tenderness of her voice and the pressure and gentle stroke of
+her hand upon his hand and arm.  He had had an accident but was going
+to be all right from now on.  But he must not be moved for a little.
+Therefore Engle would come soon, and perhaps Mrs. Engle with him.  And
+a wagon bringing a real bed and fresh clean sheets and all of those
+articles which she had listed.  It would not be very long now until
+Engle came.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But at last when she paused his hand shut down upon hers and he asked
+quietly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't dream it all, did I, Virginia?  It is hard to know just what
+I did and what I dreamed I did.  But it seems more than a dream.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Was it I who robbed Kemble of the Quigley mines?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," she told him lightly, as though it were a matter of small
+moment.  "But you were not responsible for what you did."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And there were other robberies?  I even tried to steal from you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," she answered again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And you wanted to have me submit to an operation?  And I would not?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And then&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. then you&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you did it?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So she explained, feeling that certainty would be less harmful to him
+now than a continual struggle to penetrate the curtain of semidarkness
+obscuring his memory.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I took it upon myself," she told him at the end.  "I took the chance
+that you might die; that it might be I who had killed you.  Perhaps I
+had no right to do it.  But I have succeeded; I have drawn you back
+from kleptomania to your own clear moral strength.  You will get well,
+Rod Norton; you will be an honest man.  But I took it upon myself to
+take the chances for you.  Now&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. do you think that you can forgive
+me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He appeared to be pondering the matter.  When his reply came it was
+couched in the form of a question:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Would you have done it, Virginia&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. if you didn't love me a little
+as I love you?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And her answer comforted him.  He was sleeping when the Engles came.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Later came the big wagon, one of Engle's men driving, Ignacio Chavez
+and two other Mexicans accompanying on horseback.  Virginia had
+forgotten nothing.  Quick hands did her bidding now, altering the
+anteroom of the King's Palace into a big airy bedroom.  There was a
+great rug upon the floor, a white-sheeted and counterpaned bed, fresh
+pajamas, table, chair, alcohol-stove, glasses and cups and
+water-pitchers.  There were cloths for fresh bandages, wide palm-leaf
+fans&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. there was even ice and the promise of further ice to come.
+The sun was shut out by heavy curtains across the main entrance and the
+broken-out holes in the easterly wall.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My dear," said Mrs. Engle, taking both of Virginia's hands into her
+own, "I don't know just what has happened and I don't care to know
+until you get good and ready to tell me about it.  But I can see by
+looking at you that you are at the end of your tether.  I'm going to
+take care of Roddy now while you sleep at least a couple of hours."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She and Engle had asked themselves the question as soon as Virginia's
+note came to them: "What in the world were she and Norton doing on the
+mountainside at that time of night?"  But they had no intention of
+asking it of any one else.  Rather John Engle hastened to answer it for
+others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"<I>Muchachos</I>" he said to the men when he sent them back to San Juan,
+"there was an accident last night.  Señor Norton had a fall from his
+horse, striking his head.  My cousin, Miss Page, together with Señor
+Norton and Señor Patten, was taking a short cut this way to make a call
+at Pozo.  Señor Patten and Miss Page succeeded in getting Señor Norton
+here, where they had to operate upon him immediately.  He is doing well
+now, thanks to their prompt action; he will be well soon.  You may tell
+his friends."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then, seeing little that he could do here and much that he might
+accomplish elsewhere, John Engle rode on his spurs back to San Juan to
+lay down the law to Patten.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+Throughout the days and nights which followed, Virginia and Mrs. Engle
+nursed Norton back into a semblance of strength.  One of them was
+always at his side.  When at last the bandage might be removed from the
+blindfolded eyes Norton's questing glance found Virginia first of all.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Virginia," he said quietly, "thanks to you I can start in all over
+now."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She understood.  So did Mrs. Engle.  For Norton had explained to both
+the banker and his wife, holding nothing back from them, telling them
+frankly of crimes committed, of his attempted abduction of the girl who
+in turn had "abducted him."  He had restitutions to make without the
+least unnecessary delay.  He must square himself and he thanked God
+that he could square himself, that his crimes had been bloodless, that
+he had but to return the stolen moneys.  And, to wipe his slate clean,
+he stood ready to pay to the full for what he had done, to offer his
+confession openly, to accept without a murmur whatever decree the court
+might award him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again John Engle did his bit.  He went to the county-seat and saw the
+district attorney, an upright man, but one who saw clearly.  The lawyer
+laid his work aside and came immediately with Engle to the King's
+Palace.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Any court, having the full evidence," he said crisply, "would hold you
+blameless.  Give me the money you have taken; I shall see that it is
+returned and that no questions are asked.  And if you've got any
+idiotic compulsion about open confession&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Well, think of somebody
+besides yourself for a change.  Try thinking about the Wonder Girl a
+little, it will be good for you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For he never called her anything but that, the Wonder Girl.  When he
+had heard everything, he came to her after his straightforward fashion
+and gripped her hand until he hurt her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I didn't know they made girls like you," he told her before she even
+knew who he was.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was he who, summoning all of his forensic eloquence, finally quieted
+Norton's disturbed mind.  Norton in his weakened condition was all for
+making a clean breast before the world, for acknowledging himself unfit
+for his office, for resigning.  But in the end when he was told curtly
+that he owed vastly more to the county than to his stupid conscience,
+that he had been chosen to get Jim Galloway, that that was his job,
+that he could do all the resigning he wanted to afterward, and that
+finally he was not to consider his own personal feelings until he had
+thought of Virginia's, Norton gave over his regrets and merely waxed
+impatient for the time when he could finish his work and go back to Las
+Flores rancho.  For it was understood that he would not go alone.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll free del Rio because I have to, not because I want to," said the
+lawyer at the end.  "Trusting to you to bring him in again later.  He
+is one of Galloway's crowd and I know it, despite his big bluffs.
+Galloway is away right now, somewhere below the border.  Just what he
+is up to I don't know.  I think del Rio does.  When Galloway gets back
+you keep your eye on the two of them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After the county attorney's departure Rod Norton rested more easily.
+He was making restitution for all that he had done, he was getting well
+and strong again, he had been given such proof as comes to few men of
+the utter devotion of a woman.  Through many a bright hour he and
+Virginia, daring to look confidently ahead, talked of life as it might
+be lived upon Las Flores when the lake was made, the lower lands
+irrigated, the big home built.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And," she confessed to him at the last, her face hidden against his
+breast, "I never want to see a surgeon's lancet again in all of my
+life, Rod Norton!"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+When at length the sheriff could bestride a horse he wondered
+impatiently what it could be that kept Jim Galloway so long away.  And
+if he was never coming back.  But he knew that high up among the
+cliffs, hidden away in the ancient caves, Jim Galloway's rifles were
+still lying.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap23"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXIII
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE STRONG HAND OF GALLOWAY
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, you will all dance and shout together very soon," said Ignacio
+wisely to his six bells in the old Mission garden.  "You will see!
+Captain and the Dancer and Lolita, the Little One, La Golondrina, and
+Ignacio Chavez, all of you together until far out across the desert men
+hear.  For it is in the air that things will happen.  And then, when it
+is all done&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Why then, amigos, who but me is going to build a
+little roof over you that runs down both ways, to save you from the hot
+sun and the rains?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Oh, one knows.  It is in the air.  You will
+see!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+For Jim Galloway had returned, a new Galloway, a Galloway who carried
+himself up and down the street with bright, victorious eyes, and the
+stride of full confidence, who, at least in the eyes of Ignacio Chavez,
+was like a blood-lusting lion "screwing up his muscles" to spring.
+Galloway's return brought to Roderick Norton a fresh vigilance, to
+Virginia a sleepless anxiety, to Florence Engle unrest, uncertainty,
+very nearly pure panic.  During the first few days of his absence she
+had allowed herself the romantic joy of floating unchecked upon the
+tide of a girlish fancy, dreaming dreams after the approved fashion
+which is youth's, dancing lightly upon foamy crests, seeing only blue
+water and no rocks under her.  Then, with the potency of the man's
+character removed with the removal of his physical being, she grew to
+see the shoals and to draw back from them, shuddering somewhat
+pleasurably.  Now that he was again in San Juan and that her eyes had
+been held by his in the first meeting upon the street, her heart
+fluttered, her vision clouded, she wondered what she would do.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There was to be no lost action in Galloway's campaign now.  Within half
+a dozen hours of his arrival there was a gathering of various of his
+henchmen at the Casa Blanca.  Just what passed was not to be known; it
+was significant, however, that among those who had come to his call
+were the Mexican, del Rio, Antone, Kid Rickard, and a handful of the
+other most restless spirits of the county.  Norton accepted the act in
+all that it implied to his suspicions and sent out word to Cutter,
+Brocky Lane, and those of his own and Brocky's cowboys whom he counted
+on.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway's second step, known only to himself and Florrie, was a
+private meeting with the banker's daughter.  It occurred upon the
+second evening following his return, just after dark among the
+cottonwoods, but a hundred yards from her home.  He had made the
+opportunity with the despatch which marked him now; he had watched for
+her during the day, had appeared merely to pass her by chance on the
+street, and had paused just long enough to ask her to meet him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I have done all that I planned to do," he announced triumphantly, his
+eyes holding hers, forcing upon her spirit the mastery of his own.
+"The power in Mexico is going to be Francisco Villa.  I have seen him.
+Let me talk with you to-night, Florence.  History is in the making; it
+may be you and I together who shape the destiny of a people."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+After all, she was but a little over sixteen, her head filled with the
+bright stuff of romance, and he was a forceful man who for his own
+purposes had long studied her.  She came to the tryst, albeit half in
+trembling, a dozen tremulous times ready for a fleeing retreat.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again he was all deference to her.  He builded cunningly upon the fact
+that he trusted her; that he, a strong man, put his faith in her, a
+woman.  He flattered her as she had never been flattered, not too
+subtly, yet not so broadly as to arouse her suspicion of his intent.
+He spoke quietly at first, then his voice seeming charged with his
+leaping ambition set responsive chords within her thrilling.  He
+pictured to her the state he was going to found, organize, rule, an
+uncertain number of fair miles stretching along a tropical coast; he
+made her see again a palatial dwelling with servants in livery, the
+blue waters of the Gulf, the white of dancing sails.  He spoke of a
+peace which was going to be declared between warring factions below the
+border within thirty days, of the magnificence to be Francisco Villa's,
+of the position to be occupied by Jim Galloway at Villa's side.  His
+planned development of a gold-mine he mentioned merely casually.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And then at length when Florrie was prepared for the passionate
+declaration he humbled himself at her feet, lifted his hands to her in
+supplication, told her in burning words of his love.  Whether the man
+did love her with all of the strength of his nature or whether he but
+meant to strike through her at John Engle, the richest man of this
+section of the State, it was for Jim Galloway alone to know.  Certainly
+not for Florrie, who listened wide-eyed.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Once she thought that
+he was about to sweep her up into his arms; they had lifted suddenly
+from his sides.  She had drawn back, crying sharply: "No, no!"  But he
+had waited, had again grown deeply deferential, swerving immediately to
+further vividly colored pictures of life as it might be, of power and
+pomp, of a secure position from which a man and a woman might direct
+policies of state, shaping the lives of other men and women.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And in the end of that ardent interview Jim Galloway's caution was
+still with him, his knowledge of the girl's nature clear in his mind.
+He did not ask her answer; he merely sought a third opportunity to
+speak with her, suggesting that upon the next night she slip out and
+meet him.  He would have a horse for her, one for himself; they could
+ride for a half-hour.  He had so much to tell her.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Perhaps a much more important factor than she realized in her action
+was Florrie's new riding-habit.  It had been acquired but three days
+before and she knew very well just how she looked in it.  There would
+be a moon, almost at the full.  The full moon and the new riding-habit
+were the allies given by fate to Jim Galloway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Besides all of this, she had not seen Elmer Page for a month.  Further,
+she knew that Elmer had gone riding upon at least one occasion with a
+girl of Las Palmas, Superintendent Kemble's daughter.  And finally,
+there lies much rich adventure in just doing that which we know we
+should leave alone.  So Florrie, while her mother and father thought
+that she had gone early to bed, was on her way to meet Galloway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They rode out of the cottonwood fringed arroyo just before moonrise,
+circling the town, Florrie scarcely marking whether they rode north or
+south.  But Galloway knew what he was doing and they turned slowly
+toward the southwest.  As they rode, his horse drawn in close to hers,
+he talked as he had never talked before; his voice rang from the first
+word with triumphant assurance.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"When he calls she will follow!" Virginia had thought fearfully of
+them.  To-night he was calling eloquently, she was following,
+frightened and yet obedient to his mastery.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Galloway's influence over the girl, that of a strong will over a weak
+and fluttering one, was quite naturally the stronger when they were
+alone together.  She had always been willing, sometimes a bit eager, to
+make a hero of him; he had long thoroughly understood her.  To-night
+was the brief battle of wills, with him summoning all of his strength,
+flushed with victory.  Abruptly now he urged that she marry him; a
+moment later his insistent pleading was subtly tinged with command.  He
+was the arbiter of the hour; he told her of a priest waiting for them
+at a little village a dozen miles away.  They would be married
+to-night; they were eloping even at this palpitant instant!
+</P>
+
+<P>
+When Florence would have stopped, of two balancing minds, he urged the
+horses on.  When she would have procrastinated, he beat down her
+opposition with the rush of his words.  Even while she struggled she
+was yielding; Galloway was quick to see how her resistance was growing
+fainter.  And all the time, while he spoke vehemently and she for the
+most part listened in a fascinated silence, they were riding on through
+the moonlit night.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  It seemed to her that surely he must love her
+as few men had loved before.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+The village he had promised her was in reality but two poor houses at a
+crossroads, inhabited by two Mexican men and dowdy women.  On the way
+they encountered but one horseman; Galloway turned his own and
+Florence's animals out so that, though seen, they might escape
+recognition.  At the nearest of the two hovels he dismounted, raising
+his arms to her.  When she cried out and shrank back trembling, he
+laughed softly, caught her in his arms, and lifted her free of the
+saddle; when he would have kissed her she put her face into her two
+hands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I want to go back!" she whispered.  "I am afraid!  Please, Mr.
+Galloway, please let me go home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Dogs were barking, a man and woman came out.  The man laughed.  Then he
+gathered up the bridle-reins and led the horses to the barn.  Florrie,
+shrinking out of Galloway's embrace, looked particularly little and
+helpless in her pretty riding-habit.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She went with Galloway into the lamplighted room.  The woman looked at
+her curiously, then to Galloway, something of wonder and upstanding
+admiration in her beady eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Has the priest come?" demanded Galloway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No, señor.  Not yet."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She added by way of explanation that word had been sent; that the
+priest was delayed; a man was dying and he must stay a little at the
+bedside.  She muttered the tale like a child repeating a lesson.
+Galloway, watching Florence, who sat rigid in her chair by the table,
+waited for her to finish.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the end he gave the woman a sharp, significant look.  She said
+something about a cup of coffee for the señorita and went hastily into
+the kitchen.  Florrie sprang to her feet, her hands clasped.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You must let me go," she cried wildly.  "The priest isn't here.  I am
+going home."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," said Galloway steadily.  "You are not going home, Florence.  You
+must listen to me.  I love you more than anything else In the world, my
+dear.  I want you, want you all for mine."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She saw a sudden light flare up in his eyes and it seemed to her that
+her heart would beat through the walls of her breast.  "I am not a boy,
+but a man.  A strong man, a man who, when he wants a thing, wants it
+with his whole heart and body and soul, a man who takes what he wants.
+Wait; just listen to me!  You love me now; you will love me more and
+more when I give you all that I have promised you.  To-night, in an
+hour, I will have made the beginning; I will have gathered about me
+fifty men who will do exactly what I tell them to do!  Then they will
+go with us down into Mexico; they will be the beginning of a little
+army whose one thought will be loyalty&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. loyalty to you and to me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," said Florence, her voice shaking.  "I am going.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You will marry me when the priest comes," he cut in sternly.
+"Otherwise, if you make me, I will take you with me anyway, unmarried.
+And I will make you marry me when we have crossed the border.  And
+now&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. now you will kiss me.  I have waited long, Florence."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He came toward her; she slipped behind the table, crying out to him to
+stop.  But he came on, caught her, drew her into his arms.  And
+Florrie, some new passionate, terrified Florrie, beat at him with her
+fists, tore at him with her nails, hid her face from him, and with the
+agility born of her terror slipped away from him again, again put the
+table between them.  Galloway, a thin line of blood across his cheek,
+thrust the table aside.  As he did so the man came back into the room
+and stood watching, a twisted smile upon his lips.  Galloway lifted his
+thick shoulders in a shrug and stood staring at the girl cowering in
+her corner.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Married or unmarried, you go with me," he told her.  "Your kisses you
+may save for me.  Think it over.  You had better ask for the priest
+when I come back."  He turned toward the Mexican.  "All ready, Feliz?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The man nodded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Tell Castro, then.  It's time to be in the saddle."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+With no other word to Florrie he went out.  But his last look was for
+her, the look of a victor.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap24"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXIV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+IN THE OPEN
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Roderick Norton, every fibre of his body alive and eager, his blood
+riotous with the certain knowledge that the long-delayed hour had come,
+rode a foam-flecked horse into San Juan shortly after moonrise.
+Galloway was striking at last; at last might Norton lift his own hand
+to strike back.  As he flung himself down from the saddle he was
+thinking almost equally of Jim Galloway, striking the supreme blow of
+his career, and of Billy Norton, whose death had come to him at
+Galloway's command.  Galloway was gathering his forces, had delivered
+an initial blow, was staking everything upon the one throw of the dice.
+And he must believe them loaded.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the clank of spur-chain and rowel Struve came hastily into the
+hallway from his office.  He saw the look in the sheriff's, eyes and
+demanded quickly:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What is it?  What's happened?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were grim lines about Norton's mouth, his quiet voice had an
+ominous ring to it.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hell's to pay, Julius," he retorted.  "And there's little telling
+where it'll end unless we're on the jump to meet it.  Galloway's come
+out into the open.  Kid Rickard and ten men with him, all Mexicans or
+breeds, crossed over into the next county yesterday, raided the county
+jail late this afternoon, shot poor Roberts, freed Moraga, and got away
+in a couple of big new touring-cars.  Every man of them carried a rifle
+and side-arms."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Killed Roberts, huh?" Struve's frown gathered.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"He's badly hurt, if not dead.  The Kid did the shooting."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Sure it's Galloway's work and not just the Kid's?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes.  Only a couple of hours ago a lot of Galloway's crowd was
+gathering up in the mountains.  They've gone to his cache for the
+rifles.  I have sent word for Brocky Lane and his and my cowboys.  It
+begins to look as though he were up to something bigger than we've been
+looking for.  And he's sure of himself, Struve, or he wouldn't have
+started things by daylight."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia had heard and came into the hallway from her room, her face
+white, her eyes filled with trouble.  Struve turned back into his room
+abruptly, going for his rifle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You heard?" asked Norton quietly.  "It's the big fight at last,
+Virginia.  But we've known it was coming all along."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes, Rod." she said half listlessly.  "I'll be glad when it's all
+over."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He sketched for her briefly what little more he knew and suspected.
+Throughout the county where there was telephone communication the wires
+were buzzing.  Over them the word had come to him of Kid Rickard's
+attack on Roberts and the freeing of Moraga.  But in many places the
+lines were reported "out of order" and towns were isolated by cut
+wires.  Already men were riding sweating horses, carrying word from
+him.  He knew that del Rio had gathered a crowd of men at Las Vegas; he
+was certain that del Rio was working hand in glove with Galloway;
+further that the Mexican had been with Galloway on his recent trip
+below the border and among the revolutionists.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They're solid down there," concluded Norton.  "What they are up to is
+something big here, then a dash for safety, carrying their booty with
+them.  But we're going to be on time to put a stop to it all.  I am
+going down to see Engle now; will you come with me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But before they left the hotel he swore Struve in as a deputy and sent
+him hastening to carry the word to other men to be counted on.  As they
+passed the Casa Blanca Norton paused a moment, looking in at the
+wide-open door; it was very quiet within, the place seeming deserted.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No use looking for Galloway here," he said as they went on.  "Nor for
+any of his gang.  But, when they come back&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. unless we head them
+off&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Her hand tightened on his arm.  She looked up into his thoughtful face
+with shining eyes.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"You think that they would attempt further robbery and outlawry here?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I am going to advise Engle to take the bulk of his money out of the
+bank, dig a hole, and hide it," he answered.  "Just to be sure in case
+we don't stop them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He knew that he had no time to waste tonight, and so as he and Virginia
+entered the Engles' living-room he began immediately telling the banker
+what had happened and what he feared was set to happen.  Engle listened
+gravely.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway is making his getaway to-night," Norton said by way of
+conclusion.  "For every rifle he has a man.  He has no reason to like
+you and he knows that you carry more money in gold and bank-notes than
+any other man in the country.  The fact that Kid Rickard pulled the
+game the way he did this afternoon, shooting down Roberts when there
+was no need of bloodshed, ought to be enough to show us that they are
+not going to draw the line anywhere this side of old Mexico."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"What are you planning?" asked Engle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I've sent for Brocky and all the men he can bring.  They'll all come
+heeled and ready for trouble, every one sworn in as a sheriff's deputy.
+I'll get every dependable man in San Juan into the saddle with a rifle
+inside half an hour.  Before that we'll have further word; or, if not,
+we ride toward Mt. Temple.  I'm taking the gamble so far that that's
+their rendezvous; that the Kid and his crowd will show up there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was unnecessary for him to continue.  Engle nodded and went for his
+rifle.  Norton, turning toward Mrs. Engle and Virginia, was shocked by
+the look he saw in the eyes of the banker's wife.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Florrie!" gasped Mrs. Engle, her hands gripped in front of her, her
+face paling.  "I thought she was in her room; when I missed her five
+minutes ago I thought that she had slipped out and run up to the hotel
+to see Virginia.  Virginia hasn't seen her."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton smiled and patted the two clasped hands.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, Florrie'll be all right, Mrs. Engle," he comforted her.  "We
+mustn't get nervous and begin to imagine things, must we?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But no lessening of that look of fear came into the mother's eyes.
+Galloway was striking, Florrie was not to be accounted for.  Though she
+turned quickly and went again through the house, the patio, and the
+rear gardens, she was apprehensively certain that she would not find
+Florence.  Virginia came hurriedly to Norton, whispering:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'm afraid for her, Rod.  I'm afraid!  I have seen her and Jim
+Galloway together, I have known all along that he had an influence over
+her which he might exert if he wanted to.  And, just before Jim
+Galloway went to Mexico, Elmer saw them walk down the street together,
+stop and talk together under the trees.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Oh, I'm afraid for her,
+Rod!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Engle's face was as white as chalk when a little later he came back
+into the room with his wife; his two hands were like rock upon his
+rifle.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Florence isn't in the house," he announced in a voice which, while
+calm, seemed not John Engle's voice.  "If she is in San Juan it won't
+take the half-hour to know it.  I'm rather inclined to think that I'm
+just a fool, Rod Norton.  My wife has told me that Galloway was looking
+at Florence in a way which meant no good.  I wouldn't believe.  And
+now, if&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton had no reply to make.  Florence's disappearance at a time like
+this might mean either a very great deal or nothing whatever.  But, as
+Engle had intimated, it would require but little time to learn if she
+were in San Juan and safe, and, as Norton had said, there was no time
+now to be wasted.  Engle would institute inquiries immediately; Norton,
+his own work looming large before him, would prepare to meet Galloway's
+latest play.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The sheriff decided promptly that it would be unwise to leave the town
+absolutely drained of men in whom he could put faith.  It was always
+possible that either the entire crowd of Galloway's men or a smaller
+detachment might find their way here.  Julius Struve, four armed men
+aiding him, was to be responsible for the welfare of women and
+children.  If Galloway's stroke should turn out to be bolder and harder
+than was now known, then Struve and his men had horses saddled and were
+to get their wards out of danger by hard riding.  Norton was to post
+two men a few miles out as he rode north and they were to report back
+to Struve in case of necessity.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+These latter plans were made only at the moment before the sheriff's
+departure.  A man sent by Brocky Lane had raced into San Juan's street,
+bringing fresh word.  It began to appear that Galloway was working in
+conjunction with aid from below the border.  Del Rio with a score of
+men, Mexicans for the most part who had dribbled into the county during
+the last few months, was reported to have swept down upon John Engle's
+ranches, and to be gathering herds of cattle and horses, starting them
+southward on the run.  Three of Engle's cowboys had been shot down; a
+similar attack had been delivered upon other ranches.  The little town
+of Las Vegas had been looted, post-office, store, and saloon safes
+dynamited, stock driven off to augment del Rio's other herds.  Further,
+the cowboy sent by Lane reported that a signal-fire had been lighted in
+the mountains an hour ago and that there had been another fire like an
+answer leaping up from the desert in the south.  Word had also come to
+Lane that telephone messages hinted that Kid Rickard and his unit were
+working further outlawry along the county line, headed toward Mt.
+Temple.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were seventeen armed horsemen in the street waiting for the word
+from Norton.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll come back to you," he said quietly to Virginia.  "Because after
+what you have done for me, I belong to you&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. if you want me."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I want you, Rod," she answered steadily.  "And I know that you will
+come back to me.  And now&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. kiss me good night."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+She clung to him a moment, then pushed him from her and watched him
+swing up into the saddle and ride out among the men who were pledged
+and sworn to do his bidding.  As he did so Engle came to him.
+
+"Going with us, John?" asked Norton.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No," said Engle.  "We haven't found her yet, Rod.  I'll try to pick up
+a trace of her here.  And&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you'll send a man to me if you find
+her?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Yes," Norton promised.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And if Galloway has got her&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I'll know what to do, John," said Norton gently.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then, without again looking back, he turned his horse toward the north.
+The seventeen men, riding two and three abreast, silent and grave for
+the most part, followed him.  The moon shone upon their rifle-barrels
+and made black, grotesque shadows underfoot.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Against the northern sky Mt. Temple was lifted sharply outlined; from
+its crest a leaping flame was stabbing at the stars, a new signal-fire
+to be seen across many miles.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap25"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXV
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE BATTLE IN THE ARROYO
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+Straight toward that wavering plume of flame in the north they rode
+swiftly, each man with his own thoughts and with few words.  But
+whether a man thought of Florrie Engle gone or of the shooting of
+Sheriff Roberts or of the looting of Las Vegas or of a ranch raided, he
+was like his fellows in that he knew that at last Jim Galloway had come
+out into the open and that to-night must be Galloway's triumph or
+Galloway's death.  And perhaps he wondered if his own saddle would run
+empty under the stars before another dawn.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Three or four miles from San Juan Norton made out an approaching rider,
+one who bent over his horse's mane, racing furiously.  The figure,
+growing rapidly distinct as it drew on from the north, grew erect as
+the horseman saw Norton's posse.  The rider jerked in his horse,
+pausing a moment as though in doubt whether he were meeting friend or
+foe.  Then, when again he came on at the same headlong gallop, Norton
+recognized him.  It was Elmer Page.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They're fighting back yonder!" cried the boy wildly, his eyes shining
+with his excitement.  "Brocky Lane sent me.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  I haven't a rifle,
+who will give me a rifle?  I'll give a man a hundred dollars for a
+rifle!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Easy, Elmer," said Norton sharply.  "Tell us what Brocky sent you to
+say.  Where are they?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Along the arroyo just off to the east of Mt. Temple.  About a mile
+from the mountain&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you know where the biggest boulders are all
+strung out along the arroyo?  It's there.  Brocky and a lot of cowboys
+are making a stand there, heading off the Kid and del Rio.  So they
+can't get with the others, you know.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Why didn't somebody tell me
+about this?" he broke off, his voice shrill.  "I haven't a rifle, just
+a cursed revolver.  Who will&nbsp;..."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Again Norton interrupted sternly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Let's have it straight, Elmer," he commanded.  "Brocky and his men are
+along the arroyo, you say?  And they're trying to keep between del Rio
+and the Kid's crowd and the other crowd?  Some of the others are still
+on the mountain, then?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The mountain is full of them.  They're pouring down and shooting as
+they come; Brocky's in between.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"How many men are with him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"About twenty.  But&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. my God!  Rickard's men and del Rio's are
+shooting from the east and the others are shooting from the west&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+poor old Tommy Rudge got shot in the stomach and Denny Blain is down
+and&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Del Rio and Rickard didn't come in machines did they?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  Brocky said tell you they'd left their cars, sent them on filled
+with loot toward the south, where a lot of other Greasers are waiting
+for them; then the Kid and del Rio and about fifty men altogether
+started a big herd of horses and cattle this way.  Brocky tried to
+stampede the herds, but the others are more than two to one, so he got
+his men in the arroyo and they're giving 'em hell from there."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway's on the other side?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"No.  Brocky said tell you Galloway hadn't shown up yet.  We think he
+didn't expect things to get started so soon.  One of Brocky's men
+riding in a little while ago from the other side of San Juan thought
+that he had seen Galloway and some one that looked like a girl riding
+with him toward the old crossroads where the Denbar place used to be.
+Brocky thinks maybe you can come in and head Galloway off and bust up
+the whole play that way."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+So Galloway and "some one who looked like a girl" had ridden toward the
+old Denbar cross-roads.  And Galloway had not yet joined his forces.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Elmer," said Norton quickly, "ride on to San Juan.  Tell John Engle
+what you have told me about Galloway.  Tell him&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"I won't!" cried Elmer, on the verge of hysteria.  "I won't do it.  Do
+it yourself; send some one else.  I want to go with you; I want a
+rifle, I tell you!  Didn't I see Tommy Rudge go down with a bullet in
+his belly?  Didn't I see Denny when the Kid shot him?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton laid a hand on Elmer's arm, speaking quietly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Listen, Elmer," he said.  "We will do what we can where Brocky is.
+But that isn't all of the devilment to-night.  Galloway got Florrie
+away somehow; she was the one riding with him toward the crossroads.
+It's up to you to ride on and ride like the devil and tell John
+Engle.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.  Come on, boys!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Elmer sagged in his saddle as though he had been struck a heavy
+physical blow.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway got Fluff!" he muttered dully.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+His gaze trailed along after the departing posse.  Norton on his big
+roan was setting the pace, the steady swinging gallop to eat up the
+miles swiftly and yet not kill the horses before the journey's end.
+The others followed him, stringing out single file to take advantage of
+the trail.  The moon picked them out with clear relief, a grim line of
+retribution.  And yet the boy, while his eyes wandered after them, saw
+only little Fluff struggling in Jim Galloway's arms.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then suddenly he, too, was riding, but at a pace which took no heed of
+a horse's endurance, riding a gallant brute that stretched out its
+neck, nostrils flaring, hammering hoofs beating out the very staccato
+of urgent speed upon the flying sands.  Already his revolver was tight
+clinched in a lifted hand.  Already he had swerved a little from the
+distant lights of San Juan.  He was taking the shortest line which led
+to Denbar's crossroads.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway's got Fluff," he said over and over, choking on the words.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+An hour later Norton heard the first spitting of rifles.  Another
+fifteen minutes of shod hoofs pounding through the broken hills and he
+saw the first spurts of flame cutting through the shadows where the
+trees clung to the arroyo.  As he drew in his horse the men behind him
+closed up about him.  He threw out his arm, pointing.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Brocky's boys must be right down there," he said sharply.  "The Kid
+and del Rio will be yonder; those are their horses.  Young Page says
+there are about fifty of them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A fusillade of rifle-shots interrupted him.  Along a fifty or sixty
+yard front the Kid's and del Rio's men had crept in closer to Brocky's
+arroyo, worming their way upon their stomachs, and now fired together.
+There came a rattling reply from the creek, the shouting of cowboys.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We'll take those fellows first," ordered Norton quickly.  "They will
+see us when we climb that little rise.  Spread out; go easy until we
+get to the top.  Then, boys, let's see who can give them hell first and
+fastest."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They looked to their rifles for the last time and rode slowly up the
+short slope of the low-lying ridge.  Then, as the first man topped it,
+there came a shout from the shadows in front, another shout, and the
+whizzing of rifle-balls.  Norton used his spurs then; his big roan
+leaped forward and was racing down the farther slope; his men in a long
+line rode with him.  And as he rode he lifted his own gun and poured
+his lead into the thickest of the shadows.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+A wild shout of cheering broke from the arroyo; rifle-barrels grew hot
+in hot hands.  On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's
+posse, some of them firing as they rode, others saving their lead.  To
+be seen from afar now, they drew many a shot toward themselves.  And
+yet the target of a man riding swiftly over uneven ground and in the
+moonlight is not to be found overreadily by questing lead.  When Norton
+called to his men to stop and dismount, taking advantage of a row of
+scattered boulders, not a saddle was empty.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-326"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG SRC="images/img-326.jpg" ALT="On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's posse." BORDER="2" WIDTH="340" HEIGHT="563">
+<H5>
+[Illustration: On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's posse.]
+</H5>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+Every man as he dismounted threw his horsed reins to the ground; the
+animals might bolt or they might not, some of them might not stop for
+many a mile, others would be found a hundred yards away.  But they must
+all think less of that now than of what lay in front of them.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"That you, Norton?" came a cheery voice booming suddenly through the
+silence which had shut down as the newcomers disappeared among the
+boulders.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Here, Brocky!" shouted Norton.  "All right down there?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Pretty well," called Brocky.  "They've winged three or four of
+us&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. they're damned rotten shots, Roddy.  We've popped over a dozen
+of them."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+There were other shouts then, tenor Mexican voices for the most part
+with the Kid's unmistakable snarl running through them.  Men were
+calling in Spanish to their fellows across the arroyo.  Whatever it was
+that Brocky was trying to say was lost in the din.  And then again came
+a volley of rifle-shots.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton rose slowly to his feet, studying the situation with frowning
+eyes.  A bullet hissed high overhead, another cut by his side, another
+went shrieking off into the night.  But while they whined in his ears
+he laid his rude plans.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The arroyo wound and twisted this way and that through the broken
+uplands.  Where Brocky Lane had placed his men so as to defy the union
+of the two bands of outlaws it described a wide rude arc curving about
+the spur from Mt. Temple.  Here the cowboys, with some twenty or thirty
+feet separating each man from his nearest fellow, were extended along a
+line which must be about two hundred yards long.  The Mexicans to the
+eastward, where del Rio and Kid Rickard and Moraga were, were bunched
+in the protecting shadows of a field of boulders such as those where
+the sheriff's men lay.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"We could stick here all night and get nothing done," said Norton to
+the men close to him.  "Rickard's gang could have charged down on
+Brocky long ago if they'd had the stomach for that sort of thing.
+They've got the numbers on us; they more than had the count on Brocky's
+outfit; with those jaspers on the mountainside they could have turned
+the trick.  But that sort hasn't the desire for a scrap unless they can
+pull it from behind a rock.  And, by the same token, they won't last
+five minutes in the face of a charge.  Get me?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"But the ginks on the mountain will pick us off pretty lively as we hit
+the trail down the slope here," said a thoughtful voice.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then Norton explained further.  He meant to eliminate the other crowd;
+it could be done.  When he gave the word every man was to jump to his
+feet and make the first half of his charge the bloodless one down into
+the arroyo toward Brocky Lane.  Then, Norton's men and Brocky's united,
+they could surge up the creek's banks and make their flying attack,
+coming in between the two other factions so that the men on the
+mountain must hold their fire or kill as many of their own crowd as of
+the others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The suggestion was accepted without discussion.  When Norton said
+"Ready," they were ready; when he jumped to his feet and ran down
+toward the arroyo, they ran with him.  A shout of laughter went up from
+each side of the dry water-course as jeering voices announced
+triumphantly that the Gringoes were afraid.  And with the shouts came
+rifle-shots.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But to the last man of them they reached the arroyo safely, and ducking
+low, trotted on to join the cowboys.  In a moment more Norton had found
+Brocky Lane, had explained his plan, had had Brocky's silent nod for an
+answer.  In quiet voices the men passed the word along the line.  Those
+from the farther end drew in closer so that their whole body of
+something better than thirty men occupied but a brief section of the
+arroyo.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Get your wind first, boys," Norton admonished them.  "Better fill your
+clips, too, while you've got the chance.  And count on using a six gun
+before you're through.  All right?  Let's show 'em the sort of a scrap
+a Gringo <I>can</I> put up."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then again they were running, the unwavering line of thirty men, but
+with a difference which the outlaws might not mistake.  And as they ran
+they held their fire for a little, knowing how useless and suicidal it
+would be to pause half-way.  But presently they were answering shot
+with shot, pausing, going down upon one knee, taking a moment's
+advantage of a friendly rock, pouring lead into the agitated groups
+among the boulders, springing up, running on again, every man fighting
+the fight his own way, the thirty of them making the air tingle with
+their shouts as they bore onward.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Then it was man to man and often enough one man to two or three, dark
+forms struggling, men striking with clubbed guns, men snatching at
+their side-arms, going down, rising or half rising, firing as long as a
+charge was in a gun or strength in a body.  And as they fired and
+struck and called out after the fashion of the cowboy in a scrimmage
+the body of men before them wavered and broke and began to fall back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton swung his clubbed empty rifle up in both hands and beat down a
+man firing at him with a revolver.  All about him were struggling forms
+and he was sore beset now and then to know who was who.  A
+fierce-mustachioed, black-browed man thrust a rifle toward his breast
+and pulled the trigger and screamed out his curses as Norton put a
+revolver bullet through him.  A slender, boyish form sprang up upon a
+rock recklessly, training his rifle upon Brocky Lane.  It was the Kid.
+But the Kid had met a man quicker, surer, than himself, and Brocky
+fired first.  Kid Rickard spun and fell.  Norton saw him drop but lost
+sight of him before the body struck the earth.  He had found del Rio;
+del Rio had found him.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Two smoking revolvers were jerked up, two guns spoke through the clamor
+as one gun.  The men were not ten feet apart as their guns spoke.
+Norton felt a bullet rip along his outer arm, the sensation that of a
+whip-lash cutting deep.  He saw del Rio stagger back under the impact
+of a forty-five-caliber bullet which must have merely grazed him, since
+it did not knock him off his feet.  Del Rio, his lips streaming his
+curses and hatred, fired again.  But his wound had been sorer than
+Norton's, his aim was less steady, and now as he gave back it was to
+fall heavily and lie still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It had lasted less than five minutes.  "It's Jim Galloway's fight and
+Galloway don't come!" some one had shouted.  They broke again, gave
+back and back&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and then were running, every man of them scenting
+defeat and much worse than defeat unless he came to a horse before
+another five minutes.  And after them, firing now as they ran, came
+Brocky's cowboys and Norton's men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"They've got all of their horses over there together," yelled Brocky
+into Norton's ear.  "The horses for those Ginneys who have been hiding
+out in the mountains, too.  That's why I cut in between them that way.
+Now if we can only scatter their cayuses&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. why, Roddy, we'll have
+every damned one of 'em afoot to be rounded up when we get ready!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+And Brocky, limping as he went, had raced along after the others.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But Norton did not follow.  His eyes had gone to the horses which he
+and the San Juan men had left beyond the little line of boulders.  And,
+travelling that way, he had seen a lone horseman far off to the south,
+a horseman riding frantically, seeking to come to the lower slopes of
+Mt. Temple.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap26"></A>
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+CHAPTER XXVI
+</H3>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+THE BELLS RING
+</H4>
+
+<P>
+"Galloway!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It seemed almost as though some great voice had shouted it to him
+through the din.  Yonder, riding on his spurs, come at this late
+moment, was Jim Galloway.  The man responsible for all of to-night's
+bloodshed, for the disappearance of Florrie, for the death of Billy
+Norton.
+
+"Coming, Jim Galloway!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Did he say it?  Or again was it a voice shouting to him, urging him on?
+He looked off to the east.  Flying forms everywhere with other racing
+forms pursuing, firing as they ran.  Horses jerking back, rearing,
+breaking away from the few men guarding them.  Full defeat for Jim
+Galloway there.  But to the west?  Galloway coming on at top speed,
+shouting as he came, and, upon the mountain's lower slope the others of
+Galloway's men, armed and bloodthirsty.  If Galloway came to them,
+whipped them with his tongue, stirring them with his magnetism&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+why, then, the fight was all to be fought over.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now again Norton, too, was running, bearing down upon the straggling
+horses.  He caught up the first dragging reins to lay his hand to,
+swung up into the saddle, measured swiftly the distance between
+Galloway and the men on the mountain&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and used his spurs.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+On came Jim Galloway, his wide, heavy shoulders not to be mistaken in
+the rich moonlight, his hat gone, his head up, a rifle across the
+saddle in front of him.  Norton lost sight of him as he swept down into
+the bed of the arroyo, caught sight of him again from the farther side.
+Already Galloway was appreciably nearer his men, driving his horse
+mercilessly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"If he comes to his crowd before I can stop him," was Norton's thought,
+"he'll put his game across on us yet.  I've got to head him off and
+take the chances."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Nor were the odds to be overlooked.  Galloway was still too far away to
+be stopped by a rifle-ball, and Norton, heading him off, would expose
+himself not only to Galloway's fire but to that of the men who were
+moving to a lower slope to meet their leader.  And yet, with fate in
+the balance, here was no time for hesitation.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Now Galloway had seen him, had recognized him, perhaps, the thought
+coming naturally to him that it would be Roderick Norton who rode to
+cut him off.  He shifted his rifle so that his right hand was on the
+grip, the barrel caught in his left; he had dropped his horse's reins.
+Norton was slipping a fresh clip into his gun, his own reins now upon
+his horse's neck.  And now both men knew that unless a bullet stopped
+him Norton would cut across Galloway's path before he could come to his
+men.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"At him, Roddy, old boy!  We're coming!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Norton glanced over his shoulder and pressed on.  Brocky had missed
+him, had seen, had called back a half dozen of his men and was
+following.  Well, if he dropped, maybe Brocky and the others could get
+Jim Galloway.  It really began to look as though Galloway had played
+out his string.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+They were firing from the mountainside now, the bullets thus far flying
+wild of their rushing target.  Norton shook his head and urged his
+horse to fresh endeavor.  In a moment he would be fairly between
+Galloway and Galloway's last chance.  His eye picked out the spot where
+he would dismount at that moment, a tumble of big boulders.  He would
+swing down so that they would be between him and the mountain, so that
+nothing but moonlit open space lay between him and Jim Galloway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+While rifles cracked and spat fire and sprayed lead over him and about
+him he rode the last fifty yards.  He reached the boulders, set his
+horse up, threw himself from the saddle, and with his back to the rock,
+his face toward Galloway, he lifted his rifle.  Galloway, almost at the
+same instant, jerked in his own horse.  He was so close that Norton
+caught his cry of rage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Hands up, Galloway!" cried the sheriff.  "Hands up or I'll drop you."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But at last Galloway had come out into the open; at last there was no
+subterfuge to stand forth at his need; at last, gambler that he was, he
+accepted the even break of man to man.  As Norton's voice rang out
+Galloway fired.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He shot twice before Norton pulled the trigger.  Norton shot but the
+once.  Galloway dropped his rifle, sat rigid a moment, toppled from the
+saddle.  And his men, seeing him go down, cried out to one another and
+drew back into the mountain cañons.
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+"Funny thing," said Brocky Lane afterward.  "Had the picture of a kid
+of a girl in his pocket!  Must have carted it around for a year.  Old
+Roddy's bullet tore right square through it."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It was a picture of Florrie Engle, taken years before.  As Brocky said:
+"Just a kid of a girl."  Where he got it nobody knew.  But then there
+were other things about Jim Galloway which no one knew.  Perhaps&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Quien sabe!
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+During the late hours of the night and the following forenoon the thing
+was ended.  Sheriff Roberts's deputies with a posse in automobiles had
+raced southward, intercepting those other cars despatched toward the
+border by the Kid and del Rio.  Brocky Lane with a score of men had
+swept down upon the stolen herds, scattered them, fired fifty shots,
+emptied some three or four saddles, and sent the escaping rustlers
+flying toward the Mexican line.  Singly and in small groups other men,
+farmers, cowboys, miners, and the dwellers of small settlements, joined
+with Norton's men, giving battle to those of Galloway's crowd who had
+drawn back into the fastnesses of Mt. Temple.  In the afternoon Norton,
+with the aid of a handful of cowboys from Brocky's outfit and from Las
+Flores, escorted fifteen anxious-faced prisoners to the county-seat,
+where jail capacity was to be taxed.  And night had come again, serene
+and peaceful with the glory of the moon and stars, when he rode once
+more into San Juan, sore and saddle-weary.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+At the hotel he learned that Virginia had gone to the Engles.  He left
+his jaded horse with Ignacio and walked down the street.  In front of
+the Casa Blanca he stopped a moment, staring musingly at the solid
+adobe walls gleaming white in the moonlight.  The place was quiet,
+deserted.  No single light winked at him through door or window.  It
+seemed to him to be brooding over the passing of Jim Galloway.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He found Florrie and Elmer strolling under the cottonwoods.  They had
+scant interest in him, little time to bestow upon a mere mortal.
+Florrie could only cry ecstatically that Black Bill was a hero!  He,
+all alone, had terrorized the Mexican woman guarding her, had saved
+her, had brought her back.  And Elmer could only look pleased and
+stammer and whisper to Fluff to be still.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Virginia had heard his voice, the voice she had been listening for
+throughout so many long hours, and met him before he had come to the
+door.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Oh, thank God, thank God!" she cried softly.  "But&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you are hurt?"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He forgot his wound as both arms closed about her.  From somewhere at
+the rear of the house he heard Mrs. Engle's voice crying eagerly; "It's
+Roddy!"  She was hurrying to greet him.  What he had to say must be
+said briefly.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"My work is done," he said quickly.  "I have put in my resignation this
+afternoon.  They can get a new sheriff.  I am going to be a rancher, my
+dear.  And, Virginia&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+He was whispering to her, his lips close to her hair.  And Virginia,
+though her face was suddenly hot with the flush mounting to her brow,
+gave him steadily for answer:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Whenever you wish, Rod Norton!"
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<P>
+So it was only twenty-four hours later that Ignacio Chavez stood in the
+old Mission garden and made his bells talk, just the three upon the
+western arch, the Little One, La Golondrina, and Ignacio Chavez, the
+golden-throated trio that tinkled to the touch of his cunning hand and
+seemed to laugh and sing and proclaim the gladdest of glad tidings.
+Then Ignacio drew his enrapt gaze earthward from the full moon and made
+out a man and a girl riding out into the night, riding toward the Ranch
+of the Flowers.  And he made the bells laugh again.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And to-morrow," vowed Ignacio solemnly, "not later than to-morrow or
+the day thereafter, you shall have your reward, <I>amigos</I>.  You have
+told the world of heavy doings; you have rung for Jim Galloway dead;
+you have made the music for the wedding of <I>el</I> Señor Nortone.  And it
+shall be I who will make a little roof like a house over you.  You will
+see!"
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+<hr class="full" noshade>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN***</p>
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Bells of San Juan, by Jackson Gregory,
+Illustrated by Frank Tenney Johnson
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Bells of San Juan
+
+
+Author: Jackson Gregory
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2005  [eBook #15438]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 15438-h.htm or 15438-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/4/3/15438/15438-h/15438-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/4/3/15438/15438-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+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 Calderon, 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, senor?  Fine warm days?  You
+have them here.  Nice cool nights for sound slumber?  Right here in San
+Juan, _amigo mio_.  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 canons 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, senorita," he told her, displaying two glistening
+rows of superb teeth friendliwise.  "And the garden . . .  _Ah, que hay
+mas 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, senorita," he exclaimed, "would
+I say _zape_ to it?  No, no, senorita; 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, senorita!"
+
+"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, senorita," 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 Senor
+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 Senor 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 senorita 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 senor 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 Jose, 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 Senor Galloway's whiskey?  And does not every one know he
+sold many sheep and that means much money these days?  Si, senorita; 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 manana-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 porque_?  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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Nunez, 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 Senor 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
+tete-a-tete 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 senor_
+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 canon.  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 canon 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 Senorita 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 Nunez; 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 Nunez, taking a grim joy in his task when he remembered
+how Nunez 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
+Nunez 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.  Nunez 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 Nunez, 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 Nunez
+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 Nunez, 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 Nunez
+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 Nunez 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 Nunez'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 Nunez 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 Nunez 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 Nunez 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
+Nunez, 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
+Nunez, 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 Nunez, 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 Nunez 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 Nunez.  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 Nunez.
+
+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 Nunez 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 Nunez 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 Nunez, 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
+hair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+WAVERING IN THE BALANCE
+
+Ignacio Chavez, waiting to ask no questions, had raced away through the
+darkness to beat out a wild alarm upon his bells.  Later he would learn
+how many were dead and would set the Captain mourning.  But already had
+San Juan poured out her handful of citizens upon the street.
+
+"Keep those men where they are," called Tom Cutter to Struve.  "Every
+damned one of them; there'll be an answer wanted for to-night's work.
+Get a doctor, somebody; Patten or Miss Page."
+
+Candles were brought; presently a lamp was found and set on the bar.
+The curious began to desert Struve and his prisoners outside, and to
+crowd about Cutter and the two forms lying still in the corner.  Kid
+Rickard, cursing now and then, had dragged himself a little away and
+grew quiet, half propped up against the wall.  Struve, as the fire of
+fagots and grass began to burn low, commanded Galloway to lead the way
+back into the barroom and herded five other men after him, the shotgun
+promising a mutilated body to any man of them who sought to run for it.
+
+"Nunez is dead," reported the deputy sheriff, getting up from his
+knees.  "Norton is alive and that's about all.  A shot along the side
+of the head."
+
+He turned slowly toward Galloway who, with steady hands and his face
+set in hard, inscrutable lines, was pouring himself a generous glass of
+whiskey.
+
+"Looks like you'd got him, Jim," he said harshly, his eyes glittering.
+"And it looks like I'd got you.  Where I want you, by God!"
+
+Galloway drank his whiskey and made no reply.  He was thinking,
+thinking fast.  His eyes were never still now, but roved from Rod
+Norton's white face to the faces of Tom Cutter, Struve, and the other
+men gathering in the room.
+
+Borne upon one of the Casa Blanca's doors Norton was carried to
+Struve's hotel, the nearest place where an attempt could be made to
+care for him.  Word came in that Virginia Page had been summoned upon
+one of her rare calls and was in Las Estrellas.  Patten, however, would
+be on hand in a moment.  It was suggested that Kid Rickard also be
+carried to the hotel.  But he himself asked to be left where he was
+until Patten came, and Cutter raised no objection.  It was clear that
+the Kid was too badly hurt to think of making an escape, were such his
+desire.
+
+Galloway and Antone alone were put under arrest, the others merely
+advised to be on hand if they were wanted later.  Galloway coolly
+demanded the charge against him.
+
+"Resisting an officer is as good as any right now," snapped Cutter.
+
+As quiet claimed the town again Caleb Patten became the most important
+figure in San Juan.  At such moments he seemed to swell visibly.  He
+drove the curious from the room while he examined the unconscious
+sheriff and, when he had finished, merely shook his head, looked grave,
+and refused to commit himself.  He ordered Norton undressed and put to
+bed, went down the street to see Kid Rickard, probed the wound in the
+upper chest, ordered him to bed, and returned to Norton at the hotel.
+
+"Well?" asked John Engle who had arrived, talked with Struve, and now
+looked anxiously to Patten.  Patten shrugged.
+
+"Heavy-caliber bullet ripped along the side of his head," he said
+thoughtfully.  "I am going to make a second examination now.  Doubtless
+just the shock stunned him.  That or striking his head as he pitched
+forward; there's another slight wound, a scalp wound, showing where his
+head hit as he fell."
+
+A moment later Tom Cutter came in hastily, stood for a little staring
+with frowning, troubled eyes at the quiet form on the bed, and went
+away, tugging at his lip, his frown deepening.  He had his hands full
+to-night, had Tom Cutter, and no one but himself knew how he wanted Rod
+Norton to tell him just what to do, to show him the way to make no
+mistake.  Leaving the room he had gone no farther than the front door
+when he swung about and returned.
+
+"May I have a word with you, Mr. Engle?" he asked.
+
+Engle nodded and followed him silently.  Out in the street, in the full
+light of Struve's porch-lamp, Cutter stopped, glancing about him to
+make sure that he was not overheard.
+
+"You know all about the shooting of Brocky Lane up in the mountains,"
+he said hurriedly.  "Rod told me you did.  Well, I just gathered in
+Moraga!"
+
+"Moraga?" muttered Engle.  "He has seen Galloway, then?  And told him
+all about our knowing the rifles were cached in the old caves?"
+
+"I found him at the Casa Blanca," said Cutter, the worried look in his
+eyes.  "Somebody shot out the light when the mix-up started, you know.
+I've a notion it was Moraga.  He was in one of the little
+card-rooms . . . putting on his shoes!  I got his gun; he'd fired just
+one shot.  The muzzle of it was bloody."
+
+"If he has told Galloway. . . ."
+
+"But I don't believe he has.  Struve says that just as Norton started
+things he saw a man run in from the cottonwoods and duck into the
+house.  It was Struve's job to see that nobody got out and he let him
+go by.  If it wasn't Moraga, who was it?  And, when I grabbed him just
+now, the first thing he said was: 'I want to talk with Galloway.'"
+
+"You didn't let him?" demanded Engle quickly.
+
+"No.  A couple of the boys have walked him off down the road.  I've got
+Galloway and Antone in the jail.  Now, what I want is some advice.
+What am I going to do with this job until Rod Norton comes to and takes
+a hand . . . if he ever does," he muttered heavily.
+
+"It's clear that you've got to keep Moraga away from Galloway; if they
+haven't already had a chance to talk it's a pure Godsend and it's up to
+you that they don't get that chance."
+
+"Yes,", admitted Cutter slowly.  "But I'm the first man to admit that
+I'm all muggled up.  What did Moraga have his shoes off for?  If he
+shot out the light, why did he do it?  And how'd he get blood on his
+gun?"
+
+Engle shook his head.
+
+"All questions for the district attorney later, Tom," he answered.
+"But, if you want any advice from me, here it is: Get Moraga out of the
+way on the jump.  He is supposed to be in jail in the next county; he
+must have broken out.  Send a man to Las Palmas to telephone to Sheriff
+Roberts; send Moraga along with him.  And, whatever you do, keep Jim
+Galloway where you've got him.  I think we've got our case against him
+to-night."
+
+"That's what I've been thinking.  I guess that's what Norton would do,
+eh?"
+
+"Sure of it," said Engle promptly.  "Find out, if you can, whether
+Moraga got a chance to talk with Galloway.  I'm going back to the house
+to let my wife and Florrie know what has happened."
+
+Engle hurried to his home, told what had happened, and, leaving his
+wife anxious, his daughter weeping hysterically, returned to the hotel.
+
+"I've done all that any one could do for him," said Patten, as though
+defending himself because of Norton's continued unconsciousness.  "He's
+in pretty bad shape, Engle.  Oh, I guess I can pull him through, but at
+that it's going to be a close squeak.  Lucky I was right on hand,
+though."  And he grew technical, spoke of blood pressures taken, of
+traumatism superinducing prolonged coma, of this and that which made no
+impression on the banker.
+
+"You mentioned two wounds," Engle reminded him.  "The one made by the
+bullet and another. . . ."
+
+"By his head striking as he fell?  Yes; that would have completed the
+work of the first shock in knocking him unconscious.  But it is a
+negligible affair now; he wouldn't know anything about it in the
+morning if it weren't for the lump that'll be there.  And since the
+other injury, the long gouging cut made by the bullet, has just plowed
+along the outer surface of the skull, I think that I can promise you
+he'll be all right pretty soon now.  We ought to have some ice, but
+I've made cold compresses do."
+
+Engle went again to look in upon Norton.  The sheriff lay as before, on
+his back, his limbs lax, his face deathly white, a bandage about his
+head.  A lump came into the banker's throat and he turned away.  For he
+remembered that just so had Billy Norton lain, that Billy Norton had
+never regained consciousness . . . and that the blow then as now had
+been struck by Galloway or Galloway's man.  The sudden fear was upon
+him that Rod Norton was even more badly hurt than Caleb Patten
+admitted.  The fear did not lessen as the night drew on and finally
+brightened into another day.  When the sun flared up out of the
+flatlands lying beyond Tecolote the wounded man at Struve's hotel lay
+as he had done all night giving no sign to tell whether he was life's
+or death's.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+CONCEALMENT
+
+The eyes of San Juan were upon Caleb Patten throughout the night and
+during the long hours of the following day.  Under them his inflated
+ego grew further distended while, waxing more technical than ever, he
+explained how a man in Rod Norton's condition could live and yet lie
+like a man dead.  So prolific and involved were his medical phrases
+that men like John Engle and Struve began to ask themselves if Patten
+understood his case.  When, after twelve hours, the wounded man awoke
+to a troubled consciousness Patten's relief was scarcely less visible
+than that of Norton's friends.  Patten felt his prestige taking unto
+itself new wings and immediately grew more wisely verbose than ever.
+It was a rare privilege to have the most talked of and generally liked
+man of the community under his hands; it was wine to Patten's soul to
+have that man show signs of recovering under his skill.
+
+So he drove well-wishers from the room, drew the shades, commanded
+quiet and came and went eternally, doing nothing whatever and appearing
+to be fighting, sleeves rolled up, for a threatened life.  Long before
+noon there were those who had laughed at Patten before, but who now
+accused themselves of having failed to do him justice.
+
+Virginia Page had remained all night with her patient in Las Estrellas.
+The first rumor she had of the fight in the Casa Blanca was borne to
+her ears by Ignacio's bell as she rode back toward San Juan.  Only a
+few hours ago she had talked with Galloway, watching him banter with
+Florrie Engle; but a little before that, earlier in the same day, she
+had seen Rod Norton.  Before she galloped up to the old Mission garden
+her heart was beating excitedly, and she was asking herself, a little
+fearfully: "Is it Galloway or is it Rod Norton?"  For she was so sure
+that in the end Ignacio would ring the Captain for one of them.
+
+Ignacio told her the story.  Norton was lying in the hotel,
+unconscious, Patten working over him; Jim Galloway and Antone were in
+the little jail and soon would be taken to the county-seat; Kid Rickard
+was shot through the lung but would live, Patten said; Vidal Nunez,
+over whom the whole thing had started, was dead.
+
+"If _mi amigo_ Roderico die," mumbled Ignacio, "it will be two
+Nortones, two sheriffs, that die because of Galloway.  If Roderico
+live, then the next time he will kill Galloway.  You will see,
+_senorita_."
+
+She made no answer as she rode slowly down the street.  She was
+thinking how, only a few weeks ago, she had heard the bells ring for
+the first time, how then Galloway and Norton had been but meaningless
+names to her, how she had been little moved by either the sound of
+pistol-shots or the Captain's heavy tolling.  Now things were
+different.  Just in what were they "different" and to what degree?  She
+could not answer her own question before she was at the hotel.
+
+Struve came immediately, noted her pale face, attributed it to a
+sleepless night, and made her take a cup of coffee.  He rounded out the
+information she already had from Ignacio.  Norton was still unconscious
+though, only a few minutes ago, Patten had reported signs of
+improvement.  Mrs. Engle had been with him, was still there acting
+nurse; he was being given every attention possible.
+
+Patten himself entered, drawn by the aroma of coffee.  He nodded
+carelessly to the girl and remarked to Struve, with a flash of triumph
+in his eyes, that at last he had "brought him around."  Norton was very
+weak, sick, dizzy, perhaps not yet out of danger.  But Patten had won
+in the initial skirmish with old man Death.
+
+At least, so Struve was given to feel.  Virginia, with a quick look at
+Patten's complacent face, was moved with sudden, almost insistent
+longing, that Rod Norton's life might be given into her own hands
+rather than remain in the pudgy hands of a man she at once disliked as
+an individual and failed to admire as a physician.  For she had needed
+no long residence in San Juan to form her own estimate of the man's
+ability . . . or lack of ability.  But plainly this was Patten's case,
+not hers; she got up from the table and went into her own room.
+
+Elmer she found lying fully dressed upon a couch in her office,
+sleeping heavily.  She stood over him a moment, her eyes tender; he was
+still, would always be, her baby brother.  Then she went to her own
+room and threw herself down upon her bed, worn out, anxious, vaguely
+fearful for the future.
+
+It was a long day for San Juan.  Mrs. Engle came now and then to
+Virginia's room to wipe her eyes and force a hopeful smile; Florrie ran
+in like a young tempest to weep copiously and hyperbolically invest
+poor dear Roddy with all imaginable heroic attributes; Engle and Struve
+and Tom Cutter were grave-eyed and distressed.  Every hour Ignacio came
+to the hotel to ask quietly for news.
+
+In his own way, it appeared that Elmer Page was as deeply concerned as
+any one.  It was long before he told Virginia that he had been in the
+Casa Blanca when the shooting occurred; haltingly he gave her his
+version of it.
+
+"Don't you think, Elmer," suggested the girl somewhat wearily, "that
+you have gotten hold of the wrong end of things here?  I mean in
+choosing your friends?  Certainly after this you will have nothing to
+do with men like Galloway and Rickard?"
+
+Ten minutes' talk with Elmer gave her a deeper understanding of his
+attitude than she had been able to guess until now.  Spontaneously he
+had leaned toward Kid Rickard because the Kid was a "killer" and Elmer
+was a boy; in other words, because young Page's imagination made of
+Rickard a truly picturesque figure.  Since Rickard admired Jim Galloway
+as he had never known how to admire aught else that breathed and
+walked, Elmer's eyes had from the first rested approvingly upon the
+massive figure of Casa Blanca's owner.  That both Galloway and Rickard
+were fighting against persecution, were merely individuals wronged by
+the law and too fearlessly independent to submit to the high hand of
+sheriff or judge, was easily implanted in the boy's mind.  Yesterday
+his fancies were ready to make heroes of Galloway and his crowd, to
+make of Norton a meddler hiding behind the bulwark of his office, and
+hounding those who were too manly to step aside for him.  But now Elmer
+was all at sea, no land in sight.
+
+"A gun in each hand, Sis," he cried warmly, his cheeks flushed, as the
+almost constantly recurring picture formed again in his memory.  "And
+if you could have only seen his eyes!  Talk about hiding behind
+anything . . . no sir!  And him only one against Galloway and the Kid
+and Nunez and a whole room full."
+
+Here was Elmer's trouble drawn to the surface; he was touched with
+leaping admiration for the man who lay now in the darkened room, he
+couldn't admire both Norton, the sheriff, and Galloway and Rickard, the
+sheriff's sworn enemies!  Which way should Elmer Page turn?  Virginia
+very wisely held her tongue.
+
+Tom Cutter, having conferred with Engle and Struve, left San Juan in
+the early afternoon, convoying his prisoners to the greater security of
+the county jail.  It seemed the wisest step, the one which Norton would
+have taken.  Besides, Galloway insisted upon it and upon being allowed
+to send a message to his lawyer.
+
+"I am willing to stand trial," said Galloway indifferently.  "I'll
+arrange for bail to-morrow and be back to-morrow night."
+
+The question which Tom Cutter, Struve, and Engle all asked of
+themselves and of each other, "Did Moraga get his chance to talk with
+Galloway?" went unanswered.  There was nothing to do but wait upon the
+future to know that, unless Moraga, now on his way back to Sheriff
+Roberts, could be made to talk.  And Moraga was not given to garrulity.
+
+Meantime Patten brought hourly reports of Norton.  He was still in
+danger, to be sure; but he was doing as well as could be expected.  No
+one must go into the room except Mrs. Engle as nurse.  Norton was fully
+conscious, but forbidden to talk; he recognized those about him, his
+eyes were clear, his temperature satisfactory, his strength no longer
+waning.  He had partaken of a bit of nourishment and to-morrow, if
+there were no unlooked-for complications, would be able to speak with
+John Engle for whom he had asked.
+
+During the days which followed, days in which Rod Norton lay quiet in a
+darkened room, Virginia Page was conscious of having awakened some form
+of interest in Caleb Patten.  His eyes followed her when she came and
+went, and, when she surprised them, were withdrawn swiftly, but not
+before she had seen in them a speculative thoughtfulness.  While she
+noted this she gave it little thought, so occupied was her mind with
+other matters.  She had postponed, as long as she could, a talk with
+Julius Struve, her spirit galled that she must in the end go to him
+"like a beggar," as she expressed it to herself.  But one day, her head
+erect, she followed the hotel keeper into his office.  In the hallway
+she encountered Patten.
+
+"May I have a word with you?" Patten asked.
+
+But Virginia had steeled herself to the interview with Struve and would
+no longer set it aside, even for a moment.
+
+"If you care to wait on the veranda," she told Patten, "I'll be out in
+a minute.  I want to see Mr. Struve now."
+
+Patten stood aside and watched her pass, the shrewdly questioning look
+in his eyes.  When she disappeared in the office he remained where she
+had left him, listening.  When she began to speak with Struve, her
+voice rapid and hinting at nervousness, he came a quiet step nearer the
+door she had closed after her.
+
+"I am ashamed of myself, Mr. Struve," said Virginia, coming straight to
+the point.  "I owe you already for a month's board and room rent for
+myself and Elmer.  I . . ."
+
+"That's perfectly all right, Miss Virginia," said Struve hurriedly.  "I
+know the sort of job you've got on your hands making collections.  If
+you can wait I am willing to do so.  Glad to do so, in fact."
+
+Patten, fingering his little mustache, then letting his thick fingers
+drop to the diamond in his tie, smiled with satisfaction.  Smiling, he
+tiptoed down the hall and went out upon the veranda where he smoked his
+cigar serenely.  When Virginia came out to him her face was flaming.
+Had he not beard Struve's words, he would have thought that his answer
+to her apology had been an angry demand for immediate payment.  Patten
+failed to understand how the girl's fine, independent nature writhed in
+a situation all but intolerable.  That she appreciated gratefully
+Struve's quick kindness did not minimize her own mortification.
+
+Patten watched her seat herself; then he launched himself into his
+subject.  Virginia listened at first with faint interest, then with
+quickened wonder.  For the life of her she could not tell if the little
+man were seeking to flatter or insult her.
+
+"I have leased an old, deserted ranch-house just on the edge of town,"
+he told her.  "Got it for a song, too.  Some first-rate land goes with
+it; I'll probably buy the whole thing before long.  There's plenty of
+good water.  Now, what am I up to, eh?  Just the same thing all the
+time, if you want to know.  And that means making money."
+
+Leaning forward he knocked the ash from his cigar and brought himself
+confidentially nearer.
+
+"An open-air sanatorium," he announced triumphantly.  "For tuberculosis
+patients.  There are lots of them," and he waved his arm in a wide half
+circle, "coming out of the East on the run, scared to death, and with
+more or less money in their pockets.  It's a big proposition, a sure
+money-getter."
+
+He grew more animated than she had ever dreamed he could be, as he
+sketched his plans.  While she was wondering why he had come to her
+with them he gave his explanation, made her his double offer.  Then it
+was that she was puzzled to know whether he meant to compliment her or
+merely to insult her.
+
+In a word he assured her from the heights of superiority to which he
+had ascended these last few days of importance, the practice of
+medicine was no woman's work at best; certainly not in a land like
+this, where a man's endurance, breadth or mind, and keener innate
+ability to cope with big situations were indicated.  No work for a slip
+of a girl like Virginia Page.  Of that Caleb Patten assured her
+unhesitatingly.  But there was work for such as her and in a place
+which he would create for her.  Fairly bewildered at his audacity she
+found herself listening to his suggestion that she marry Caleb Patten
+and become a sort of head nurse in an institution which he would found!
+
+In spite of her she was moved to sudden, impulsive laughter.  She had
+not meant to laugh at the man who might be sincere, who, it was
+possible, was merely a fool.  But laugh she did, so that her mirth
+reached Rod Norton where he lay upon his bed and made him stir
+restlessly.
+
+"What do you mean by that?" demanded Patten, a flush in his cheeks.
+
+"I mean," stammered Virginia at last, "that I thank you very much, Dr.
+Patten, but that I can avail myself of neither the opportunity of being
+your wife or your head nurse.  As for my inability to do for myself
+what I have set out to accomplish . . . well, I am not afraid yet.
+There is work to be done here and I don't quite agree with you that
+it's all man's work.  There's always a little left over for a woman,
+you know," she added brightly.
+
+But Patten was obviously angered.  He flung to his feet and glared down
+at her.  Perhaps it had not entered his thought that she could make
+other than the answer he wanted; it had been very clear to him that he
+was offering to become responsible for one who was embarked upon a
+voyage already destined to failure, that he would support her, merely
+doing as many other men of his ilk did and make her work for all that
+she got.
+
+"It's silly nonsense, your thinking you can make a living here," he
+said irritably.  "I'm already established, I'm a man, I can have all of
+the cases I want, you'll get only a few breeds who haven't a dollar to
+the dozen of them.  If you are already broke and can't even pay for
+your room and board . . ."
+
+"Who told you that?" she asked quickly.
+
+"I can hear, can't I?" he demanded coarsely.  "Didn't you go just now
+to beg Struve to hold you over?  And . . ."
+
+She slipped out of her chair and stood a moment staring coldly and
+contemptuously at him.  Then she was gone, leaving Patten watching her
+departure incredulously.
+
+"A man who hasn't any more sense than Caleb Patten," she cried within
+herself, "has no business with a physician's license.  It's a sheer
+wonder he didn't kill Roderick Norton!"
+
+Already she had forgotten her words with Struve, or rather the matter
+for the present was shoved aside in her mind by another.  She had come
+here to make good, she had her fight before her, and she was going to
+make good.  She had to . . . for herself, for her own pride, for
+Elmer's sake.  She went straight to Elmer and made him sit down and
+listen while she sketched actual conditions briefly and emphatically.
+
+He was old enough to do something for himself in the world, continued
+idleness did him no earthly good and might do him no end of harm
+morally, mentally, and physically.  He had been her baby brother long
+enough; it was time that he became a man.  She had supported him until
+now, asking nothing of him in return save that he kept out of mischief
+a certain percentage of the time.  Now he was going to work and help
+out.  He could go to John Engle and get something to do upon one of
+Engle's ranches.
+
+Somewhat to her surprise Elmer responded eagerly.  He had been thinking
+the matter over and it appealed to him.  What he did not tell her was
+that he had seen some of the vaqueros riding in from one of the
+outlying ranges, lean, brown, quick-eyed men who bestrode high-headed
+mounts and who wore spurs, wide hats, shaggy chaps, and who, perhaps,
+carried revolvers hidden away in their hip pockets, men who drank
+freely, spent their money as freely at dice and cards, and who, all in
+all, were a picturesque crowd.  Elmer took up his hat and went down to
+the bank and had a talk with John Engle.  Virginia's eyes followed him
+hopefully.
+
+That day Norton was allowed for the first time to receive callers.  He
+had his talk with Engle, limited to five minutes by Patten who hung
+about curiously until Norton said pointedly that he wanted to speak
+privately with the banker.  Later Florrie came with her mother,
+bringing an immense armful of roses culled by her own hands, excited,
+earnest, entering the shaded room like a frightened child, speaking
+only in hushed whispers.
+
+"Won't you come in too for a moment, Virginia?" asked Mrs. Engle.
+"Roddy will be glad to see you; he has asked about you."
+
+But Virginia made an excuse; it was Patten's case and after what had
+occurred between herself and Patten she had no intention of so much as
+seeming to overstep the professional lines.  The following day,
+however, she did go to see him.  Patten himself, stiff and boorish,
+asked her to.  His patient had asked for her several times, knowing
+that she was in the building and marking how she made an exception and
+refused to look in on him while all of his other friends were doing so,
+some of them coming many miles.  Patten told her that Norton was not
+well by any means yet and that he did not intend to have him worried up
+over an imagined slight.  So Virginia did as she was bid.
+
+Mrs. Engle was in the room, bending over the bed with a dampened towel
+to lay upon Norton's forehead; he showed a sign of fever and his head
+ached constantly.  He looked about quickly as the girl came in, his
+hand stirring a little, offering itself.  She took it by way of
+greeting and sat down in the chair drawn up at his side.
+
+"It's good of you to come!" he said quickly, his eyes brightening.  "I
+was beginning to wonder if I had offended you in some way?  You see,
+everybody has run in but you.  A man gets spoiled when he's laid up
+like this, doesn't he?  Especially when it's the first time he can
+remember when he has stuck in bed for upward of twenty-four hours
+running."
+
+Despite her familiarity with the swift ravages of illness she received
+a positive shock as she looked at him; she had visualized him during
+these latter days as she had last seen him, brown, vitally robust, the
+embodiment of lean, clean strength.  Now sunless inaction had set its
+mark in his skin which had already grown sallow; his eyes burned into
+her own, his hand fell weakly to the coverlet as she removed her own,
+his fingers plucking nervously.  And yet she summoned a cheerful smile
+to answer his.
+
+"I was satisfied just in hearing that you were doing well," she said.
+"And I know that the fewer people a sick man sees the better for him."
+
+He moved his head restlessly back and forth on his pillow.
+
+"Not for a man like me," he told her.  "I'm not used to this sort of
+business.  Just lying here with my eyes shut or staring at the ceiling,
+which is worse, drives a man mad.  I told Patten to-day that if he
+didn't let me see folks I'd get up and go out if I had to crawl."
+
+Virginia laughed, determined to be cheerful.
+
+"I am afraid that you make a rather troublesome patient, don't you?"
+she asked lightly.
+
+Norton made no answer but lay motionless save for the constant plucking
+at his coverlet, his eyes moodily fixed upon the wall.  Mrs. Engle,
+finding the water-pitcher empty and saying that she would be back in
+two seconds, went out to fill it.  Promptly Norton's eyes returned to
+Virginia's face, resting there steadily.
+
+"I've been dizzy and sick and half out of my head a whole lot," he said
+abruptly.  "I've been thinking of you most of the time, dreaming about
+you, climbing cliffs with you. . . ."
+
+He broke off suddenly, but did not remove his eyes from hers.  It was
+she who turned away, pretending to find it necessary to adjust the
+window-curtain.  It was impossible to sit quietly while he looked at
+her that way, his eyes all without warning filling with a look for any
+girl to read a look of glowing admiration, almost a look of pure
+love-making.  Norton sighed and again his head moved restlessly on his
+pillow.
+
+"I've had time to think here of late," he said after a little.  "More
+time to think than I've ever had before in my life.  About everything;
+myself and Jim Galloway and you. . . .  I have decided to send word to
+the district attorney to let Galloway go," he added, again watching
+her.  "I am not going to appear against him and there's no case if I
+don't."
+
+"But . . ." she began, wondering.
+
+"There are no buts about it.  Suppose I can get him convicted, which I
+doubt; he'd get a light sentence, would appeal, at most would be out of
+the way a couple of years or so.  And then it would all be to do over
+again.  No; I want him out in the open, where he can go as far as he
+wants to go.  And then . . ."
+
+She saw how his body stiffened as he braced himself with his feet
+against the foot-board.
+
+"We won't talk shop," she said gently.  "It isn't good for you.  Don't
+think about such things any more than you have to."
+
+"I've got to think about something," he said impatiently.  "Can I think
+about you?"
+
+"Why not?" she answered as lightly as she had spoken before.
+
+"Maybe that isn't good for me either," he answered.
+
+"Nonsense.  It's always good for us to think about our friends."
+
+His eyes wandered from hers, rested a moment upon the little table near
+his bedhead and came back to her, narrowing a little.
+
+"Will you set a chair against that window-shade?" he asked.  "The light
+at the side hurts my eyes."
+
+It was a natural request and she turned naturally to do what he asked.
+But, even with her back turned, she knew that he had reached out
+swiftly for something that lay on the table, that he had thrust it out
+of sight under his pillow.
+
+Mrs. Engle returned and Virginia, staying another minute, said good-by.
+As she went out she glanced down at the table.  In her room she asked
+herself what it was that he had snatched and hidden.  It seemed a
+strange thing to do and the question perplexed her; while she attached
+no importance to it, it was there like a pebble in one's shoe, refusing
+to be ignored.
+
+That night, just as she was going to sleep, she knew.  Out of a half
+doze she had visualized the table with its couple of bottles, a
+withering rose, a scrap of note-paper, a fountain pen.  The pen . . .
+it was Patten's . . . had evidently leaked and had been wiped
+carelessly upon the sheet of paper, left lying with the paper half
+wrapped around it.  She had noted carelessly a few scrawled words in
+Patten's slovenly hand.  And she knew that it had been removed while
+she turned her back, removed by a hand which, in its haste, had slipped
+the pen with it under the pillow.
+
+She went to sleep incensed with herself that she gave the matter
+another thought.  But she kept asking herself what it was that Patten
+had written that Roderick Norton did not want her to read.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+A FREE MAN
+
+"I am a free man, if you please."  The sheriff stood in the hotel
+doorway, looking down upon her as she sat in her favorite veranda
+chair.  "I have given my keeper his fee and sent him away.  May I watch
+you while you read?"
+
+Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of
+welcome.  He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low
+entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt
+and haggard.
+
+"I shouldn't be reading in this light, anyway," she said.  "I hadn't
+noticed that the sun was down.  It is good to be what you call free
+again, isn't it?"
+
+He laughed softly, put back his head, filled his lungs.  Then he came
+on to her and stood leaning against the wall, his hat cocked to one
+side to hide the bandage.
+
+"The world is good," he announced with gay positiveness.  "Especially
+when you've been away from it for a spell and weren't quite sure what
+was next.  And especially, too, when you've had time to think.  Did you
+ever take off a week and just do nothing but think?"
+
+"One doesn't have time for that sort of thing as a rule," she admitted.
+"There's a chair standing empty if you care to let me in on your
+deductions."
+
+"I don't want to sit down or lie down until I'm ready to drop," he
+grinned down at her.  "A bed makes me sick at my stomach and a chair is
+pretty nearly as bad.  I'd like almighty well to get a horse between my
+knees . . . and _ride_!  Suppose I'd fall to pieces if I tried it
+right now?"
+
+"Sure of it.  And not so sure that you haven't discharged your keeper
+prematurely.  You mustn't think of such things."
+
+"There you go.  Forbidding me to think again! . . . Believe I will sit
+down; would you believe that a full-grown man like me could get as weak
+as a cat this quick?"
+
+He took the chair just beyond her, tilted it back against the wall, his
+booted heels caught under its elevated legs, and glanced away from her
+to the colorful sky above San Juan's scattered houses in the west.
+
+"Yes, sir," he continued his train of thought, "I'd like a horse
+between my knees; I'd like to ride out yonder into the sunset, to meet
+the night as it comes down; I'd like the feeling of nothing but the
+stars over me instead of the smothery roof of a house.  Doesn't it
+appeal to you, too?"
+
+"Yes," she said.
+
+"You on Persis, with me on my big roan, riding not as we rode that
+other night, but just for the fun of it.  I'd like to ride like the
+devil. . . .  You don't mind my saying what I mean, do you? . . . to go
+scooting across the sage-brush letting out a yell at every jump, boring
+holes in the night with my gun, making all of the racket and dust that
+one man can make.  Ever feel that way? just like getting outside and
+making a noise?  Let me talk!  I'm the one who has been shut up for so
+long my tongue has started to grow fast to the roof of my mouth.  At
+first I could do nothing but lie flat on my back in a sort of fog,
+seeing nothing clearly, thinking not at all.  Then came the hours in
+which I could do nothing but think, under orders to keep still.  Think?
+Why, I thought about everything that ever happened, most things that
+might happen, and a whole lot that never will.  Now comes the third
+stage; I can talk better than I can walk. . . .  Do you mind listening
+while a man raves?"
+
+"Not in the least."  She found his mood contagious and, smiling in that
+quick, bright way natural to her, showed for a moment the twin dimples
+of which together with a host of other things he had had ample time to
+think during his bedroom imprisonment.  "Please rave on."
+
+"In due course," he mused, "the fourth stage will arrive and I can be
+doing something besides talk, can't I?  Now let me tell you about the
+King's Palace."
+
+"You begin well."
+
+"The King's Palace is where we are going on our first outing.  That was
+decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M.  You and I and, if
+you like, Florrie and your kid brother.  We'll ride out there in the
+very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone.  We'll
+lunch and loaf there all day.  For lunch we will have bacon and coffee,
+cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms.  We will have some
+trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest
+mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about.  We will have cheese,
+perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert.  We'll ride home in the
+dusk and the dark."
+
+"The King's Palace?" she asked curiously.  "I never heard of such a
+place.  Are you making it all up?"
+
+"Not a bit of it.  It's all that's left of some of the old ruins of the
+same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs. . . .  Do you know
+why I am bound to get Jim Galloway's tag soon or late?"
+
+Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt
+digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.
+
+"Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other
+words, because he opposes the law and you represent it."
+
+"Because he plays the game wrong!  Some more results of a long week of
+nothing to do but think things out.  There is just one way for a
+law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it."
+
+"You mean that a man can get away with it?  Surely not for good?"
+
+But he nodded thoughtfully at the slowly fading strata of shaded colors
+splashed across the sky.
+
+"A man can get away with it for keeps . . . if he plays the game right.
+Jim Galloway isn't that man and so I'll get him.  He has ignored the
+first necessary principle, which is the lone hand."
+
+"You mean he takes men into his confidence?"
+
+"And he goes on and ignores the second necessary principle; a man must
+stop short of murder.  If he turns gangman and killer, he ties his own
+rope around his neck.  If a man like Galloway, a man with brains,
+power, without fear, without scruple, should decide to loot this corner
+of the world or any other corner, and set about it right, playing the
+lone hand invariably, he would be a man I couldn't bring in in a
+thousand years.  But Galloway has slipped up; he has too many Moragas
+and Antones and Vidals at his heels; he has been the cause, directly or
+indirectly, of too many killings. . . .  A theft will be forgotten in
+time, the hue and cry die down; spilled blood cries to heaven after ten
+years."
+
+"Galloway is back in San Juan."
+
+"I know.  I wanted him back.  I wanted him free and unhampered.  He'll
+be bolder than ever now, won't he, if this case is dropped?  He's come
+out a little into the open already, he'll be tempted out a little
+farther.  There'll be more of his work soon, a robbery here or there,
+and he will grow so sure of himself that he'll get careless.  Then I'll
+get him."
+
+"But have you the right?" she asked quickly.  "Knowing him a
+lawbreaker, have you the right to allow him to go farther and farther,
+just because in the end you hope to get him?"
+
+He met her look with a smile which puzzled her.
+
+"I'll answer your question when you define right and wrong for me," he
+said quietly.
+
+They grew silent together, watching the gradual sinking of day into
+twilight and early dusk.  Norton, for all his vaunted ravings, had
+grown thoughtful; Virginia turning her eyes toward him while his were
+staring out beyond the house-tops saw in them a look of deep, frowning
+speculation.  And through this look, like a little fire gleaming
+through a fog, was another look whose meaning baffled her.
+
+"What do you think of Patten?" he asked.
+
+Startled by his abruptness, characteristic of him though it was to-day,
+she asked in puzzled fashion:
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Not as a man," he said, withdrawing his gaze from the sunset and
+bestowing it gravely upon her.  "As a physician.  Do you size him up as
+capable or as something of a quack?"
+
+She hesitated.  But finally she made the only reply possible.
+
+"Of course you don't expect any answer, knowing that you should not
+come to one member of a profession for an estimate of another.  And,
+besides, you realize that I know nothing whatever of Dr. Patten, either
+as a man or as a physician."
+
+He laughed softly.
+
+"Hedging, pure, unadulterated hedging!  I didn't look for that from
+you.  Shall I tell you what we both think of him?  He is a farce and a
+fake, and I rather think that I am going to run him out of the State
+pretty soon. . . .  What would you say of a doctor who couldn't tell
+the difference between a wound made by a man bumping his head when he
+fell and by a smashing blow with a gun-barrel?  Patten doesn't guess
+yet that it was the blow Moraga gave me the other night which came so
+close to ringing down the sable curtains for me."
+
+"Moraga?" she asked with quickened interest.  "Not the same Moraga who
+shot Brocky Lane?"
+
+"The same little old Moraga," he assured her lightly.  "You needn't
+mention it abroad, of course; I don't think Galloway got a chance to
+talk with him and we are not sure yet that he even knows Moraga was
+here.  But I know somebody put me out in the dark by hammering me over
+the head; and Tom Cutter found blood on Moraga's revolver.  But we
+wander far afield.  Coming back to Patten, do we agree that he is
+something of a dub?"
+
+"I'd rather not discuss him."
+
+"Exactly.  And I, being in the talkative way, am going to tell you that
+he has made blunders before now; that at least one man died under his
+nice little fat hands who shouldn't have died outside of jail; that
+long ago I had my suspicions and began instituting inquiries; that now
+I am fully prepared to learn that Caleb Patten has no more right to an
+M.D. after his name than I have."
+
+"You must be mistaken.  I hope you are.  Men used to do that sort of
+thing, but under existing laws . . ."
+
+"Under existing laws men do a good many things in and about San Juan
+which they shouldn't do.  I have found out that there was a Caleb
+Patten who was a young doctor; that there was a Charles Patten, his
+brother, who was a young scamp; that they both lived in Baltimore a few
+years ago; that from Baltimore they both went hastily no man knows
+where.  This gentleman whom we have with us might be either one of
+them. . . .  Here comes Ignacio.  _Que hay_, Ignacio!"
+
+"_Que hay_, Roderico?" responded Ignacio, coming to lean languidly
+against the veranda post.  He removed his hat elaborately, his liquid
+eyes doing justice to Virginia's dainty charm.  "_Buenos tardes,
+senorita_," he greeted her.
+
+"What is new, Ignacio?" queried Norton, "No bells for you to ring for
+the last ten days!  You grow fat in idleness, _amigo mio_."
+
+Ignacio sighed and rolled his cigarette.
+
+"What is new, you ask?  No?  _Bueno_, this is new!"  He lifted his
+eyes suddenly and they were sparkling as with suppressed excitement.
+"The Devil himself has made a visit to San Juan.  _Si, senor; si,
+senorita_.  It is so."
+
+Virginia smiled; Norton gravely asked the explanation.  Why should his
+satanic majesty come to San Juan?
+
+"Why?  _Quien sabe_?"  Ignacio shrugged all responsibility from his
+lazy shoulders.  "But he came and more bad will come from his visit,
+more and more of evil things.  One knows.  _Seguro que si_; one knows.
+But I will tell you and the senorita; no one else knows of it.  It was
+while in the Casa Blanca men are shooting, while Roderico Nortone will
+make his arrest of poor Vidal who is dead now."  He crossed himself and
+drew a thoughtful puff from his cigarette.  "I run fast to ring the
+bells.  I come into the garden and it is dark.  I come under the bells.
+And while my hand cannot find the rope . . .  _Si, senor y
+senorita_! . . . before I touch the rope the Captain begins to ring!
+Just a little; not long; low and quiet and . . . angry!  And then he
+stop and I shiver.  It is hard not to run out of the garden.  But I
+cross myself and find the ropes and make all the bells dance.  But I
+know; it was the Devil who was before me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE KING'S PALACE
+
+Not only was Galloway back in San Juan but, as Norton had predicted of
+him, he appeared to have every assurance that he stood in no unusual
+danger.  There had been a fight in a dark room and one man had been
+killed, certain others wounded.  The dead man was Galloway's friend,
+hence it was not to be thought that Galloway had killed him.  Kid
+Rickard was another friend.  As for the wound Rod Norton had received,
+who could swear that this man or that had given it to him?
+
+"The chances are," Galloway had already said in many quarters, "that
+Tom Cutter, getting excited, popped over his own sheriff."
+
+True, it was quite obvious that a charge lay at Galloway's door, that
+of harboring a fugitive from justice and of resisting an officer.  But
+with Galloway's money and influence, with the shrewdest technical
+lawyer in the State retained, with ample perjured testimony to be had
+as desired, the law-breaker saw no reason for present uneasiness.
+Perhaps more than anything else he regretted the death of Vidal Nunez
+and the wounding of Kid Rickard.  For these matters vitally touched Jim
+Galloway and his swollen prestige among his henchmen; he had thrown the
+cloak of his protection about Vidal, had summoned him, promised him all
+safety . . . and Vidal was dead.  He knew that men spoke of this over
+and over and hushed when he came upon them; that Vidal's brother, Pete,
+grumbled and muttered that Galloway was losing his grip, that soon or
+late he would fall, that falling he would drag others down with him.
+More than ever before the whole county watched for the final duello
+between Galloway and Norton.  In half a dozen small towns and
+mining-camps men laid bets upon the result.
+
+For the first time, also, there was much barbed comment and criticism
+of the sheriff.  He had gotten this man and that, it was true.  And
+yet, after all this time, he seemed to be no nearer than at the
+beginning to getting the man who counted.  There were those who
+recalled the killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas, and reminded others that
+there had been no attempt at prosecution.  Now there had come forth
+from the Casa Blanca fresh defiance and lawlessness and still Jim
+Galloway came and went as he pleased.  Those who criticised said that
+Norton was losing his nerve, or else that he was merely incompetent
+when measured by the yardstick of swift, incisive action wedded to
+capability.
+
+"If he can't get Jim Galloway, let him step out of the way and give the
+chance to a man who can," was said many times and in many ways.  Even
+John Engle, Julius Struve, Tom Cutter, and Brocky Lane came to Norton
+at one time or another, telling him what they had heard, urging him to
+give some heed to popular clamor, and to begin legal action.
+
+"Put the skids under him, Roddy," pleaded Brocky Lane.  "We can't slide
+him far the first trip, maybe.  But a year or so in jail will break his
+grip here."
+
+But Norton shook his head.  He was playing the game his way.
+
+"The rifles are still in the cache," he told Brocky.  "He is getting
+ready, as we know; further, just as my friends are beginning to find
+fault with me, so are his hangers-on beginning to wonder if they
+haven't tied to the wrong man.  Just to save his own face he'll have to
+start something pretty pronto.  And we know about where he is going to
+strike.  It's up to us to hold our horses, Brocky."
+
+Brocky growled a bit, but went away more than half-persuaded.  He
+called at the hotel, paid his respects to Virginia, and affording her a
+satisfaction which it was hard for her to conceal, also paid her for
+her services rendered him in the cliff-dweller's cave.
+
+Often enough the man who tilts with the law is in most things not
+unlike his fellows, different alone perhaps in the one essential that
+he is born a few hundreds of years late in the advance of civilization.
+Going about that part of his business which has its claims to
+legitimacy, mingling freely with his fellows, he fails to stand out
+distinctly from them as a monster.  Given the slow passing of
+uneventful time, and it becomes hard and harder to consider him as a
+social menace.  When the man is of the Jim Galloway type, his plans
+large, his patience long, he may even pass out from the shadow of a
+gallows-tree and return to occupy his former place in the quiet
+community life, while his neighbors are prone to forget or condone.
+
+As other days came and slipped by and the weeks grew out of them,
+Galloway's was a pleasant, untroubled face to be seen on the street, at
+the post-office, behind his own bar, on the country roads.  He ignored
+any animosity which San Juan might feel for him.  If a man looked at
+him stonily, Galloway did not care to let it be seen that he saw; if a
+woman turned out to avoid him, no evidence that he understood darkened
+his eyes.  He had a good-humored word to speak always; he lifted his
+hat to the banker's wife, as he had always done; he mingled with the
+crowd when there were "exercises" at the little schoolhouse; he warmly
+congratulated Miss Porter, the crabbed old-maid teacher, on the work
+she had accomplished and made her wonder fleetingly if there wasn't a
+bit of good in the man, after all.  Perhaps there was; there is in most
+men.  And Florrie Engle was beginning to wonder the same thing.  For
+Rod Norton, recovered and about his duties, was not quite the same
+touchingly heroic figure he had been while lying unconscious and in
+danger of his life.  Nor was it any part of Florrie Engle's nature to
+remain long either upon the heights or in the depths of an emotion.
+The night of the shooting she had cried out passionately against
+Galloway; as days went their placid way and she saw Galloway upon each
+one of them . . . and did not see a great deal of Norton, who was
+either away or monopolizing Virginia, . . . she took the first step in
+the gambler's direction by beginning to be sorry for him.  First, it
+was too bad that Mr. Galloway did the sort of things which he did; no
+doubt he had had no mother to teach him when he was very young.  Next,
+it was a shame that he was blamed for everything that had to happen;
+maybe he was a . . . a bad man, but Florrie simply didn't believe he
+was responsible for half of the deeds laid at his door.  Finally,
+through a long and intricate chain of considerations, the girl reached
+the point where she nodded when Galloway lifted his hat.  The smile in
+the man's eyes was one of pure triumph.
+
+"Oh, my dear!"  Florrie burst into Virginia's room, flushed and
+palpitant with her latest emotion.  "He has told me all about it, and
+do you know, I don't believe that we have the right to blame him?
+Doesn't it say in the Bible or . . . or somewhere, that greater praise
+or something shall no man have than he who gives his life for a friend?
+It's something like that, anyway.  Aren't people just horrid, always
+blaming other people, never stopping to consider their reasons and
+impulses and looking at it from their side?  Vidal Nunez was a friend
+of Mr. Galloway's; he was in Mr. Galloway's house.  Of course . . ."
+
+"I thought that you didn't speak to him any more."
+
+"I didn't for a long time.  But if you could have only seen the way he
+always looks at me when I bump into him.  Virgie, I believe he is sad
+and lonely and that he would like to be good if people would only give
+him the chance.  Why, he is human, after all, you know."
+
+Virginia began to ask herself if Galloway were merely amusing himself
+with Florrie or if the man were really interested in her.  It did not
+seem likely that a girl like Florrie would appeal to a man like him;
+and yet, why not?  There is at least a grain of truth, if no more, in
+the old saw of the attraction of opposites.  And it was scarcely more
+improbable that he should be interested in her than that she should
+allow herself to be ever so slightly moved by him.  Furthermore, in its
+final analysis, emotion is not always to be explained.
+
+Virginia set herself the task of watching for any slightest development
+of the man's influence over the girl.  She saw Florrie almost daily,
+either at the hotel to which Florrie had acquired the habit of coming
+in the cool of the afternoons or at the Engle home.  And for the sake
+of her little friend, and at the same time for Elmer's sake, she threw
+the two youngsters together as much as possible.  They quarrelled
+rather a good deal, criticised each other with startling frankness, and
+grew to be better friends than either realized.  Elmer was a vaquero
+now, as he explained whenever need be or opportunity arose, wore chaps,
+a knotted handkerchief about a throat which daily grew more brown,
+spurs as large and noisy as were to be encountered on San Juan's
+street, and his right hip pocket bulged.  None of the details escaped
+Florrie's eyes . . . he called her "Fluff" now and she nicknamed him
+"Black Bill" . . . and she never failed to refer to them mockingly.
+
+"They tell me, Black Bill," she said innocently, "that you fell off
+your horse yesterday.  I was so _sorry_."
+
+She had offered her sympathy during a lull in the conversation, drawing
+the attention of her father, mother, and Virginia to Elmer, whose face
+reddened promptly.
+
+"Florrie!" chided Mrs. Engle, hiding the twinkle in her own eyes.
+
+"Oh, her," said Elmer with a wave of the hand.  "I don't mind what
+Fluff says.  She's just trying to kid me."
+
+Toward the end of the evening, having been thoughtful for ten minutes,
+Elmer adopted Florrie's tactics and remarked suddenly and in a voice to
+be heard much farther than his needed to carry:
+
+"Say, Fluff.  Saw an old friend of yours the other day."  And when
+Florrie, "gun-shy" as Elmer called her, was too wise to ask any
+questions, he hastened on: "Juanito Miranda it was.  Sent his best.  So
+did Mrs. Juanito."
+
+Whereupon it was Florrie's turn to turn a scarlet of mortification and
+anger.  For Juanito had soft black eyes and almost equally soft black
+mustaches, with probably a heart to match, and only a year ago Florrie
+had been busied making a hero of him when he, the blind one, took unto
+himself an Indian bride and in all innocence heaped shame high upon the
+blonde head.  How Elmer unearthed such ancient history was a mystery to
+Florrie; but none the less she "hated" him for it.  They saw a very
+great deal of each other, each serving as a sort of balance-wheel to
+the other's self-centred complacency.  Perhaps the one subject upon
+which they could agree was Jim Galloway; Elmer still liked to look upon
+the gambler as a colossal figure standing serene among wolves, while
+Florrie could admit to him, with no fear of a chiding, that she thought
+Mr. Galloway "simply splendid!"
+
+When one evening, after having failed to show himself for a full month,
+Rod Norton came to the Engles', found Elmer and Virginia there, and
+suggested the ride to the King's Palace, he awakened no end of
+enthusiasm.  Elmer had a day off, thanks to the generosity of his
+employer, Mr. Engle, and had just secretly purchased a fresh outfit
+consisting of a silver-mounted Spanish bit, a new pair of white and
+unspeakably shaggy, draggy chaps, a wide hat with a band of snake hide,
+and boots that were the final whisper in high-heeled discomfort.
+Florrie disappeared into her room to make her own little riding-costume
+as irresistible as possible.  They were to start with the first streaks
+of dawn to-morrow, just the four of them, since the banker and his
+wife, lukewarmly invited, had no desire for a forty-mile ride between
+morning and night.
+
+It was Rod Norton's privilege to lead his merry party into what for
+them was wonderland.  Even Florrie, though so much other life had been
+passed in San Juan, had never before visited the King's Palace.
+Clattering through the street while most folk were asleep, they took
+advantage of the cool of the dawn and rode swiftly.  Elmer and Florrie
+racing on ahead laid aside their accustomed weapons and were, for the
+once, utterly flattering to each other.  Each wishing to be admired,
+admired the other, and was paid back in the coveted coin.  Norton and
+Virginia, at first a little inclined toward silence, soon grew as
+noisily merry as the others, drawing deep enjoyment from the moment.
+
+And at the portals of the King's Palace, reached after four hours in
+the saddle, followed by thirty minutes on foot, they stood hushed with
+wonder.  High upon the southern slope of Mt. Temple they had come
+abruptly into the unexpected.  Here a rugged plateau had caught and
+held through the ages the soil which had weathered down from the cliffs
+above; here were trees to replace the weary gray brush, shade instead
+of glare, birds as welcome substitutes for droning insects, water and
+flowers to make the canons doubly cool and fragrant for him who had
+ascended from the dry reaches of sand below the talus.
+
+"It's just like fairy-land!" cried the ecstatic Florrie.  "Roddy
+Norton, I think you're real mean not to have brought me here ages ago!"
+
+"Ages ago, my dear miss," laughed Norton, "you were too little to
+appreciate it.  You should thank me for bringing you now."
+
+Down through the middle of the plateau from its hidden source ran the
+purling stream which was destined to yield to sun and thirsty earth
+long before it twisted down the lower slopes of the hills.  Along its
+edges the grass was thick and rich, shot through everywhere with little
+blue blossoms and the golden gleam of the starflowers.  Further promise
+of yellow beauty was given by the stalks of the evening-primrose
+scattered on every hand, the flowers furled now, sleeping.  In the
+groves were pines, small cedars, and a sprinkling of sturdy dwarf oaks.
+And from their shelter came the welcome sound of a bird's twitter.
+
+"It's always about as you see it," Norton explained.  "Too hard to get
+to, too small when one makes the climb to afford enough pasturage for
+sheep.  And now the Palace itself."
+
+Straight ahead the cliffs overhung the farther rim of the plateau.  And
+there, under the out-jutting roof of rock, an ancient people had
+fashioned themselves a home which stood now as when their hands
+laboriously set it there.  The protected ledge which afforded eternal
+foundation was slightly above the plateau's level, to be reached by a
+series of "steps" in the rock, steps which were holes worn deep,
+perhaps five hundred years ago.  The climb was steep, hazardous unless
+one went with due precaution, but the four holiday-makers hurried to
+begin it.
+
+So close to the edge of the rock ledge did the walls of the ruin stand
+that there was barely room to edge along it to come to the narrow
+doorway.  Holding hands, Norton in the lead, Elmer in the rear, they
+made their breathless way.  And then they were in the hushed, shaded
+anteroom.
+
+The dust of untroubled ages lay upon the surprisingly smooth floor.
+Walls of cemented rock rose intact on two sides, broken here and there
+on a third, while the cliff itself made the fourth at the rear.  And
+unusually spacious, wide, and high-ceiled was this room, which may have
+had its use when time was younger as a council-chamber.  At one end was
+another door, small and dark and forbidding, leading to another room.
+Beyond lay other quarters, a long line of them, which might have housed
+scores in their time.
+
+While Florrie, letting out little shrieks now and then interspersed
+with gay cries of delight, led a half-timorous way and Elmer went with
+her upon the tour of discovery, Virginia and Norton stood a moment at
+the front entrance looking down upon the fertile plateau and across it
+to the level miles running out to San Juan and beyond.
+
+"Who were they?" asked Virginia, unconscious of a half-sigh as she
+withdrew abstracted eyes from the wide panorama which had filled the
+vision of so many other men and women and little children before the
+white man came to claim the New World.  "They who builded here and
+lived and died here.  What has become of them?  Where did they go?"
+
+"All questions asked a thousand times and never answered.  I don't
+know.  But they were good builders, good engineers, good
+pottery-makers, good farmers and hunters and fighters; rather a goodly
+crowd, I take it.  Come, and I'll share my secret with you while
+Florrie and Elmer discover the skeleton a little farther on and stop to
+exclaim over it."
+
+[Illustration: "Come, and I'll share my secret with you."]
+
+Norton's secret was a hidden room of the King's Palace.  While many men
+knew of the Palace itself, he believed that none other than himself had
+ever ferreted out this particular chamber which he called the Treasure
+Chamber.  It was to be reached by clambering through an orifice of the
+eastern wall, over a clutter of fallen blocks of stone and a score of
+feet along the narrowing ledge.  Just before they came to the point
+where the encroaching wall of cliff denied farther foothold they found
+a fissure in the rock itself wide enough to allow them to slip into it.
+Again they climbed, coming presently to a ledge smaller than the one
+below and hidden by an outthrust boulder.  Here was the last of the
+rooms of the King's Palace, cunningly masked, to be found only by
+accident, even the cramped door concealed by the branches of a tortured
+cedar.  Norton pushed them aside and they entered.
+
+"I have cached a few of my things here," he told her as they confronted
+each other in the gloom of the room's interior.  "And the joke of it is
+that my hiding-place is almost if not quite directly below the caves
+where Galloway's rifles are.  This is a secret, mind you! . . .  If
+you'll look around, you'll find some of the articles our friends the
+cliff-dwellers left behind them when they made their getaway."
+
+In a dark corner she found a blackened coffee-pot and a frying-pan,
+proclaiming anachronistically that here was the twentieth century
+interloping upon the fifteenth, articles which Norton had hidden here.
+In another corner were jumbled the things which the ancient people had
+left to mark their passing, an earthenware water-jar, half a dozen
+spear and arrow points of stone, a clumsy-looking axe still fitted to
+its handle of century-seasoned cedar, bound with thongs.
+
+"But," exclaimed the girl, "the wood, the raw-hide . . . they would
+have disintegrated long ago.  They must belong to the age of your
+coffee-pot and frying-pan!"
+
+"The air is bone-dry," he reminded her.  "What little rain there is
+never gets in here.  Nothing decays; look yonder."
+
+He showed her a basket made of withes, a graceful thing skilfully made,
+small, frail-looking, and as perfect as the day it had come from a pair
+of quick brown hands under a pair of quick black eyes.  She took it
+almost with a sense of awe upon her.
+
+"Keep it, will you?" he asked lightly.  "As a memento.  Presented by a
+caveman through your friend the sheriff.  Now let's get back before
+they miss us.  I may have need of this place some time and I'd rather
+no one else knew of it."
+
+They made their way back as they had come and in silence, Virginia
+treasuring the token and with it the sense that her friend the sheriff
+had cared to share his secret with her.
+
+
+They made of the day an occasion to be remembered, to be considered
+wistfully in retrospect during the troubled hours so soon to come to
+each one of the four of them.  While Elmer and Florrie gathered
+fire-wood, Norton showed Virginia how simple a matter it was here in
+this seldom-visited mountain-stream to take a trout.  Cool, shaded
+pools under overhanging, gouged-out banks, tiny falls, and shimmering
+riffles all housed the quick speckled beauties.  Then, as Norton had
+predicted, the fish were fried, crisp and brown, in sizzling
+bacon-grease, while the thin wafers of bacon garnished the tin plate
+bedded in hot ashes.  They nooned in the shady grove, sipping their
+coffee that had the taste of some rare, black nectar.  And throughout
+the long lazy afternoon they loitered as it pleased them, picked
+flowers, wandered anew through the ruins of the King's Palace, lay by
+the singing water, and were quietly content.  It was only when the
+shadows had thickened over the world and the promise of the primroses
+was fulfilled that they made ready for the return ride.  Before they
+had gone down to their horses the moths were coming to the yellow
+flowers, tumbling about them, filling the air with the frail beating of
+their wings.
+
+At Struve's hotel . . . Elmer and Virginia had ridden on to Engle's
+home . . . Virginia told Norton good night, thanking him for a perfect
+day.  As their hands met for a little she saw a new, deeply probing
+look in his eyes, a look to be understood.  He towered over her,
+physically superb.  As she had felt it before, so now did she
+experience that odd little thrill born from nearness to him go singing
+through her.  She withdrew her hand hastily and went in.  In her own
+room she stood a long time before her glass, seeking to read what lay
+in her own eyes.
+
+
+Tom Cutter was waiting for Norton--merely to tell him that a stranger
+had come to San Juan, a Mexican with all the earmarks of a gentleman
+and a man of means.  The Mexican's name was Enrique del Rio.  He
+evidently came from below the border.  He had lost no time in finding
+Jim Galloway, with whom he had been all afternoon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE MEXICAN FROM MEXICO
+
+Enrique del Rio promptly became known to San Juan as the Mexican from
+Mexico, this to distinguish him from the many Mexicans, as San Juan
+knew them, who had never seen that turbulent field of intrigue and
+revolt from which their sires had come.  He showed himself from the
+outset to be a gentleman of culture, discernment, and ability.  He was
+suave, he was polished, he gave certain signs of refinement.
+
+His first afternoon and evening he bestowed upon Jim Galloway.  The
+second day found him registered at Struve's hotel.  The following
+morning he presented himself with a sheaf of credentials at the bank,
+asking for John Engle.  With him came Ignacio Chavez in the role of
+interpreter.  Del Rio spoke absolutely no English and had informed
+himself that Engle's Spanish was inadequate for the occasion.
+
+"He is Senor Don Enrique del Rio," explained Ignacio, touched by the
+spell of the other's munificence and immaculate clothes.  "He would
+like to shake the hand of Senor Engle to become acquainted and then
+friends. . . .  He brings papers to tell who and what he is in Mexico
+City, whence he has departed because of too damn much fight down there;
+he wishes to put some money here in the _banco_, which he can take
+away again to buy a big ranch and many cattle and horses.  He has the
+other money in a _banco_ in New York, where he sent it out from Mexico
+two, three months ago."
+
+And so on, while Engle gravely listened and shrewdly, after his fashion
+in business hours, probed for the inner man under the outer polish,
+while del Rio nodded and smiled and never withdrew his night-black eyes
+from Engle's face.
+
+Del Rio, it appeared, had gone first to the Casa Blanca because he had
+heard of Jim Galloway as one of the most influential men of the county.
+Since arriving in San Juan, however, he had heard this and that, mere
+rumors, which caused him to come to Engle.  He, a stranger, could ill
+afford in the beginning to have his name coupled with that of any man
+not known for his spotless integrity.  Senor Engle understood? . . .
+Later, when del Rio had found the properties to his liking and had
+builded a home, his wife and two daughters would arrive.  Now they
+travelled in California.
+
+In the end Engle accepted the Mexican's deposits, which amounted to
+approximately a thousand dollars, and which were to be drawn against
+merely as an expense account until del Rio found his ranch.  And the
+first item of expense was the purchase from Engle himself of a fine
+saddle-animal, a pure-blooded, clean-limbed young mare, sister to
+Persis.  After which the Mexican spent a great deal of his time riding
+about the country, looking at ranches.  He visited Engle's two places,
+called upon Norton at Las Flores, ferreting out prices, looking at
+water and feed, examining soil.
+
+It was a bare fortnight after the coming of del Rio when out of Las
+Palmas came word of fresh lawlessness.  The superintendent of the three
+Quigley mines had been surprised the night before pay-day, forced at
+the point of a revolver to open his own safe, and robbed of several
+thousand dollars.  A man on horseback rushed word to San Juan, found
+Tom Cutter, who located Norton the same afternoon at his ranch at Las
+Flores.
+
+"Rod, old man," cried Cutter angrily, "this damned thing has got to
+stop!  You haven't a much better friend than I am, I guess, and I'm
+telling you straight that the whole county is getting sore on you.
+They will talk more than ever now, saying that it's up to you to get
+results and that you don't get them."
+
+"The stick-up was last night?" asked the sheriff coolly.
+
+"Yes," snapped Cutter.
+
+"You were in San Juan?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where was Jim Galloway?  Was he in town?"
+
+"No, he wasn't.  I don't know where he was.  But I do know where he
+ought to be. . . ."
+
+"Was that Mexican gent, del Rio, in town?"
+
+Cutter opened his eyes.
+
+"No.  I don't think so.  You haven't got anything on him, have you?"
+
+"Only what you told me.  Remember that his first day in San Juan he
+went to Galloway like a homing pigeon."
+
+Norton went for his horse, saddled, and rode swiftly to Las Palmas.  In
+the mining-camp he went immediately to the office of Nate Kemble, the
+superintendent, whom he found cursing volubly.
+
+"It's up to you," were the sharp words of greeting as Kemble wheeled
+upon the sheriff.  "What the hell do you think you're for, anyway?
+Good Lord, man, if you can't cut the mustard, why don't you crawl out
+and let a man who _can_ wear your star?"
+
+"Easy there, Kemble," said Norton quietly.  "You can do your raring and
+pitching after I'm gone.  Tell me about it.  What time did it happen?"
+
+"It was hardly dark."
+
+"How many men jumped you?"
+
+"Just one.  But . . ."
+
+"Just one, eh?"  He pondered the information.  "That isn't the usual
+brand of Galloway work, is it?  Get a good slant at him?"
+
+"At his clothes," growled Kemble, slamming himself down dejectedly in
+his chair.  "His face was hid, of course."
+
+"Ever see a Mexican named del Rio?"
+
+Like Cutter before him, Kemble started.
+
+"Don't ask me what I mean," Norton cut him short.  "Del Rio is a pretty
+big man for a Mexican; was this highwayman about his size?"
+
+Kemble hesitated.
+
+"It's hard to say just how big a man is when he comes in on you like
+that," he said at last.  "At a guess I'd say that the man who stuck me
+up was a little taller than del Rio.  But I wouldn't swear to it."
+
+"It might have been del Rio himself, then?" Norton insisted.
+
+"Yes.  Or it might have been the Devil's grandmother.  I don't . . ."
+
+"See anything of del Rio the last few days?"
+
+"Saw him yesterday.  He was in camp.  Was talking mines."
+
+"See anything of Galloway hereabouts of late?"
+
+"No.  Haven't seen him for a month or two."
+
+Norton asked a few other questions, kept his own thoughts to himself,
+and rode away.  Less than a mile from the camp he met Jim Galloway
+riding a sweat-wet horse.  The two men reined in sharply, each man's
+eyes matching the other's for hardness.  Galloway's face was red, the
+fiery red of anger.
+
+"Going back for what you forgot, Jim?" asked Norton.
+
+For a moment Galloway, staring back at him, seemed utterly speechless
+in the grip of his wrath.  Norton did not remember ever having seen
+such blazing anger in the prominent eyes.
+
+"Between you and me, Rod Norton," muttered Galloway at last, "I have
+turned a trick or two in my time.  But this job is none of my doing and
+if I wise up as to who put it over he'll go under the sand or into the
+pen, and I'll put him there."
+
+Norton laughed.
+
+"In other words, some free-lance has made a bid to break your corner on
+the crime market, eh?" he jeered.  "Put one over on you without your
+knowledge and consent?  And without splitting two ways?  That what you
+mean?"
+
+"I mean that I'd pay five hundred dollars out of my own pocket right
+now for the dead-wood on the man who robbed Kemble."
+
+"Kid Rickard is around once more; sure he didn't do it?"
+
+"Yes, I am.  Kid Rickard didn't do it."
+
+Norton eased himself in the saddle, thoughtfully regarding Galloway.
+And then, very abruptly:
+
+"How about your friend, del Rio?"
+
+It was the third time that he had mentioned del Rio's name in this
+connection and to the third man.  And now, but slightly different in
+degree only, he saw the same look in Galloway's eyes which he had
+brought into Cutter's and Kemble's.
+
+"Del Rio?" repeated Galloway frowningly.  "What makes you say that?"
+
+"I'll collect your five hundred later," was Norton's laughing response.
+Swerving out a little as he passed, he rode on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+A STACK OF GOLD PIECES
+
+John Engle rapidly came to assume the nature and proportions of a
+stubborn bulwark standing sturdily between Roderick Norton and the
+fires of criticism, which, springing from little, scattered flames were
+now a wide-spread blaze amply fed with the dry fuel of many fields.
+Again there had been a general excitement over a crime committed, much
+talk, various suspicions, and, in the end, no arrest made.  Men who had
+stood by the sheriff until now began to lose faith in him.  They
+recalled how, after the fight in the Casa Blanca, he had let Galloway
+go and with him Antone and the Kid; their memories trailed back to the
+killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas and the evidence of the boots.  They
+began to admit, at first reluctantly, then with angry eagerness, that
+Norton was not the man his father had been before him, not the man they
+had taken him to be.  And all of this hurt Norton's stanch friend, John
+Engle.  All the more that he, too, saw signs of hesitancy which he
+found it hard to condone.
+
+"Let him alone," he said many a time.  "Give him his chance and a free
+hand.  He knows what he is doing."
+
+From that point he began to make excuses, first to himself and then to
+others.  People were forgetting that only a short time ago the sheriff
+had lain many days at the point of death; that his system had been
+overtaxed; that not yet had his superb strength come back to him.  Wait
+until once more he was physically fit.
+
+It was merely an excuse, and at the outset no man knew it better than
+the banker himself.  But as time went by without bringing results and
+tongues grew sharper and more insistent everywhere, Engle grew
+convinced that there was a grain of truth in his trumped-up argument.
+He invited Norton to his home, had him to dinner, watched him keenly,
+and came to the conclusion that Norton was riding on his nerves, that
+he had not taken sufficient time to recuperate before getting his feet
+back into the official stirrups, that the strain of his duties was
+telling on him, that he needed a rest and a change or would go to
+pieces.
+
+But Norton, the subject broached, merely shook his head.
+
+"I'm all right, John," he said a little hurriedly and nervously.  "I am
+run down at the heels a bit, I'll admit.  But I can't stop to rest
+right now.  One of these days I'll quit this job and go back to
+ranching.  Until then . . .  Well, let them talk.  We can't stop them
+very well."
+
+Suspicion of the Quigley mines robbery had turned at first toward del
+Rio.  But he had established an alibi.  So had Galloway.  So had Antone
+and the Kid.
+
+"There is nothing to do but wait," Norton insisted.  "It won't be long
+now."
+
+Engle, having less than no faith in Patten's ability, went to Virginia
+Page.  She saw Norton often; what did she think?  Was he on the verge
+of a collapse?  Was he physically fit?
+
+"All of this criticism hurts him," said the banker thoughtfully.  "I
+know Rod and how he must take it, though he only shrugs.  It's gall and
+wormwood to him.  He's up against a hard proposition, as we all know;
+if he is half-sick, I wonder if the proposition isn't going to be too
+much for him?  Can't you advise him, persuade him to knock off for a
+couple of weeks and clear out?  Get into a city somewhere and forget
+his work.  Why, it's the most pitiful thing in the world to see a man
+like him lose his grip."
+
+"He is not quite himself," she admitted slowly.  "He is more nervous,
+inclined to be short and irritable, than he used to be.  You may be
+right; or it may be simply that his continued failure to stop these
+crimes is wearing him down.  I'll be glad to watch him, to talk with
+him if he will listen to me."
+
+But first she forced herself to what seemed a casual chat with Patten,
+finding him loitering upon the hotel veranda.  She suggested to him
+that Norton was beginning to show the strain, that he looked haggard
+under it, and wondered if he had quite recovered from his recent
+illness?
+
+Patten, after his pompous way, leaned back in his chair, his thumbs in
+his armholes, his manner that of a most high judge.
+
+"He's as well as I am," he announced positively.  "Thin, to be sure,
+just from being laid up those ten days.  And from a lot of hard riding
+and worry.  That's all."
+
+Out of Patten's vest-pocket peeped a lead-pencil.  Curiously enough, it
+carried her mind back to Patten's incompetence.  For it suggested the
+fountain pen which of old occupied the pencil's place and which the
+sheriff had taken in his haste to secrete a bit of paper with Patten's
+scrawl upon it.  She wondered again just what had been on that paper,
+and if it were meant to help Norton prove that Patten had no right to
+the M.D. after his name?  The incident, all but forgotten, remained
+prominently in her mind, soon to assume a position of transcendent
+importance.
+
+And then, one after the other, here and there throughout the county
+came fresh crimes which not only set men talking angrily but which drew
+the eyes of the State and then of the neighboring States upon this
+corner of the world.  Newspapers in the cities commented variously,
+most of them sweepingly condemning the county's sheriff for a
+figurehead and a boy who should never have been given a man's place in
+the sun.  New faces were seen in San Juan, in Las Estrellas, Las
+Palmas, Pozo, everywhere, and men said that the undesirable citizens of
+the whole Southwest were flocking here where they might reap with
+others of their ilk and go scot free.  Naturally, the Casa Blanca
+became headquarters for a large percentage of the newcomers.
+
+"The condition in and about San Juan," commented one of the most
+reputable and generally conservative of the attacking dailies, "has
+become acute, unprecedented for this time in our development.  The
+community has become the asylum of the lawless.  The authorities have
+shown themselves utterly unable to cope with the situation.  A
+well-known figure of the desert town who long ago should have gone to
+the gallows is daily growing bolder, attaching to himself the wildest
+of the insurging element, and is commonly looked upon as a crime
+dictator.  Unless there comes a stiffening in the moral fiber of the
+local officers, we dread to consider the logical outcome of these
+conditions."
+
+And so forth from countless quarters.  Galloway openly jeered at
+Norton.  New faces, looking out from the Casa Blanca, grinned widely as
+the sheriff now and then rode past.  Engle and Struve and Tom Cutter,
+anxious and beginning to be afraid of what lurked in the future, met at
+the hotel and sought to hit upon a solution of the problem.
+
+"Norton has got something up his sleeve," growled the hotel keeper,
+"and he's as stubborn as a mule.  He's after Galloway, and it begins to
+look as though he were forgetting that his job is to serve the county
+first and his own private quarrels next.  I've jawed him up and down;
+it only makes him shake his head like a horse with flies after him."
+
+The three, hoping that their combined arguments might have weight with
+Norton, went to him and did not leave him until they had made clear
+what their thoughts were, what the whole State was saying of him.  And,
+as Struve had predicted, he shook his head.
+
+"These later robberies haven't been Galloway's work," he told them
+positively.  "They were pulled off by the same man who stuck up Kemble
+of the Quigley mines.  Inside of a week I'll get something done; I'll
+promise you that.  But let me do it my way."
+
+Engle alone of the three drew a certain satisfaction from the interview.
+
+"He has promised something definite," he told them.  "Did you ever know
+him to do that and fail to keep his word?  Maybe we're getting a little
+excited, boys."
+
+The latest crime had been the robbery of the little bank at Packard
+Springs.  The highwayman had gone in the night to the room of the
+cashier, forced him to dress, go to the bank, and open his safe.  The
+result was a theft of a couple of thousand dollars, no trace left
+behind, and a growing feeling of insecurity throughout the county.  It
+was for this crime that Norton meant and promised to make an arrest.
+
+Exactly seven days from the day of his promise Norton rode into San
+Juan and asked for Tom Cutter.  Struve, meeting him at the hotel door,
+looked at him sharply.
+
+"Made that arrest yet, Norton?" he demanded.  Norton smiled.
+
+"No, I haven't," he admitted coolly.  "But I've got a few minutes
+before my week's up, haven't I?  Fix me up with something to eat and
+I'll have a talk with you and Tom while I attend to the inner man."
+
+But over his meal, while Cutter and Struve watched him impatiently, he
+did little talking other than to ask carelessly where del Rio was.
+
+"Damn it, man," cried Struve irritably.  "You've hinted at him before
+now.  If he's a crook, why don't you go grab him?  He's in his room."
+
+Norton swung about upon Struve, his eyes suddenly filled with fire.
+
+"Look here, Struve," he retorted, "I've had about a bellyful of
+badgering.  I'm running my job and it will be just as well for you to
+keep your hands off.  As for why I don't make an arrest . . .  Come on,
+Tom.  You, too, Julius," his smile coming back.  "I'm going to get del
+Rio."
+
+"I don't believe . . ." began Struve.
+
+"Seeing is believing," returned Norton lightly.  "Come on."
+
+Followed by the two men, Norton went direct to del Rio's room, at the
+front of the house, just across the hall from Virginia's office.  At
+del Rio's quick "_Entra_," he threw open the door and went in.  Del
+Rio, seated smoking a cigar, looked up with curious eyes which did not
+miss the two men following the sheriff.
+
+"You are under arrest for the bank robbery at Packard Springs," said
+Norton crisply.
+
+"_Que quiere usted decir_?" demanded the Mexican, to whom the English
+words were meaningless.
+
+Norton threw back his vest, showing his star.  And while he kept his
+eye upon del Rio he said quietly to Cutter:
+
+"Look through his trunk and bags."
+
+Del Rio, understanding quickly enough, sat smoking swiftly, his eyes
+narrowing as they clung steadily to Norton's.  Cutter, a rising hope in
+his breast that at last his superior had made good, went to the trunk
+in the corner.  Del Rio shrugged and remained silent.
+
+Cutter began tumbling out upon the floor an assortment of clothing,
+evincing little respect for the Mexican's finery.  Suddenly, when his
+hands had gone to the bottom, he sat back upon his heels, a leaping
+light in his eyes.
+
+"Caught with the goods on, by God!" he cried.  "Look here, Struve!"
+
+He had whipped out a canvas bag which gave forth the chink of gold.
+Another came after it.  And across each bag was stamped "Packard
+Springs Bank."
+
+Del Rio's eyes had wandered a moment to Cutter and the evidence.  Then
+they came back to Norton, filled with black malevolence.  One did not
+need to understand the southern language to grasp the meaning of the
+words muttered under his breath.
+
+Within the half-hour Strove, Cutter, and Engle had apologized to
+Norton; after this, they promised him to keep their hands off and their
+mouths shut.
+
+
+That evening Virginia and Norton sat long together on Struve's veranda.
+There was more silence than talk between them.  Norton seemed
+abstracted; the girl was plainly constrained, anxious, and found it
+difficult to keep her mind upon the thin thread of conversation joining
+their occasional remarks.  Abruptly, out of one of their wordless
+intervals, she said quickly:
+
+"Congratulate me on being a rich woman!  I got a check from an old,
+almost forgotten, patient to-day.  A hundred dollars, all in one lump!
+It's a fortune in San Juan, isn't it?"
+
+Norton laughed with her.
+
+"I feel like spending it all in a breath," she ran on.  "I went right
+away to Mr. Engle and had him cash it so that I could see what five
+twenty-dollar gold pieces looked like.  And I chinked them and played
+with them like a child!  Do you think I am growing greedy for gold in
+my old age? . . .  You ought to see them piled up, though; five
+twenties.  Isn't gold a pretty thing?  I've a notion to go get them and
+show them to you; they're right on my table ..."
+
+She broke off suddenly, her hand on his arm.
+
+"Did you see some one out there at the corner of the house?" she asked
+quickly.  "Do you think . . ."
+
+Then she laughed again and settled back in her chair.
+
+"Already thinking somebody is going to steal my gold!  My five
+twenties.  Just to punish myself I am going to leave them on my office
+table all night; do you suppose I'll be wondering all the time if
+somebody is crawling in at a window and taking them?"
+
+Five minutes later she said good night and left him.
+
+"I'll be up early in the morning," she said laughingly.  "Just to make
+sure that my gold is there!"
+
+
+An hour later Virginia Page, sitting fully dressed in the darkness of
+her bedroom, got quietly to her feet and went to the door leading to
+her office.  With wildly beating heart she stood listening, seeking to
+peer through the crack of the door she had left ajar.  She had heard
+the faint, expected sound of some one moving cautiously.
+
+Now she heard it again, then the rustling of loose papers lying on her
+table, then the faint, golden chink of yellow-minted disks.  As she
+suddenly scratched the match in her hand, drawing it along the wall,
+she threw the door open.  The tiny flame, held high, retrieved the room
+from darkness into sufficient pale light.  The man at her table whirled
+upon her, an exclamation caught in his throat, one hand going to his
+hip, the other closing tight upon what it held.
+
+She came in, her eyes steadily upon his, her face deathly pale.  As the
+match fell from her fingers she went to the open window and drew down
+the shade.  Then she lit a second match, set it to her lamp, and sank
+wearily into her chair.
+
+"Shall we thresh matters out, Mr. Norton?" she asked.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+DESIRE OUTWEIGHS DISCRETION
+
+Following Virginia's barely audible words there was a long silence.
+Her eyes, dark with the trouble in them, rested upon Norton's face and
+saw the frown go from his brows while slowly the red seeped into his
+bronzed cheeks.  For the first time in her life she saw him staggered
+by the shock of surprise, held hesitant and uncertain.  For a little
+there was never a movement of his rigid muscles; one hand rested upon
+the butt of his revolver, the other was closed upon the stack of gold
+pieces.  When at last he found his tongue it was to accuse her.
+
+"You trapped me," he said bitterly.
+
+"With golden bait," she admitted, her voice oddly spiritless.  "Yes."
+
+"Well," he challenged, "what are you going to do about it?"
+
+"Do?  I don't know!"
+
+Again they grew silent, studying each other intently.  Norton, his
+poise coming back to him as the unusual color receded from his face,
+smiled at her with an affectation of his old manner.  Suddenly he
+stepped back to her table, noiselessly set down the coins, eased
+himself into a chair.
+
+"You wished to thresh things out?  I am ready.  And in case we should
+be interrupted, you know, I have called on you in your official
+capacity.  We'll say that I am troubled by the old wound in the head;
+that will do as well as anything, won't it?"
+
+"It was you who robbed the bank at Pozo!" she cried softly, leaning
+toward him, the look in her eyes one of dread now.  "And the mine
+superintendent at Las Palmas?  And I don't know how many other people.
+It was you!"
+
+She had startled him in the beginning; she knew she would not draw
+another sign of surprise from him.  He had himself under control, and
+long years of severe training made that control complete.  He merely
+looked interested under her sweeping accusation.
+
+"You must have a reason for a charge like that," he remarked evenly.
+
+"Do you deny it?"
+
+"I deny nothing, I affirm nothing right now.  I say that you must have
+a reason for what you state."
+
+"You put the incriminating evidence in del Rio's trunk," she ran on
+hurriedly.  "The canvas bags of gold.  Didn't you?"
+
+"Reason?" he insisted equably.
+
+"You took Caleb Patten's fountain pen!  I saw you."
+
+He lifted his brows at her.  Then he laughed softly.
+
+"In the first place," he replied thoughtfully, "I really believe that
+he is not Caleb at all but Charles Patten.  We'll talk of that later,
+however.  In the second place isn't it rather humorous to wind up by
+accusing a man with the theft of a fountain pen after your other
+charges?"
+
+"Answer one question," she urged earnestly.  "Please.  It is only a
+small matter.  Give me your word of honor that you will answer it
+truthfully."
+
+He was very grave as he sat for a moment, head down, twirling his big
+hat in slow fingers.  Then he smiled again as he looked up.
+
+"Either truthfully or not at all," he promised her.  "My word of honor."
+
+She was plainly excited as she set him her question, seeming at once
+eager and afraid to have his response.
+
+"I saw you take Patten's fountain pen and a scrap of note-paper from
+the table by your bed when you were hurt--the first time I called to
+see how you were doing.  I thought that perhaps there was something of
+importance written on the paper, that, if nothing else, you wanted a
+bit of Patten's handwriting to use in your proof that he was not the
+man he pretended to be.  You slipped both pen and paper under your
+pillow.  Tell me just this: Was that paper of any importance whatever,
+of any interest even, to you?"
+
+"No," he said steadily, without hesitation.  "It was not.  I did not so
+much as look at it."
+
+She leaned back in her chair with a long sigh, her eyes wide on his.
+And while he marvelled at it, he saw that now her look was one of pure
+pity.
+
+"Just what has that got to do with the robberies you mention?"
+
+"Everything!" she burst out.  "Everything!  Can't you see?  Oh, my God!"
+
+She dropped her face into her hands and he saw her shoulders lift and
+slump.  Glancing aside swiftly, he saw the five golden disks on the
+table, almost to be reached from where he sat.
+
+"No doubt," he said hastily, as her head was lifted again, "you think
+that you would like to send me to jail?"
+
+"Jail, no!  A thousand times no!  But you must, you must let me send
+you to a hospital!"
+
+He frowned at her while he gave over twirling his hat and grew very
+still.
+
+"You think I am crazy?" he asked sharply.  "That it?"
+
+"No.  You are as sane as I am.  I don't think that at all.  But . . .
+Oh, can't you understand?"
+
+"No, I can't.  You accuse me of this and that, you give no reasons for
+your wild suspicions, you end up by suggesting medical treatment.
+What's the answer, Virginia Page?"
+
+"The answer, Roderick Norton, is a very simple one.  But first I am
+going to ask you another question or so.  You sought to commit a theft
+to-night, I saw you, so there is no use denying it to me, is there?"
+
+"Go ahead.  What next?"
+
+"While you lay ill during a week or ten days you had time to think.
+You remember having told me that you had had time to think about
+everything in the world?  It was at that time, wasn't it, that you came
+to the decision which you mentioned to me that a man to commit crime
+and play safe at the same time must keep in mind two essential matters:
+First, the lone hand; second, not to kill?"
+
+"I thought it out then; yes.  In fact, I suppose I told you so."
+
+"The crimes committed recently have been characterized by these two
+essentials, haven't they?  Nearly all of them?"
+
+He nodded, watching her keenly, holding back his answers for just a
+second or two each time.
+
+"I believe so."
+
+"Did you ever have an impulse to steal before you were knocked
+unconscious at the Casa Blanca?"
+
+"No."
+
+"And you have had that impulse almost all the time ever since?  Answer
+me, tell me the truth!  I am right, am I not?"
+
+Now again he laughed softly at her.
+
+"Virginia Page, the medico, speaks," he returned lightly.  "She has a
+theory.  A man may have such an accident, leaving such and such
+pressure on the brain, with the result that he becomes a thief or
+worse!  Virginia . . ."
+
+"Theory!  It is no theory.  It is an established, undeniable, and
+undenied fact!  It has occurred time and again, physicians have
+observed, have made cures!  Can't you see now, Rod Norton?  Won't you
+see?"
+
+She was upon her feet, her hands clasped before her, her eyes shining,
+her figure tense, her cheeks stained with the color of her excitement.
+
+"I don't care whether Patten is a physician or not," she ran on.  "He
+is a bungler.  It is a sheer wonder he did not let you die.  You told
+me yourself that he attributed the second wound to your fall and that
+you knew that Moraga had struck you a terrible blow with his
+gun-barrel.  Patten did not treat that wound; he cared for the lesser
+injury like a fool and allowed the major one to take care of itself.
+And the result . . .  Oh, dear God!  Think of what might have happened.
+If any one but me had learned what I have learned to-night."
+
+He rose with her, stood still, regarding her with eyes like drills.
+Then he shook his head.
+
+"You are wrong, Virginia, dead wrong," he told her with quiet emphasis.
+"You have called me a thief?  Well, perhaps I am.  You have given your
+explanation; let me give mine."
+
+He paused, shaping the matter in mind.  His face was stern and very,
+very grave.  Presently, his lowered voice guarded against any chance
+ears, he continued.
+
+"I lay on my bed a week, a long, utterly damnable week.  I could do
+nothing but think.  So I thought, as I told you, of everything.  Most
+of all I thought of you, Virginia Page.  Shall I tell you why?  No;
+we'll let that go until we understand each other.  I thought of myself,
+of my life, of my eternal striving with Jim Galloway.  Some day I
+should get Galloway or he would get me.  In either case, what good?
+Was not Galloway a wiser man than I?  He took what he wanted; I merely
+wasted my time chasing after such bigger men as he.  If he desired a
+thousand dollars or five, ten thousand, he went out for it like a man
+and took it.  Why shouldn't he?  Oh, I tell you I had the time to dwell
+upon the little meaningless words of honesty and dishonesty, honor and
+dishonor, and all of their progeny and forebears!  They are empty;
+empty, I tell you, Virginia!  When I stood on my feet again I was a
+free man.  I knew it then, I know it now.  Free, I tell you.  Free,
+most of all from shackles of empty ideas.  What I wanted I would take."
+
+She looked at him helplessly, his dominant vigor for the moment seeming
+a thing not to be restricted or tamed.
+
+"What you have done," she told him gently, "is to find argument to
+bolster up impulse.  That is generally very easy to do, isn't it?  If
+one wants a thing, it is not hard convincing himself that it is right
+that he should have it."
+
+"At least I have decided sanely what I wanted, there is no call for
+hospitals."
+
+"You sustained a fracture of the skull.  That fracture had improper
+treatment.  It is a wonder you did not die.  The wound healed and there
+remains a pressure of a bit of bone upon the brain.  Until that
+pressure is removed by an operation you are doomed to be a criminal.  A
+kleptomaniac," she said steadily, "if not much worse."
+
+"I believe that you mean what you say.  You are just mistaken, that is
+all.  I'd know if there were anything physically wrong."
+
+She came closer, laid her hand upon his arm, and lifted her eyes
+pleadingly to his.
+
+"I have had the best of medical training," she said slowly.  "I have
+specialized in brain disorders, interested in that branch of my work
+until I decided to bring Elmer out here.  I know what I am saying.
+Will you at least promise to do as I ask?  Have a thorough examination
+by a specialist?  And have the operation if he advises it?"
+
+"Such an operation is a serious matter?"
+
+"Yes.  It must be.  But think . . ."
+
+"A man might die under the hands of the surgeon?"
+
+"Yes.  There is always the danger, there is always the chance of death
+resulting from any but the most minor of operations.  But you are not
+the man to be afraid, Rod Norton.  I know that."
+
+"You say that you have specialized In this sort of thing."  He was
+probing for her thoughts with keen, narrowed eyes.  "Would you be
+willing to perform that operation for me?"
+
+She shrank back suddenly, her hand dropping from his arm.
+
+"No," she cried.  "No, no."
+
+He smiled triumphantly.
+
+"Then we'll let it go for a while.  If you wouldn't care to do it,
+afraid that I might die under your knife, I guess I don't want it done
+at all.  I am quite content with things as they are.  I see the way to
+gain the ends I desire; I am gaining them; if there is a brain
+pressure, well, I'm quite ready to thank God and Moraga for it!  Which
+you may take as absolutely final, Dr. Page!"
+
+She was beaten then and she knew it.  She went back to her chair in a
+sort of bewildered despair, her hands dropping idly to her lap.
+
+"It would be just as well," he said presently, "if I left before any
+one came in.  Before I go, do you mind telling me what you mean to do?
+Shall you denounce me?  Are you going to spread your suspicions abroad?"
+
+"What do you leave me to do?  Have I the right to sit still and say
+nothing?  You would go on as you have begun; you would commit fresh
+crimes.  In spite of your 'two essentials' you would be led to kill a
+man sooner or later.  Or you yourself would be killed.  Have I the
+right to allow all of that to continue?"
+
+"Then you have decided to accuse me?"
+
+"It is so hard to decide anything.  You make it so hard; can't you see
+that you do? . . .  But, after all, my part is clear; if you will
+consent to an examination and an operation I will say nothing of what
+has happened.  If you won't do that . . . you will drive me to tell
+what I know."
+
+"Our trails divide to-night, then?  I had hoped for better than that,
+Virginia."
+
+Though her cheeks flushed, she held her eyes steadily upon his.
+
+"I, too, had hoped for better than that," she confessed, finding this
+no time for faltering.  "I should continue to hope if you would just do
+your part."
+
+He came a swift step toward her.  Then he stopped suddenly, his hands
+falling to his sides.  But the light in his eyes did not diminish.
+
+"Denounce me to-morrow, if you wish," he said slowly, indifferently it
+seemed to her.  "Accept my promise that I will attempt no theft of more
+gold to-night; give me this one last chance to talk with you.  Before
+some one comes, come out with me.  You are not afraid of me; you admit
+that I am sane.  Then let us ride together.  And let me talk with you
+freely.  Will you, Virginia?  Will you do that one favor for me?"
+
+The high desire was upon her to accede to his request; her calmer
+judgment forbade it.  But to-night was to-night; to-morrow would be
+to-morrow.  And, after all, in her talk with him, she might save the
+man to himself and to his truer manhood.
+
+But even that hope was less than her desire when she answered him.
+
+"Have my horse saddled," she said.  "I'll let Struve think I have to
+make a call at Las Estrellas.  I'll be out in five minutes."
+
+He thanked her with his eyes, opened the hall door, and went out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+DEADLOCK
+
+Virginia, having changed swiftly to her riding-togs, took up her little
+black emergency kit, which would lend an air of business urgency to her
+nocturnal ride with Norton, and stepped out into the hall.
+
+"There's a call for you from Las Estrellas," said Struve, appearing
+from the front, whence his voice had come to her mingled with the
+excited tones of a Mexican.  "Tony Garcia has been hurt; pretty badly,
+I expect.  His brother says that Tony got his hand caught in some kind
+of machinery he was fooling with late this afternoon and crushed so
+that it's all but torn off."
+
+Into the light cast by the hotel porch-lamp Norton, leading Persis,
+rode around the corner of the building.
+
+"I was just going out," said Virginia.  "But I'll go on this case
+first.  Mr. Norton is riding with me.  Please ask him to wait while I
+get my other bag."
+
+In her room again, the lamp lighted on her table, she stood a moment
+frowning thoughtfully into vacancy.  Then with a quick shake of the
+head she snatched up the two other bags which might be needed in
+treating Tony's hurt and again hastened out.  Norton bending from his
+saddle took them from her.  As Struve relinquished into her gantletted
+hands the reins of Persis's bridle she swung lightly up to the mare's
+back.
+
+"The poor fellow must be suffering all kinds of torture," she said as
+Norton reined in with her.  "Let's hurry."
+
+He offered no answer as they clattered out of San Juan and turned out
+across the level lands toward Las Estrellas.  So, as upon another night
+when speeding upon a similar errand, they rode for a long time in
+silence.  Again they two alone were pushing out into the dark and the
+vast silence that was broken only by the soft thudding of their own
+horses' hoofs and the creak of saddle leather and jingle of spur and
+bit chains.
+
+"You wanted to talk with me?" suggested the girl after fifteen minutes
+of wordless restraint between them.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "But not now.  That is, if you will give me a
+further chance after you have done what you can for poor old Tony.  You
+will hardly need to stay at Las Estrellas all night, I imagine.  When
+we leave you can listen to me.  Do you mind?"
+
+"No," she said slowly.  "I don't mind.  I'd rather it was then.  You
+and I have a good bit to think about before we do any talking.  Haven't
+we?"
+
+They fell silent again.  The soft beauty of the night over the southern
+desert lands . . . and there is no other earthly beauty like it . . .
+touched the girl's soul now as it had never done before; perhaps,
+similarly, it disturbed shadows in the man's.  She was distressed by
+the position in which she found herself, and the night's infinite quiet
+and utter peace was grateful to her.  As she left the hotel her
+thoughts were in chaos; she was caught in a fearsome labyrinth whence
+there appeared no escape.  Now, though no way out suggested itself,
+still the stars were shining.
+
+At last the twinkling lights of Las Estrellas, seeming at first fallen
+stars caught in the mesquite branches, swam into view.  Plainly Tony's
+accident had stimulated much local interest; among the few straggling
+houses men came and went, while a knot of women, children, and
+countless mongrel dogs had congregated just outside of the hut where
+the injured man lay.  A brush fire in the street crackled right
+merrily, its sparks dancing skyward.
+
+"You promise me," said Norton as they drew their horses down to a trot,
+"not to say anything until we can have had time to talk?"
+
+"I promise," she said wearily.
+
+She entered the sufferer's room first, Norton delaying to tie the
+horses and lift down the instrument cases from the saddle-strings.  She
+stopped abruptly just beyond the threshold; the smell of chloroform was
+heavy upon the air, Tony lay whitefaced upon a table, Caleb Patten with
+coat off and sleeves rolled up was bending over him.
+
+"Oh, senorita!" cried a woman, hurrying forward, her hands twisting
+nervously in her apron.  And a torrential outpouring in Spanish greeted
+the mystified Virginia.
+
+"I thought that I was wanted here," she said, looking about her at the
+four or five grave faces.  "Tony's brother came for me."
+
+One of the men shambled forward to explain.  "Tony want you," he said
+quickly.  "Tony ver' bad hurt.  Dr. Patten come in Las Estrellas by
+accident, he say got to cut off the arm, can't wait too long or Tony
+die.  He just beginnin' now."
+
+The woman, who, it appeared was Tony's wife and the mother of two of
+the ragged children out by the fire, joined her voice eagerly to the
+man's.  He translated.
+
+"Eloisa say she thank God you come; Tony want you, she want you.
+Patten charge one hundred dollar an'. . . ."  He shrugged eloquently.
+"She say you do for Tony; you do better than Patten."
+
+Virginia's eyes flashed upon Patten.  He came a step toward her, his
+attitude half belligerent.
+
+"The man has to be operated upon immediately," he said sharply.  "He
+was hurt in the afternoon out on the end of the ranch; has been all day
+getting in; fainted half a dozen times, I guess.  The arm has to come
+off at the elbow."
+
+"Thank you," returned Virginia quietly, going to the table.  "I'll take
+the case now, Dr. Patten."
+
+"You?" Patten laughed, his eyes jeering.  "You operate?  Do you think
+that they want you to cut a skein of silk with a pair of scissors?  Cut
+off a man's arm . . . how far would you go before you fainted?"
+
+"That'll be about all, Patten," came Norton's voice sternly from the
+door.  "This is Dr. Page's case.  Clear out."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Norton," said Virginia quickly.  She was already making
+an examination of the blood covered arm and hand, and did not look
+around.  "And please clear the room, will you?  Let Tony's wife stay,
+that is all.  Eloisa."
+
+The woman came forward, her eyes wide and frightened.  Virginia smiled
+at her reassuringly.
+
+"_No muy malo_," she said in the few Spanish words which she could
+summon for the occasion from those she had picked up from the desert
+people.  "_Muy bueno manana_.  And now get me some warm water . . .
+_agua caliente_.  Mr. Norton, if you will open my instrument
+case . . . no; the other one.  And then stand by to help with the
+anaesthetic if Patten hasn't already given him enough to keep him
+asleep all night!"
+
+She gave her directions concisely and was obeyed.  Norton put the last
+of the undesired onlookers out of the door, closed it after them, found
+another lamp and some candles, did all that he could think of to help
+and all that was asked of him.  Eloisa, having brought the water,
+withdrew to a corner and kept her fascinated eyes upon Virginia's face
+and stubbornly away from her husband's.
+
+Virginia, when she had completed a very thorough examination, turned
+toward Norton, her eyes blazing.
+
+"Patten has no more right to an M.D. after his name than you have," she
+cried angrily.  "Not so much, for he hasn't even any brains!  Cut the
+man's arm off!  Why, there is only a simple fracture above the wrist
+which won't cause a bit of trouble.  The hand is another matter; but
+even it isn't half as badly mangled as it looks. . . .  The second and
+third fingers are terribly crushed; they've got to come off.  We might
+as well do it now, while he is already under the chloroform. . . .
+Tell Eloisa just how matters stand and then send her out."
+
+Eloisa, already prepared for the greater operation, gasped her
+gratitude for the lesser and allowed herself to be gently thrust from
+the room.  Then Norton came back to the table, his eyes wonderingly
+upon Virginia.  He knew that she was capable; he had read that fact the
+first day when he had seen her hands.  But it struck him as rather
+unusual that a girl, any girl no matter what her training, should take
+hold as she was doing.
+
+And as she selected her instruments, laid them out upon a bit of
+sterilized gauze upon a chair, cleansed her hands and prepared to
+operate he began to feel a sense of utter confidence in her.  Rapidly
+his own anger rose at the thought of the crime Patten would have
+perpetrated.
+
+
+Tony Garcia, when in due time his consciousness came back to him
+bringing the attendant dizzy nausea in its wake, looked down at his
+side curiously, wondering how it would be to go without an arm.  And
+when his Eloisa told him. . . .
+
+"We are going to sell our cow and the goats to-morrow!" vowed Tony
+faintly.  "And give her all the money!"
+
+"_Si, si_, Tony," wept the wife.
+
+Whereupon the small children, who were teaching the goats to pull a
+wagon, set up a wail of grief and rebellion.
+
+
+It struck both Virginia and Norton as a shade odd that Patten should be
+still in Las Estrellas when they rode out of it long after midnight.
+They saw him standing in the doorway of the one still lighted building
+of the village as they galloped past.  It was the Three Star saloon.
+Patten's horse was tied in front of it.  Since Patten neither drank nor
+played at dice or cards here might have been matter to ponder on.  But
+in neither mind was there place now for any interest other than that
+which again held them silent and constrained.
+
+Las Estrellas lost behind them, they drew their horses down into a
+rocking trot, then to a slow walk.  Virginia rode with her head up, her
+eyes upon the field of stars.  Her face, as Norton kept close to her
+side, looked very white in the starlight.  He would have given much to
+have seen her eyes when a little later he began to talk.  And she was
+conscious of a kindred wish.
+
+"Look yonder," she said.  "The late moon is coming up.  There will be a
+little more light then and. . . .  And I want to look at you, Rod
+Norton, while we thresh it out."
+
+The thin curved sliver of silver thrusting up over the edge of the
+world in the east, ghostly and pale, added little to the throbbing
+gleam of the stars; but the waiting for it had put Las Estrellas a mile
+behind them, had set them alone together out in the heart of the
+silences, had given them that last excuse to be had to set back an evil
+moment.  Virginia, with a sigh, brought her eyes down from the glitter
+of the wide heavens and sought Norton's.
+
+"I am afraid," she said listlessly, "that there is no way out for us,
+Rod Norton."
+
+"There is a way!" he began quickly
+
+"There is no way unless you do what I say.  If you would only give me
+your word to take the stage to-morrow, to go to a competent surgeon, to
+submit to the operation.  If you would only give me your word. . . ."
+
+"I give you my word," he said sharply, "that that is just the thing
+which I will never do.  Virginia, breathe deep, fill your lungs with
+the wonder of the night; realize what it means to live; think what it
+means to die!  You say that I am not afraid of death; well, maybe not
+if it comes in a guise I have grown up to be familiar with.  But to lie
+as I saw Tony Garcia lying just now, powerless, unconscious, without
+will or knowledge of what was coming to me, and to let a man cut into
+me . . .  I'd rather die, I think, standing upon my two feet and
+fighting it out with a gun!  You would go on and tell me that the
+chances would be highly in favor of my recovery; and yet you would
+admit that the danger would be grave."
+
+"Then you are afraid, after all?  That is it?  That holds you back?"
+She found it hard to believe that he was telling her his true emotion.
+
+"I am merely measuring the chances," he said steadily.  "I am satisfied
+with life as I find it; I do not believe that there is anything wrong
+with me; I see at least the possibility of death and nothing to be
+gained by submitting to an operation."
+
+"Then," she said again wearily, "there is no way out."
+
+"But there is!  My way, not the one you have thought of.  You have
+stumbled upon a thing which you must forget; that is all.  Give me the
+free swing to finish Jim Galloway, to complete certain other
+undertakings.  Promise me that you will do this; in return I will
+promise you not to . . . ."
+
+And here he hesitated.
+
+"Not to commit another theft?"  She set the matter squarely before him.
+"Can you promise that, Rod Norton?  Could you keep the promise were it
+once made?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"No!  You could not.  You don't understand or you won't understand.
+You would obey the impulse which would come just as certainly as the
+sun will rise and set again.  So I can neither accept your
+promise . . . nor give you mine."
+
+"You will tell what you have guessed?"
+
+"Rather what I know!  Even if you were my own brother. . . ."
+
+"Or your lover?" he demanded, a challenge in his voice.
+
+"Or my lover.  For his sake if not for the sake of others."
+
+For a little while he made no answer.  Again there was absolute silence
+between him, a troubled silence filled with pain.  Then suddenly he
+leaned close to her, threw out his hand for Persis's rein, jerked both
+horses back to a fretful standstill.
+
+"Can't you see what you force me to do?" he demanded half angrily.  "Do
+you picture what your denunciation would do for me?  Do you think that
+I can let you make it?"
+
+His face was so near hers that she could see it clearly in the pallid
+light.  He could see hers and that it was lifted fearlessly.
+
+"How will you stop me?" she asked quietly.
+
+"I will finish Jim Galloway out of hand," he told her savagely.  "It
+will no longer be the representative of the law against the lawbreaker;
+it will just be Norton and Galloway, both men!  I will accomplish the
+one other matter I have planned.  Both will require not over three or
+four days.  During that time . . .  I tell you, Virginia, I have grown
+into a free man, a man who does what he wants to do, who takes what he
+wants to take, who is not bound by flimsy shackles of other men's
+codes.  During those three or four days I shall see that you do no
+talking!"
+
+Once more, her voice quickened, she asked:
+
+"How will you stop me?"
+
+"We have come to a deadlock; argument does no good.  Either I must
+yield to you or you to me.  There is too much at stake to allow of a
+man being squeamish.  I don't care much for the job, but by high Heaven
+I am of no mind to watch life run by through the bars of a
+penitentiary.  After all action becomes simplified when a crisis comes;
+doesn't it?  There is just one answer, just one way out.  You will come
+with me, now.  I will put you where you will have no opportunity to do
+any talking for the few days in which I shall finish what I have to
+do."  His hand on Persis's rein drew the two horses still closer
+together.  "Give me your promise, Virginia; or come with me!"
+
+Her quick spurt of anger rose, flared, and dwindled away like a little
+flame extinguished by a splash of rain; the tears were stinging her
+eyes almost before the last word.  For she felt that here was no
+Roderick Norton speaking, but rather a bit of bone pressing upon the
+delicate machinery which is a man's brain.
+
+"Where would you take me?" she asked faintly.
+
+"To the King's Palace," he answered bitterly.  "Where we had one
+perfect, happy day, Virginia; where, I had hoped, we would have other
+perfect days.  Oh, girl, can't you see," and his voice went thrilling
+through her, "can't you see what I have hoped, what I have
+dreamed. . . ."
+
+"You might still hope," she told him steadily.  "You might still dream."
+
+"I will!"  His eyes shone at her, his erect form outlined against the
+black of the earth and the gleam of the stars was eloquent of mastery.
+"There will come a time when you will see life as I see it. . . .  And
+now, for the last time, will you give me your promise, Virginia?  It is
+forced upon you; you will be blameless in giving it.  Will you do so?"
+
+She only shook her head, her lips trembling, not trusting her
+voice. . . .  And then, in a sort of daze, she knew that they had
+turned off to the left, that no longer was San Juan ahead of them, that
+they were riding toward the gloomy bulwark of the mountains.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+FLUFF AND BLACK BILL
+
+Fluff and Black Bill were quarrelling.
+
+Elmer, while Norton and Virginia were on their way from San Juan to Las
+Estrellas, had dropped in at the hotel to see his sister.  He found
+upon her office table the card which she always left for him; this
+merely informed him that she was "out on a case at Las Estrellas."
+Elmer had come for her purposing to suggest a call upon the Engles.
+For not yet had he summoned the hardihood to present himself alone at
+Florrie's home.  Now, disgruntled, seeing plainly that Virginia would
+never get back in time, he went out on the veranda and took solace from
+the pipe to which he had grown fairly accustomed.  To him came the girl
+of whom he was thinking.  "Hello, Fluff," he said from the shadows.
+
+"Hello, Black Bill," she greeted him.  "Where's Virgie?"
+
+"Gone," he informed her, waving his pipe.  "On a case to Las Estrellas.
+I'm waiting for her.  Did you want to see her?"
+
+Florrie, coming down the veranda to him, giggled.
+
+"No," she told him flippantly.  "I'm looking for the Emperor of China.
+I never was so lonesome. . . ."
+
+"So'm I," said Elmer.  He pushed a chair forward with his foot.  "Sit
+down and we'll wait for her.  And I'll go in and bring out a couple of
+bottles of ginger ale or something."
+
+"Will she be back real soon?" asked Florrie pretending to hesitate.
+
+"Sure," he assured her positively.
+
+"All right then." Florrie with a great rustling of skirts sat down.
+"But you must be nice to me, Black Bill."
+
+"It's always you who starts it," he muttered at her.  "I'd be friends
+if you would.  What's the good of spatting like two kids, anyway?"
+
+"We're really not kids any longer, are we?" she agreed demurely.  "I
+feel terribly grown up sometimes, don't you?"
+
+From which point they got along swimmingly for perhaps five minutes
+longer than it had ever been possible for them to talk together without
+"starting something."  Elmer, very emphatic in his own mind concerning
+his matured status, yearned for her to understand it as he did.  With
+such purpose clearly before him . . . and before her, too, for that
+matter, since Miss Florrie had a keen little comprehension of her
+own . . . he spoke largely of himself and his blossoming plans.  He was
+a vaquero, to begin with; he had ridden fifty miles yesterday on range
+business; he was making money; he was putting part of that money away
+in Mr. Engle's bank.  There was a little ranch on the rim of Engle's
+big holding which belonged to an old half-breed; Elmer meant to acquire
+it himself one of these days.  And before so very long, too.  Mr. Engle
+had been approached and was looking into it, might be persuaded to
+advance the couple of thousand dollars for the property, taking as
+security a mortgage until Elmer could have squared for it.  Then Black
+Bill would begin stocking his place, a cow now, a horse, another cow,
+and so on.
+
+He had launched himself valiantly into his tale.  But at a certain
+point he began to swallow and catch at his words and smoke fast between
+sentences.  He had located a dandy spot for a house . . . the jolliest
+little spring of cold water you ever saw . . . a knoll with big trees
+upon it.
+
+"We'll make up a party with Virginia and Norton some day and ride out
+there," he said abruptly.  "I . . . I'd like to have you see it, Fluff."
+
+She was tremulously delighted.  She sensed the nearest thing to an
+out-and-out proposal which had ever sung in her ears.  She leaned
+forward eagerly, her hands clasped to keep them from trembling.  She
+was sixteen, he eighteen . . . and she had his assurance of a moment
+ago that they were no longer just "kids."  And then and there their
+so-long-delayed quarrel began.  Just at the wrong time, after the
+time-honored fashion of quarrels.  He was ready to twine the vine about
+the veranda posts of the house on the knoll where the spring and the
+big trees were, she was ready to plant the fig-tree.  Then she had
+glimpsed something just too funny for anything in the idea of Elmer
+raising pigs . . . for he had gone on to that, sagely anticipating a
+high market another season . . . and she laughed at him and all
+unintentionally wounded his feelings.  In a flash he was Black Bill
+again and on his mettle, ready with the quick retort stung from him;
+and she, parrying his thrust, was at once Fluff, the mercuric.  The
+spat was on . . . they would call it a spat to-morrow if to-morrow were
+kind to them . . . and Elmer's ranch and house and cow, horse and pigs
+were laughed to scorn.
+
+Florrie departed leaving her cruellest laughter to ring in his ears.
+This might have been a repetition of any one of a dozen episodes
+familiar to them both, but never, perhaps, had Elmer's ears burned so
+or Florrie's heart so disturbed her with its beating.  For, she thought
+regretfully as she hurried out into the street, they had been getting
+along so nicely. . . .
+
+She had no business out alone at this time of night and she knew it.
+So she hurried on, anxious to get home before her father, who was
+returning late from a visit to one of his ranches.  Abreast of the Casa
+Blanca she slowed up, looking in curiously.  Then, as again she was
+hastening on, she heard Jim Galloway's deep voice in a quiet "Good
+evening, Miss Florence."
+
+"Good evening!" gasped Florrie aloud.  And "Oh!" said Florrie under her
+breath.  For Galloway's figure had separated itself from the shadows at
+the side of his open door and had come out into the street, while
+Galloway was saying in a matter-of-fact way: "I'll see you home."
+
+She wanted to run and could not.  She hung a moment balancing upon a
+high heel in indecision.  Galloway stepped forward swiftly, coming to
+her side.  "Oh, dear," the inner Florrie was saying.  A glance over her
+shoulder showed her Black Bill standing out in front of Struve's hotel.
+Well, there were compensations.
+
+She started to hurry on, and had Jim Galloway been less sure of
+himself, troubled with the diffidence of youth as was Elmer, he must
+have either given over his purpose or else fairly run to keep up with
+her.  But being Jim Galloway, he laid a gentle but none the less
+restraining hand upon her arm.
+
+"Please," he said quietly.  "I want to talk with you.  May I?"
+
+Florrie's arm burned where he had touched her.  She was all in a
+flutter, half frightened and the other half flattered.  A shade more
+leisurely they walked on toward the cottonwoods.  Here, in the shadows,
+Galloway stopped and Florrie, although beginning to tremble, stopped
+with him.
+
+"Men have given me a black name here," he was saying as he faced her.
+"They've made me somewhat worse than I am.  I feel that I have few
+friends, certainly very few of my own class.  I like to think of you as
+a friend.  May I?"
+
+It was distinctly pleasant to have a big man like Galloway, a man whom
+for good or for bad the whole State knew, pleading with her.  It gave a
+new sort of assurance to her theory that she was "grown up"; it added
+to her importance in her own eyes.
+
+"Why, yes," said Florrie.
+
+"I am going away," he continued gravely.  "For just how long I don't
+know.  A week, perhaps a month, maybe longer.  It is a business matter
+of considerable importance, Florence.  Nor is it entirely without
+danger.  It will take me down below the border, and an American in
+Mexico right now takes his life entirely into his own hands.  You know
+that, don't you?"
+
+"Then why do you go?"
+
+Galloway smiled down at her.
+
+"If I held back every time a danger-signal was thrown out," he said
+lightly, "I wouldn't travel very far.  Oh, I'll come back all right; a
+man may go through fire itself and return if he has the incentive which
+I have."  His tone altered subtly.  Florrie started.
+
+"But before I go," went on Galloway, "I am going to tell you something
+which I think you know already.  You do, don't you, Florence?"
+
+She would not have been Florrie at all, but some very different,
+unromantic, and unimaginative creature, had she failed of
+comprehension.  Jim Galloway was actually making love to her!
+
+"What do you mean, Mr. Galloway?" she managed to stammer.
+
+"I mean that what I am telling you is for your ears alone.  I am
+placing a confidence in you, the greatest confidence a man can place in
+a girl.  Or in a woman, Florence.  I am trusting that what I say will
+remain just between you and me for the present. . . .  When I come back
+I will be no longer just Jim Galloway of the Casa Blanca, but Galloway
+of one of the biggest grants in Mexico, with mile after mile of fertile
+lands, with a small army of servants, vaqueros, and retainers, a sort
+of ruler of my own State!  It sounds like a fairy-tale, Florence, but
+it is the sober truth made possible by conditions below the border.  My
+estates will run down to the blue water of the Gulf; I shall have my
+own fleet of ocean-going yachts; there is a port upon my own land.
+There will be a home overlooking the sea like a king's palace.  Will
+you think of all that while I am gone?  Will you think of me a little,
+too?  Will you remember that my little kingdom is crying out for its
+queen? . . .  No; I am not asking you to answer me now.  I am just
+asking that you hold this as our secret until I come back.  Until I
+come back for you! . . .  I shall stand here until you reach your
+home," he broke off suddenly.  "Good night, my dear."
+
+"Good night," said Florence faintly, a little dazed by all that he had
+said to her.  Then, running through the shadows to her home, she was
+thinking of the boy who had wished to propose to her and of the man who
+had done so; of Elmer's little home upon the knoll surrounded by a cow,
+a horse, and some pigs . . . and of a big house like a palace looking
+out to sea across the swaying masts of white-sailed, sea-going yachts!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+A CRISIS
+
+Like Norton, Virginia found life simplifying itself in a crisis.  Upon
+three hundred and sixty days or more of the average year each
+individual has before him scores of avenues open to his thoughts or to
+his act; he may turn wheresoever he will.  But in the supreme moments
+of his life, with brief time for hesitation granted him, he may be
+forced to do one of two things: he must leap back or plunge forward to
+escape the destiny rushing down upon him like a speeding engine
+threatening him who has come to stand upon the crossing.  Now Virginia
+saw clearly that she must submit to Norton's mastery and remain silent
+in the King's Palace or she must seek to escape and tell what she knew
+or . . .  Was there a remaining alternative?  If so it must present
+itself as clearly as the others.  Action was stripped down to
+essentials, bared to its component elements.  True vision must
+necessarily result, since no side issues cluttered the view.
+
+She sat upon a saddle-blanket upon the rock floor of the main chamber
+of the series of ancient dwelling-rooms, staring at the fire which
+Norton had builded against a wall where it might not be seen from
+without.  The horses were in the meadow down by the stream; she and
+Norton had tethered them among the trees where they were fairly free
+from the chance of being seen.  Norton was coming up, mounting the
+deep-worn steps in the cliff side.  He had gone for water; he had not
+been out of sight nor away five minutes.  And yet when she looked up to
+see him coming through the irregular doorway she had decided.
+
+She saw in him both the man and the gentleman.  Her anger had died down
+long ago, smothered in the ashes of her distress; now she summoned to
+the fore all that she might in extenuation of what he did.  She did not
+blame him for the crimes which she knew he had committed because she
+was so confident that the chief crime of all had been the act resulting
+from Caleb Patten's abysmal ignorance.  Nor now could she blame Norton
+that, embarked upon this flood of his life, he saw himself forced to
+make her his prisoner for a few hours.  It was a man's birthright to
+protect himself, to guard his freedom.  And her heart gave him high
+praise that toward her he acted with all deference, that with things as
+they were, while he was man enough to hold her here, he was too much
+the gentleman to make love to her.  Would she have resisted, would she
+have opposed calm argument against a hot avowal?  She did not know.
+
+"Virginia," he said gravely as he slumped down upon the far side of the
+fire, "I feel the brute.  But . . ."
+
+Yes, she had decided, fully decided, whether if be for better or for
+worse.  Now she surprised him with one of her quick, bright, friendly
+smiles while she interrupted:
+
+"Let us make the best of a bad situation," she said swiftly.  "I am not
+unhappy right now; I have no wish to run half-way to meet any
+unhappiness which may be coming our way.  You are not the brute toward
+me; what you do, I do not so much as censure you for.  I am not going
+to quarrel with you; were I in your boots I imagine I'd do just exactly
+as you are doing.  I hope I'd be as nice about it, too.  And now,
+before we drop the subject for good and all, let me say this: no matter
+what I do, should it even be the betraying you into the hands of your
+enemies, to put it quite tragically, I want you to know that I wish you
+well and that is why I do it.  Can you understand me?"
+
+"Yes," he said slowly.  "It's sweet of you, Virginia.  If you got my
+gun and shot my head off, I don't know who should blame you.  I
+shouldn't!" he concluded with a forced attempt to match her smile.
+
+"Then we understand each other?  As long as each does the best he can
+see his way to do, the other finds no fault?"  And when he nodded she
+rose quickly and came to him, putting out her hand as he rose.  "Rod
+Norton," she said simply, and her eyes shone steady and clear into his,
+"I wish you the best there is.  I think we should both pray a little to
+God to help us to-night. . . .  And now, if you will run up to your
+Treasure Chamber and bring down the coffee, I'll promise to be here
+when you get back.  And to make you a good hot drink; I feel the need
+of it and so do you."
+
+He went out without an answer, his face grave and troubled again.  As
+her eyes followed him they were no longer gay but wistful, and then
+filled with a sadness which she had not shown to him, and then suddenly
+wet.  But before he had gone half a dozen steps from the door she
+dashed a hasty hand across her eyes and went swiftly to the smallest of
+the three black leather cases he had brought up here after her.
+
+"This is the one way out, Rod Norton!" she whispered.  "The one way out
+if God is with us."
+
+Her quick fingers sought and found the tiny phial with its small white
+tablets . . . labelled _Hyoscine_ . . . and secreted it in her bosom.
+She was laying fresh twigs upon the blaze when he came back with the
+coffee-pot, can of coffee, and a tin cup.  She greeted him with another
+quick smile.  He saw that her cheeks were flushed rosily, that there
+was subdued excitement in her eyes.  And yet matters just as they were
+would sufficiently explain these phenomena without causing him to quest
+farther.  He thought merely that he had never seen her so delightfully
+pretty.
+
+"Virginia Page," he told her as his own eyes grew bright with the new
+light leaping up into them, "some day . . ."
+
+"Sh!" she commanded, her color deepened.  "Let us wait until that day
+comes.  Now you just obey orders; lie there and smoke while I make the
+coffee."
+
+He wanted to wait on her, but when she insisted he withdrew to the wall
+a few feet away, sat down, filled his pipe, and watched her.  And while
+he filled his eyes with her he marvelled afresh.  For it seemed to him
+that her mood was one of unqualified happiness.  She did all of the
+talking, her words came in a ceaseless bright flow, she laughed readily
+and often, her eyes were dancing, the warm color stood high in her
+cheeks.  That her heart was beating like mad, that the intoxication of
+an intent he could not read had swept into her brain, that she was
+vastly more in the mood to weep than to smile . . . all of this lay
+hidden to him behind her woman's wit.  For, having decided, there would
+be no going back.
+
+With the coffee boiling in the old black and spoutless pot from
+Norton's cache in the Treasure Chamber, she poured what was left of the
+ground coffee from its tin to the flat surface of a bit of stone.  This
+tin was to serve Norton as his cup.
+
+"It's to be our night-cap," she laughed at him as she put the
+improvised cup by the other.  "I refuse to sit up any later; a
+saddle-blanket for bunk, and then to sleep.  That is my room yonder,
+isn't it?"  She nodded toward the black entrance to the second of the
+chambers of the King's Palace.  "And you will sleep here?  Well, while
+the coffee cools, I'm going to make my bed."  She carried her blanket
+on past him, was gone into the yawning darkness, was back in a moment.
+
+"My bed's ready," she told him gayly.  "This kind of housekeeping just
+suits me!  Now for the coffee. . . .  Rod Norton, will you do as you
+are told or not?  You are to sit still and let me wait on you; who's
+hostess here, I'd like to know?"
+
+While out of his sight she had slipped one of the hyoscine tablets into
+her palm; now, as she poured the ink-black beverage, she let it drop
+into the tin can which she presented to Norton.
+
+"Don't say it doesn't taste right!" she admonished him in a voice in
+which at last he detected the nervous note.
+
+He stood up, holding his coffee-can in his hand, meeting her strained
+levity with a deep gravity.
+
+"Virginia," he began.
+
+"It's too late to cut in on my monologue!" she cried gayly.  "Pledge me
+in the drink I have made for you, Mr. Norton!  Just say: 'Virginia,
+here's looking at you!'  Or: 'I wish you well in all that you
+undertake.'  Or: 'For all that you have said to me, for whatever you
+may say or do in the future, I forgive you!'  That's all."
+
+"Virginia," he said gently, "I love you, my dear."
+
+She laughed nervously.
+
+"That's the nice way to say everything all at once!"  He saw that her
+hand shook, that a little of her coffee spilled, and that again she
+grew steady.  "Now our night-cap and good night!"
+
+She drank hurriedly.  Thereafter she yawned and made her little
+pretense of increased drowsiness.
+
+"It's been such a long day," she said.  "You'll forgive me if I tumble
+right straight into sleepy-land?"
+
+Again they said good night and she left him, going down among the eerie
+dancing shadows to her own quarter, drawing his moody eyes after her.
+When she had gone, he threw down his own blanket across the main
+entrance of the King's Palace, filled his pipe again, and sat staring
+out into the night.
+
+The fire cast up its red flare spasmodically, licked at the last of the
+dead branches which, rolling apart, burned out upon the rock floor.
+The darkness once more blotted out all detail saving the few
+smouldering coals, the knobs of stone in the small flickering circles
+of light, the quiet form of the man silhouetted against the lesser dark
+of the night without.  Virginia, rigid and motionless at the spot to
+which she had stolen noiselessly, watched him breathlessly.
+
+For only a little he sat smoking.  Then, as though he experienced
+something of that weariness of which she had made pretense, he laid his
+pipe aside and stretched out upon his blanket, leaning upon an elbow.
+She heard him sigh, vaguely made out when he let his head slip down
+upon an arm, saw that he had grown still, and was lying stretched out
+across the main threshold.
+
+Now she must stand motionless while every fibre of her being demanded
+action; now she must curb impetuosity to the call of caution.  As the
+seconds passed, all but insupportable in their tedious slowness, she
+stood rigid and tense, waiting.  But soon she knew that the drug had
+had its will with him, that he was steeped in deep sleep, that no
+longer must she wait, that now at length she might act.
+
+Carrying her saddle-blanket she came to him and stood quietly looking
+down into his upturned face.  At last she could let the tears burst
+into her eyes unchecked, now she could suddenly go down on her knees
+beside him, for an instant laying her cheek lightly against his in the
+first caress.  Would it be the last?  He stirred a little and sighed
+again.  She drew back, still upon her knees again breathlessly rigid.
+But his stupor clung heavily to him, and she knew that it would hold
+him thus for hours.
+
+A score of burning questions clamoring in her mind she disposed of
+briefly, since time was of the essence.
+
+"If I let you have your way, Rod Norton," she whispered, "you will go
+on from crime to tragedy.  If I hand you over to the law, I will be
+betraying you for no end; for your type of man finds the way to break
+jail and so force his own hand to further violence.  There is the one
+way out. . . .  And God help me to succeed.  God forgive me if I fail!"
+
+She stole by him and stepped upon the outer ledge.  She was leaving him
+helpless . . . the thought presented itself that she would have another
+thing to answer for if one of the many men with such cause to hate him
+should come upon him thus.  Well, that was but one of the more remote
+chances she must take.  There was scant enough likelihood that any one
+should come here before she could race into Las Estrellas and back.
+
+Then it was that she saw Patten.  She did not know at first that it was
+Patten, but just that within a few feet of her upon the ledge which she
+must travel to the steps a man was standing, his body jerking back,
+pressed against the rocks as he saw her.  She drew back swiftly, her
+blood in riotous tumult.
+
+But now, above aught else, the one thought in her mind was that there
+was no time for loitering, that the dawn would come all too soon, that
+there must be no delay.  She stooped quickly and drew from its holster
+Norton's heavy revolver.  Her saddle-blanket over her left arm, the gun
+gripped in her right hand, she was once more upon the ledge, moving
+cautiously toward the figure seen a moment ago, gone now.
+
+That it was Patten she knew only when she had gone down the steps and
+had overtaken him there.  Retreating thus far, reassured when he had
+made out that it was the girl alone, he waited for her.  And as she
+demanded nervously, "Who is it?" it was Patten's disagreeable laugh
+which answered her.
+
+"So," he jeered at her, "this is the sort of thing you do when you are
+supposed to be out on a case all night!"
+
+Patten here!  Had God sent him . . . or the devil?  His insult she
+passed over.  She was not thinking of herself right now, of convention,
+of wagging tongues.  She was just seeking to understand how this latest
+incident might simplify or make more complex her problem.
+
+"I've had my suspicions all along," he laughed evilly.  "To-night I
+followed and made sure.  And now, my fine little white dove, what have
+you to say for yourself?"
+
+Might she use Patten?  She was but now on her way to Las Estrellas for
+aid.  She would operate herself, she would take that upon herself, with
+no more regard for ethics than for Patten's gossiping tongue.  She
+believed that she could do it successfully; at the least she must make
+the attempt, though Norton died under her hand.  The right?  She had
+the right!  The right because she loved him, because he loved her,
+because his whole future was at stake.  But she must have assistance so
+that she submit him to no needless danger, so that she give him every
+chance under such circumstances as these.  She would have brought a man
+from Las Estrellas, she would have let him think what pleased him, just
+saying that Norton had met with an accident, that an operation was
+necessary.  And now Patten was here.
+
+Could she use him?
+
+"You followed us?" she said, gaining time for her thoughts.
+
+"Yes; I followed you.  I saw you come here.  I watched while he
+unsaddled, how he came up to you.  What I could not see through the
+rock walls I could guess!  And now . . ."
+
+"Well, now?" she repeated after him, so that Patten must have marvelled
+at her lack of emotion.  "Now what?"
+
+"Now," he spat at her venomously, "I think I have found the fact to
+shut Roderick Norton's blabbing mouth for him!"
+
+"I don't understand . . ."
+
+"You don't?  You mean that he hasn't done any talking to you about me?"
+
+"Oh!"  And now suddenly she did understand.  "You mean how you are not
+Caleb Patten at all but Charles?  How you are no physician but liable
+to prosecution for illegal practising?"
+
+Could she use him or could she not?  That was what she was thinking,
+over and over.
+
+"Where is he?" demanded Patten a little suspiciously.  "What is he
+doing?  What are you doing out here alone?"
+
+"He is asleep," she told him.
+
+Patten laughed again.
+
+"Your little parties are growing commonplace then!"
+
+"Charles Patten," she cut in coolly, "I have stood enough of your
+insult.  Be still a moment and let me think."
+
+He stared at her but for a little; his own mind busy, was silent.
+Could she make use of this blind instrument which fate had thrust into
+her hand?  She began to believe that she could.
+
+"Charles Patten," she went on, a new vigor in her tone, "Mr. Norton
+knows enough concerning you to make you a deal of trouble.  Just how
+long a term in the State prison he can get for you I don't know.
+But . . ."
+
+"Haven't I found the way to shut his mouth!" he said sharply.
+
+"I think not.  Before your slanders could travel far we could have
+found Father Jose and have been married.  But let me finish.  You have
+practised here for upward of two years, haven't you?  You have made
+money, you have a ranch of your own.  That is one thing to keep in
+mind.  The other is that more than one of your patients have died.  I
+believe, Charles Patten, that it would be a simple matter to have the
+district attorney convict you of murder.  That's the second thing to
+remember."
+
+Patten shifted uneasily.  Then she knew that it had been God who had
+sent him.  When he sought to bluster, she cut him short.
+
+"In the morning, as soon as there is light enough," she said, wondering
+at her own calmness, "I am going to perform a capital operation upon
+Mr. Norton.  It will be without his knowledge and consent.  If he lives
+and you will give up your practice and retire to your ranch or what
+business pleases you, I will guarantee that he does not prosecute you
+for what has passed.  If he dies . . ."
+
+"If he dies"--he snatched the words from her--"it will be murder!"
+
+". . . you would be free from prosecution," she continued, quite as
+though he had made no interruption, "I rather imagine that I should
+die, too.  And, as you say, I would be liable for murder.  He is asleep
+now because I have drugged him.  I shall chloroform him before he
+wakes.  I should have no defense in the law-courts.  Yes, it would be
+murder."
+
+He drew a step back from her as though from one suddenly gone mad.
+
+"What are you operating for?" he demanded.
+
+"For your blunder," she said simply.  "And you are going to help me."
+
+"Am I?" he jeered.  "Not by a damned sight!  If you think that I am
+going to let myself in for that sort of thing . . ."
+
+Until now he had not seen the gun in her hand.  Her quick gesture
+showed it to him.
+
+"Charles Patten," she told him emphatically, "I am risking Mr. Norton's
+life; I am therefore risking my own.  Understand what that means.
+Understand just what you have got to win or lose by to-night's work.
+Consider that I pledge you my word not to implicate you in what you do;
+that if worse came to worse, you could claim and I would admit that you
+were forced at the point of a gun to do as I told you.  Oh, I can shoot
+straight!  And finally, I will shoot straight, as God watches me,
+rather than let you go now and stop what I have undertaken!  Think of
+it well, Charles Patten!"
+
+Patten, being as weak of mind as he was pudgy of hand, having besides
+that peculiar form of craft which is vouchsafed his type, furthermore
+more or less of a coward, saw matters quite as Virginia wished him.
+Together they awaited the coming of the dawn.  The girl, realizing to
+the uttermost what lay before her, forced herself to rest, lying still
+under the stars, schooling herself to the steady-nerved action which
+was to have its supreme test.
+
+Just before the dawn they had coffee and a bite to eat from Norton's
+little pack.  Close to the drugged man they builded a rude low table by
+dragging the squared blocks of fallen stone from their place by the
+wall.  Upon this Virginia placed the saddle-blankets, neatly folded.
+Already Patten was showing signs of nervousness.  Looking into her face
+he saw that it was white and drawn but very calm.  Patten was asking
+himself countless questions, many of them impossible of answer yet.
+She was closing her mind to everything but the one supreme matter.
+
+He helped her give the chloroform when she told him that there was
+sufficient light and that she was ready.  He brought water, placed
+instruments, stood by to do what she told him.  His nervousness had
+grown into fear; he started now and then, jerking about guiltily, as
+though he foresaw an interruption.
+
+Together they got Norton's inert form upon the folded blankets.
+Patten's hands shook a little; he asked for a sip of brandy from her
+flask.  She granted it, and while Patten drank she cut away the hair
+from the unconscious man's scalp.  Long ago her fingers had made their
+examination, were assured that her diagnosis was correct.  Her hands
+were as untrembling as the steel of her knife.  She made the first
+incision, drawing back the flap of skin and flesh, revealing the bone
+of the skull. . . .
+
+For forty-five minutes she worked, her hands swift, sure, capable,
+unerring.  It was done.  She was right.  The under-table of the skull
+had been fractured; there was the bone pressure upon the underlying
+area of brain-tissue.  She had removed the pressure and with it any
+true pathological cause of the theft impulse.
+
+She drew a bandage about the sleeping eyes.  She made Patten bring his
+own saddle-blanket; it was fixed across the entrance of the anteroom of
+the King's Palace, darkening it.  Then she went to the ledge just
+outside and stood there, staring with wide eyes across the little
+meadow with its flowers and birds and water, down the slope of the
+mountain, to the miles of desert.  She had now but to await the
+awakening.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+THE BEGINNING OF THE END
+
+When Norton stirred and would have opened his eyes but for the bandage
+drawn over them, she was at his side.  She had been kneeling there for
+a long time, waiting.  Her hand was on his where it had crept softly
+from his wrist.
+
+"You must lie very still," she commanded gently.  "I am with you and
+everything is all right.  There was . . . an accident.  No, don't try
+to move the cloth; please, Roderick."  She pushed his hand back down to
+his side.  "We are in the King's Palace, just you and I, and everything
+is all right."
+
+He was feverish, and she soothed him; sick, and she mothered him and
+nursed him; troubled, uncertain, perplexed, and she comforted him.  At
+the first she went no further than saying that there had been an
+accident; that already she had sent to San Juan for all that was needed
+to make him comfortable; that Mr. Engle had been instructed to speed a
+man to the railroad for further necessities; that now for his own sake,
+for her sake, he must just lie very still . . . try not even to think.
+
+He was listless, seeming without volition, quite willing to surrender
+himself into her keeping.  What dazed thoughts were his upon this first
+awakening were lost, forgotten in the brief doze into which she
+succeeded in luring him.  When again he stirred and woke she was still
+at his side, kneeling upon the hard rock floor beside him. . . .  She
+had had Patten help her to lift him down from the table before she
+despatched Patten with the note for John Engle.  Again she pleaded with
+him to lie still and just trust to her.
+
+He was very still.  She knew that he was trying to piece together his
+fragmentary thoughts and impressions, seeking to bridge over from last
+night to to-day.  So she talked softly with him, soothing him alike
+with the tenderness of her voice and the pressure and gentle stroke of
+her hand upon his hand and arm.  He had had an accident but was going
+to be all right from now on.  But he must not be moved for a little.
+Therefore Engle would come soon, and perhaps Mrs. Engle with him.  And
+a wagon bringing a real bed and fresh clean sheets and all of those
+articles which she had listed.  It would not be very long now until
+Engle came.
+
+But at last when she paused his hand shut down upon hers and he asked
+quietly:
+
+"I didn't dream it all, did I, Virginia?  It is hard to know just what
+I did and what I dreamed I did.  But it seems more than a dream. . . .
+Was it I who robbed Kemble of the Quigley mines?"
+
+"Yes," she told him lightly, as though it were a matter of small
+moment.  "But you were not responsible for what you did."
+
+"And there were other robberies?  I even tried to steal from you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered again.
+
+"And you wanted to have me submit to an operation?  And I would not?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And then . . . then you . . . you did it?"
+
+So she explained, feeling that certainty would be less harmful to him
+now than a continual struggle to penetrate the curtain of semidarkness
+obscuring his memory.
+
+"I took it upon myself," she told him at the end.  "I took the chance
+that you might die; that it might be I who had killed you.  Perhaps I
+had no right to do it.  But I have succeeded; I have drawn you back
+from kleptomania to your own clear moral strength.  You will get well,
+Rod Norton; you will be an honest man.  But I took it upon myself to
+take the chances for you.  Now . . . do you think that you can forgive
+me?"
+
+He appeared to be pondering the matter.  When his reply came it was
+couched in the form of a question:
+
+"Would you have done it, Virginia . . . if you didn't love me a little
+as I love you?"
+
+And her answer comforted him.  He was sleeping when the Engles came.
+
+
+Later came the big wagon, one of Engle's men driving, Ignacio Chavez
+and two other Mexicans accompanying on horseback.  Virginia had
+forgotten nothing.  Quick hands did her bidding now, altering the
+anteroom of the King's Palace into a big airy bedroom.  There was a
+great rug upon the floor, a white-sheeted and counterpaned bed, fresh
+pajamas, table, chair, alcohol-stove, glasses and cups and
+water-pitchers.  There were cloths for fresh bandages, wide palm-leaf
+fans . . . there was even ice and the promise of further ice to come.
+The sun was shut out by heavy curtains across the main entrance and the
+broken-out holes in the easterly wall.
+
+"My dear," said Mrs. Engle, taking both of Virginia's hands into her
+own, "I don't know just what has happened and I don't care to know
+until you get good and ready to tell me about it.  But I can see by
+looking at you that you are at the end of your tether.  I'm going to
+take care of Roddy now while you sleep at least a couple of hours."
+
+She and Engle had asked themselves the question as soon as Virginia's
+note came to them: "What in the world were she and Norton doing on the
+mountainside at that time of night?"  But they had no intention of
+asking it of any one else.  Rather John Engle hastened to answer it for
+others.
+
+"_Muchachos_" he said to the men when he sent them back to San Juan,
+"there was an accident last night.  Senor Norton had a fall from his
+horse, striking his head.  My cousin, Miss Page, together with Senor
+Norton and Senor Patten, was taking a short cut this way to make a call
+at Pozo.  Senor Patten and Miss Page succeeded in getting Senor Norton
+here, where they had to operate upon him immediately.  He is doing well
+now, thanks to their prompt action; he will be well soon.  You may tell
+his friends."
+
+And then, seeing little that he could do here and much that he might
+accomplish elsewhere, John Engle rode on his spurs back to San Juan to
+lay down the law to Patten.
+
+
+Throughout the days and nights which followed, Virginia and Mrs. Engle
+nursed Norton back into a semblance of strength.  One of them was
+always at his side.  When at last the bandage might be removed from the
+blindfolded eyes Norton's questing glance found Virginia first of all.
+
+"Virginia," he said quietly, "thanks to you I can start in all over
+now."
+
+She understood.  So did Mrs. Engle.  For Norton had explained to both
+the banker and his wife, holding nothing back from them, telling them
+frankly of crimes committed, of his attempted abduction of the girl who
+in turn had "abducted him."  He had restitutions to make without the
+least unnecessary delay.  He must square himself and he thanked God
+that he could square himself, that his crimes had been bloodless, that
+he had but to return the stolen moneys.  And, to wipe his slate clean,
+he stood ready to pay to the full for what he had done, to offer his
+confession openly, to accept without a murmur whatever decree the court
+might award him.
+
+Again John Engle did his bit.  He went to the county-seat and saw the
+district attorney, an upright man, but one who saw clearly.  The lawyer
+laid his work aside and came immediately with Engle to the King's
+Palace.
+
+"Any court, having the full evidence," he said crisply, "would hold you
+blameless.  Give me the money you have taken; I shall see that it is
+returned and that no questions are asked.  And if you've got any
+idiotic compulsion about open confession . . .  Well, think of somebody
+besides yourself for a change.  Try thinking about the Wonder Girl a
+little, it will be good for you."
+
+For he never called her anything but that, the Wonder Girl.  When he
+had heard everything, he came to her after his straightforward fashion
+and gripped her hand until he hurt her.
+
+"I didn't know they made girls like you," he told her before she even
+knew who he was.
+
+It was he who, summoning all of his forensic eloquence, finally quieted
+Norton's disturbed mind.  Norton in his weakened condition was all for
+making a clean breast before the world, for acknowledging himself unfit
+for his office, for resigning.  But in the end when he was told curtly
+that he owed vastly more to the county than to his stupid conscience,
+that he had been chosen to get Jim Galloway, that that was his job,
+that he could do all the resigning he wanted to afterward, and that
+finally he was not to consider his own personal feelings until he had
+thought of Virginia's, Norton gave over his regrets and merely waxed
+impatient for the time when he could finish his work and go back to Las
+Flores rancho.  For it was understood that he would not go alone.
+
+"I'll free del Rio because I have to, not because I want to," said the
+lawyer at the end.  "Trusting to you to bring him in again later.  He
+is one of Galloway's crowd and I know it, despite his big bluffs.
+Galloway is away right now, somewhere below the border.  Just what he
+is up to I don't know.  I think del Rio does.  When Galloway gets back
+you keep your eye on the two of them."
+
+After the county attorney's departure Rod Norton rested more easily.
+He was making restitution for all that he had done, he was getting well
+and strong again, he had been given such proof as comes to few men of
+the utter devotion of a woman.  Through many a bright hour he and
+Virginia, daring to look confidently ahead, talked of life as it might
+be lived upon Las Flores when the lake was made, the lower lands
+irrigated, the big home built.
+
+"And," she confessed to him at the last, her face hidden against his
+breast, "I never want to see a surgeon's lancet again in all of my
+life, Rod Norton!"
+
+
+When at length the sheriff could bestride a horse he wondered
+impatiently what it could be that kept Jim Galloway so long away.  And
+if he was never coming back.  But he knew that high up among the
+cliffs, hidden away in the ancient caves, Jim Galloway's rifles were
+still lying.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+THE STRONG HAND OF GALLOWAY
+
+"Oh, you will all dance and shout together very soon," said Ignacio
+wisely to his six bells in the old Mission garden.  "You will see!
+Captain and the Dancer and Lolita, the Little One, La Golondrina, and
+Ignacio Chavez, all of you together until far out across the desert men
+hear.  For it is in the air that things will happen.  And then, when it
+is all done . . .  Why then, amigos, who but me is going to build a
+little roof over you that runs down both ways, to save you from the hot
+sun and the rains? . . .  Oh, one knows.  It is in the air.  You will
+see!"
+
+For Jim Galloway had returned, a new Galloway, a Galloway who carried
+himself up and down the street with bright, victorious eyes, and the
+stride of full confidence, who, at least in the eyes of Ignacio Chavez,
+was like a blood-lusting lion "screwing up his muscles" to spring.
+Galloway's return brought to Roderick Norton a fresh vigilance, to
+Virginia a sleepless anxiety, to Florence Engle unrest, uncertainty,
+very nearly pure panic.  During the first few days of his absence she
+had allowed herself the romantic joy of floating unchecked upon the
+tide of a girlish fancy, dreaming dreams after the approved fashion
+which is youth's, dancing lightly upon foamy crests, seeing only blue
+water and no rocks under her.  Then, with the potency of the man's
+character removed with the removal of his physical being, she grew to
+see the shoals and to draw back from them, shuddering somewhat
+pleasurably.  Now that he was again in San Juan and that her eyes had
+been held by his in the first meeting upon the street, her heart
+fluttered, her vision clouded, she wondered what she would do.
+
+There was to be no lost action in Galloway's campaign now.  Within half
+a dozen hours of his arrival there was a gathering of various of his
+henchmen at the Casa Blanca.  Just what passed was not to be known; it
+was significant, however, that among those who had come to his call
+were the Mexican, del Rio, Antone, Kid Rickard, and a handful of the
+other most restless spirits of the county.  Norton accepted the act in
+all that it implied to his suspicions and sent out word to Cutter,
+Brocky Lane, and those of his own and Brocky's cowboys whom he counted
+on.
+
+Galloway's second step, known only to himself and Florrie, was a
+private meeting with the banker's daughter.  It occurred upon the
+second evening following his return, just after dark among the
+cottonwoods, but a hundred yards from her home.  He had made the
+opportunity with the despatch which marked him now; he had watched for
+her during the day, had appeared merely to pass her by chance on the
+street, and had paused just long enough to ask her to meet him.
+
+"I have done all that I planned to do," he announced triumphantly, his
+eyes holding hers, forcing upon her spirit the mastery of his own.
+"The power in Mexico is going to be Francisco Villa.  I have seen him.
+Let me talk with you to-night, Florence.  History is in the making; it
+may be you and I together who shape the destiny of a people."
+
+After all, she was but a little over sixteen, her head filled with the
+bright stuff of romance, and he was a forceful man who for his own
+purposes had long studied her.  She came to the tryst, albeit half in
+trembling, a dozen tremulous times ready for a fleeing retreat.
+
+Again he was all deference to her.  He builded cunningly upon the fact
+that he trusted her; that he, a strong man, put his faith in her, a
+woman.  He flattered her as she had never been flattered, not too
+subtly, yet not so broadly as to arouse her suspicion of his intent.
+He spoke quietly at first, then his voice seeming charged with his
+leaping ambition set responsive chords within her thrilling.  He
+pictured to her the state he was going to found, organize, rule, an
+uncertain number of fair miles stretching along a tropical coast; he
+made her see again a palatial dwelling with servants in livery, the
+blue waters of the Gulf, the white of dancing sails.  He spoke of a
+peace which was going to be declared between warring factions below the
+border within thirty days, of the magnificence to be Francisco Villa's,
+of the position to be occupied by Jim Galloway at Villa's side.  His
+planned development of a gold-mine he mentioned merely casually.
+
+And then at length when Florrie was prepared for the passionate
+declaration he humbled himself at her feet, lifted his hands to her in
+supplication, told her in burning words of his love.  Whether the man
+did love her with all of the strength of his nature or whether he but
+meant to strike through her at John Engle, the richest man of this
+section of the State, it was for Jim Galloway alone to know.  Certainly
+not for Florrie, who listened wide-eyed. . . .  Once she thought that
+he was about to sweep her up into his arms; they had lifted suddenly
+from his sides.  She had drawn back, crying sharply: "No, no!"  But he
+had waited, had again grown deeply deferential, swerving immediately to
+further vividly colored pictures of life as it might be, of power and
+pomp, of a secure position from which a man and a woman might direct
+policies of state, shaping the lives of other men and women.
+
+And in the end of that ardent interview Jim Galloway's caution was
+still with him, his knowledge of the girl's nature clear in his mind.
+He did not ask her answer; he merely sought a third opportunity to
+speak with her, suggesting that upon the next night she slip out and
+meet him.  He would have a horse for her, one for himself; they could
+ride for a half-hour.  He had so much to tell her.
+
+Perhaps a much more important factor than she realized in her action
+was Florrie's new riding-habit.  It had been acquired but three days
+before and she knew very well just how she looked in it.  There would
+be a moon, almost at the full.  The full moon and the new riding-habit
+were the allies given by fate to Jim Galloway.
+
+Besides all of this, she had not seen Elmer Page for a month.  Further,
+she knew that Elmer had gone riding upon at least one occasion with a
+girl of Las Palmas, Superintendent Kemble's daughter.  And finally,
+there lies much rich adventure in just doing that which we know we
+should leave alone.  So Florrie, while her mother and father thought
+that she had gone early to bed, was on her way to meet Galloway.
+
+They rode out of the cottonwood fringed arroyo just before moonrise,
+circling the town, Florrie scarcely marking whether they rode north or
+south.  But Galloway knew what he was doing and they turned slowly
+toward the southwest.  As they rode, his horse drawn in close to hers,
+he talked as he had never talked before; his voice rang from the first
+word with triumphant assurance.
+
+"When he calls she will follow!" Virginia had thought fearfully of
+them.  To-night he was calling eloquently, she was following,
+frightened and yet obedient to his mastery.
+
+Galloway's influence over the girl, that of a strong will over a weak
+and fluttering one, was quite naturally the stronger when they were
+alone together.  She had always been willing, sometimes a bit eager, to
+make a hero of him; he had long thoroughly understood her.  To-night
+was the brief battle of wills, with him summoning all of his strength,
+flushed with victory.  Abruptly now he urged that she marry him; a
+moment later his insistent pleading was subtly tinged with command.  He
+was the arbiter of the hour; he told her of a priest waiting for them
+at a little village a dozen miles away.  They would be married
+to-night; they were eloping even at this palpitant instant!
+
+When Florence would have stopped, of two balancing minds, he urged the
+horses on.  When she would have procrastinated, he beat down her
+opposition with the rush of his words.  Even while she struggled she
+was yielding; Galloway was quick to see how her resistance was growing
+fainter.  And all the time, while he spoke vehemently and she for the
+most part listened in a fascinated silence, they were riding on through
+the moonlit night. . . .  It seemed to her that surely he must love her
+as few men had loved before. . . .
+
+
+The village he had promised her was in reality but two poor houses at a
+crossroads, inhabited by two Mexican men and dowdy women.  On the way
+they encountered but one horseman; Galloway turned his own and
+Florence's animals out so that, though seen, they might escape
+recognition.  At the nearest of the two hovels he dismounted, raising
+his arms to her.  When she cried out and shrank back trembling, he
+laughed softly, caught her in his arms, and lifted her free of the
+saddle; when he would have kissed her she put her face into her two
+hands.
+
+"I . . . I want to go back!" she whispered.  "I am afraid!  Please, Mr.
+Galloway, please let me go home."
+
+Dogs were barking, a man and woman came out.  The man laughed.  Then he
+gathered up the bridle-reins and led the horses to the barn.  Florrie,
+shrinking out of Galloway's embrace, looked particularly little and
+helpless in her pretty riding-habit.
+
+She went with Galloway into the lamplighted room.  The woman looked at
+her curiously, then to Galloway, something of wonder and upstanding
+admiration in her beady eyes.
+
+"Has the priest come?" demanded Galloway.
+
+"No, senor.  Not yet."
+
+She added by way of explanation that word had been sent; that the
+priest was delayed; a man was dying and he must stay a little at the
+bedside.  She muttered the tale like a child repeating a lesson.
+Galloway, watching Florence, who sat rigid in her chair by the table,
+waited for her to finish.
+
+At the end he gave the woman a sharp, significant look.  She said
+something about a cup of coffee for the senorita and went hastily into
+the kitchen.  Florrie sprang to her feet, her hands clasped.
+
+"You must let me go," she cried wildly.  "The priest isn't here.  I am
+going home."
+
+"No," said Galloway steadily.  "You are not going home, Florence.  You
+must listen to me.  I love you more than anything else In the world, my
+dear.  I want you, want you all for mine."
+
+She saw a sudden light flare up in his eyes and it seemed to her that
+her heart would beat through the walls of her breast.  "I am not a boy,
+but a man.  A strong man, a man who, when he wants a thing, wants it
+with his whole heart and body and soul, a man who takes what he wants.
+Wait; just listen to me!  You love me now; you will love me more and
+more when I give you all that I have promised you.  To-night, in an
+hour, I will have made the beginning; I will have gathered about me
+fifty men who will do exactly what I tell them to do!  Then they will
+go with us down into Mexico; they will be the beginning of a little
+army whose one thought will be loyalty . . . loyalty to you and to me."
+
+"No," said Florence, her voice shaking.  "I am going. . . ."
+
+"You will marry me when the priest comes," he cut in sternly.
+"Otherwise, if you make me, I will take you with me anyway, unmarried.
+And I will make you marry me when we have crossed the border.  And
+now . . . now you will kiss me.  I have waited long, Florence."
+
+He came toward her; she slipped behind the table, crying out to him to
+stop.  But he came on, caught her, drew her into his arms.  And
+Florrie, some new passionate, terrified Florrie, beat at him with her
+fists, tore at him with her nails, hid her face from him, and with the
+agility born of her terror slipped away from him again, again put the
+table between them.  Galloway, a thin line of blood across his cheek,
+thrust the table aside.  As he did so the man came back into the room
+and stood watching, a twisted smile upon his lips.  Galloway lifted his
+thick shoulders in a shrug and stood staring at the girl cowering in
+her corner.
+
+"Married or unmarried, you go with me," he told her.  "Your kisses you
+may save for me.  Think it over.  You had better ask for the priest
+when I come back."  He turned toward the Mexican.  "All ready, Feliz?"
+
+The man nodded.
+
+"Tell Castro, then.  It's time to be in the saddle."
+
+With no other word to Florrie he went out.  But his last look was for
+her, the look of a victor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+IN THE OPEN
+
+Roderick Norton, every fibre of his body alive and eager, his blood
+riotous with the certain knowledge that the long-delayed hour had come,
+rode a foam-flecked horse into San Juan shortly after moonrise.
+Galloway was striking at last; at last might Norton lift his own hand
+to strike back.  As he flung himself down from the saddle he was
+thinking almost equally of Jim Galloway, striking the supreme blow of
+his career, and of Billy Norton, whose death had come to him at
+Galloway's command.  Galloway was gathering his forces, had delivered
+an initial blow, was staking everything upon the one throw of the dice.
+And he must believe them loaded.
+
+At the clank of spur-chain and rowel Struve came hastily into the
+hallway from his office.  He saw the look in the sheriff's, eyes and
+demanded quickly:
+
+"What is it?  What's happened?"
+
+There were grim lines about Norton's mouth, his quiet voice had an
+ominous ring to it.
+
+"Hell's to pay, Julius," he retorted.  "And there's little telling
+where it'll end unless we're on the jump to meet it.  Galloway's come
+out into the open.  Kid Rickard and ten men with him, all Mexicans or
+breeds, crossed over into the next county yesterday, raided the county
+jail late this afternoon, shot poor Roberts, freed Moraga, and got away
+in a couple of big new touring-cars.  Every man of them carried a rifle
+and side-arms."
+
+"Killed Roberts, huh?" Struve's frown gathered.
+
+"He's badly hurt, if not dead.  The Kid did the shooting."
+
+"Sure it's Galloway's work and not just the Kid's?"
+
+"Yes.  Only a couple of hours ago a lot of Galloway's crowd was
+gathering up in the mountains.  They've gone to his cache for the
+rifles.  I have sent word for Brocky Lane and his and my cowboys.  It
+begins to look as though he were up to something bigger than we've been
+looking for.  And he's sure of himself, Struve, or he wouldn't have
+started things by daylight."
+
+Virginia had heard and came into the hallway from her room, her face
+white, her eyes filled with trouble.  Struve turned back into his room
+abruptly, going for his rifle.
+
+"You heard?" asked Norton quietly.  "It's the big fight at last,
+Virginia.  But we've known it was coming all along."
+
+"Yes, Rod." she said half listlessly.  "I'll be glad when it's all
+over."
+
+He sketched for her briefly what little more he knew and suspected.
+Throughout the county where there was telephone communication the wires
+were buzzing.  Over them the word had come to him of Kid Rickard's
+attack on Roberts and the freeing of Moraga.  But in many places the
+lines were reported "out of order" and towns were isolated by cut
+wires.  Already men were riding sweating horses, carrying word from
+him.  He knew that del Rio had gathered a crowd of men at Las Vegas; he
+was certain that del Rio was working hand in glove with Galloway;
+further that the Mexican had been with Galloway on his recent trip
+below the border and among the revolutionists.
+
+"They're solid down there," concluded Norton.  "What they are up to is
+something big here, then a dash for safety, carrying their booty with
+them.  But we're going to be on time to put a stop to it all.  I am
+going down to see Engle now; will you come with me?"
+
+But before they left the hotel he swore Struve in as a deputy and sent
+him hastening to carry the word to other men to be counted on.  As they
+passed the Casa Blanca Norton paused a moment, looking in at the
+wide-open door; it was very quiet within, the place seeming deserted.
+
+"No use looking for Galloway here," he said as they went on.  "Nor for
+any of his gang.  But, when they come back . . . unless we head them
+off . . ."
+
+Her hand tightened on his arm.  She looked up into his thoughtful face
+with shining eyes.
+
+"You think that they would attempt further robbery and outlawry here?"
+
+"I am going to advise Engle to take the bulk of his money out of the
+bank, dig a hole, and hide it," he answered.  "Just to be sure in case
+we don't stop them."
+
+He knew that he had no time to waste tonight, and so as he and Virginia
+entered the Engles' living-room he began immediately telling the banker
+what had happened and what he feared was set to happen.  Engle listened
+gravely.
+
+"Galloway is making his getaway to-night," Norton said by way of
+conclusion.  "For every rifle he has a man.  He has no reason to like
+you and he knows that you carry more money in gold and bank-notes than
+any other man in the country.  The fact that Kid Rickard pulled the
+game the way he did this afternoon, shooting down Roberts when there
+was no need of bloodshed, ought to be enough to show us that they are
+not going to draw the line anywhere this side of old Mexico."
+
+"What are you planning?" asked Engle.
+
+"I've sent for Brocky and all the men he can bring.  They'll all come
+heeled and ready for trouble, every one sworn in as a sheriff's deputy.
+I'll get every dependable man in San Juan into the saddle with a rifle
+inside half an hour.  Before that we'll have further word; or, if not,
+we ride toward Mt. Temple.  I'm taking the gamble so far that that's
+their rendezvous; that the Kid and his crowd will show up there."
+
+It was unnecessary for him to continue.  Engle nodded and went for his
+rifle.  Norton, turning toward Mrs. Engle and Virginia, was shocked by
+the look he saw in the eyes of the banker's wife.
+
+"Florrie!" gasped Mrs. Engle, her hands gripped in front of her, her
+face paling.  "I thought she was in her room; when I missed her five
+minutes ago I thought that she had slipped out and run up to the hotel
+to see Virginia.  Virginia hasn't seen her."
+
+Norton smiled and patted the two clasped hands.
+
+"Oh, Florrie'll be all right, Mrs. Engle," he comforted her.  "We
+mustn't get nervous and begin to imagine things, must we?"
+
+But no lessening of that look of fear came into the mother's eyes.
+Galloway was striking, Florrie was not to be accounted for.  Though she
+turned quickly and went again through the house, the patio, and the
+rear gardens, she was apprehensively certain that she would not find
+Florence.  Virginia came hurriedly to Norton, whispering:
+
+"I'm afraid for her, Rod.  I'm afraid!  I have seen her and Jim
+Galloway together, I have known all along that he had an influence over
+her which he might exert if he wanted to.  And, just before Jim
+Galloway went to Mexico, Elmer saw them walk down the street together,
+stop and talk together under the trees. . . .  Oh, I'm afraid for her,
+Rod!"
+
+Engle's face was as white as chalk when a little later he came back
+into the room with his wife; his two hands were like rock upon his
+rifle.
+
+"Florence isn't in the house," he announced in a voice which, while
+calm, seemed not John Engle's voice.  "If she is in San Juan it won't
+take the half-hour to know it.  I'm rather inclined to think that I'm
+just a fool, Rod Norton.  My wife has told me that Galloway was looking
+at Florence in a way which meant no good.  I wouldn't believe.  And
+now, if . . ."
+
+Norton had no reply to make.  Florence's disappearance at a time like
+this might mean either a very great deal or nothing whatever.  But, as
+Engle had intimated, it would require but little time to learn if she
+were in San Juan and safe, and, as Norton had said, there was no time
+now to be wasted.  Engle would institute inquiries immediately; Norton,
+his own work looming large before him, would prepare to meet Galloway's
+latest play.
+
+The sheriff decided promptly that it would be unwise to leave the town
+absolutely drained of men in whom he could put faith.  It was always
+possible that either the entire crowd of Galloway's men or a smaller
+detachment might find their way here.  Julius Struve, four armed men
+aiding him, was to be responsible for the welfare of women and
+children.  If Galloway's stroke should turn out to be bolder and harder
+than was now known, then Struve and his men had horses saddled and were
+to get their wards out of danger by hard riding.  Norton was to post
+two men a few miles out as he rode north and they were to report back
+to Struve in case of necessity.
+
+These latter plans were made only at the moment before the sheriff's
+departure.  A man sent by Brocky Lane had raced into San Juan's street,
+bringing fresh word.  It began to appear that Galloway was working in
+conjunction with aid from below the border.  Del Rio with a score of
+men, Mexicans for the most part who had dribbled into the county during
+the last few months, was reported to have swept down upon John Engle's
+ranches, and to be gathering herds of cattle and horses, starting them
+southward on the run.  Three of Engle's cowboys had been shot down; a
+similar attack had been delivered upon other ranches.  The little town
+of Las Vegas had been looted, post-office, store, and saloon safes
+dynamited, stock driven off to augment del Rio's other herds.  Further,
+the cowboy sent by Lane reported that a signal-fire had been lighted in
+the mountains an hour ago and that there had been another fire like an
+answer leaping up from the desert in the south.  Word had also come to
+Lane that telephone messages hinted that Kid Rickard and his unit were
+working further outlawry along the county line, headed toward Mt.
+Temple.
+
+There were seventeen armed horsemen in the street waiting for the word
+from Norton.
+
+"I'll come back to you," he said quietly to Virginia.  "Because after
+what you have done for me, I belong to you . . . if you want me."
+
+"I want you, Rod," she answered steadily.  "And I know that you will
+come back to me.  And now . . . kiss me good night."
+
+She clung to him a moment, then pushed him from her and watched him
+swing up into the saddle and ride out among the men who were pledged
+and sworn to do his bidding.  As he did so Engle came to him.
+
+"Going with us, John?" asked Norton.
+
+"No," said Engle.  "We haven't found her yet, Rod.  I'll try to pick up
+a trace of her here.  And . . . you'll send a man to me if you find
+her?"
+
+"Yes," Norton promised.
+
+"And if Galloway has got her . . ."
+
+"I'll know what to do, John," said Norton gently.
+
+Then, without again looking back, he turned his horse toward the north.
+The seventeen men, riding two and three abreast, silent and grave for
+the most part, followed him.  The moon shone upon their rifle-barrels
+and made black, grotesque shadows underfoot.
+
+Against the northern sky Mt. Temple was lifted sharply outlined; from
+its crest a leaping flame was stabbing at the stars, a new signal-fire
+to be seen across many miles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+THE BATTLE IN THE ARROYO
+
+Straight toward that wavering plume of flame in the north they rode
+swiftly, each man with his own thoughts and with few words.  But
+whether a man thought of Florrie Engle gone or of the shooting of
+Sheriff Roberts or of the looting of Las Vegas or of a ranch raided, he
+was like his fellows in that he knew that at last Jim Galloway had come
+out into the open and that to-night must be Galloway's triumph or
+Galloway's death.  And perhaps he wondered if his own saddle would run
+empty under the stars before another dawn.
+
+Three or four miles from San Juan Norton made out an approaching rider,
+one who bent over his horse's mane, racing furiously.  The figure,
+growing rapidly distinct as it drew on from the north, grew erect as
+the horseman saw Norton's posse.  The rider jerked in his horse,
+pausing a moment as though in doubt whether he were meeting friend or
+foe.  Then, when again he came on at the same headlong gallop, Norton
+recognized him.  It was Elmer Page.
+
+"They're fighting back yonder!" cried the boy wildly, his eyes shining
+with his excitement.  "Brocky Lane sent me. . . .  I haven't a rifle,
+who will give me a rifle?  I'll give a man a hundred dollars for a
+rifle!"
+
+"Easy, Elmer," said Norton sharply.  "Tell us what Brocky sent you to
+say.  Where are they?"
+
+"Along the arroyo just off to the east of Mt. Temple.  About a mile
+from the mountain . . . you know where the biggest boulders are all
+strung out along the arroyo?  It's there.  Brocky and a lot of cowboys
+are making a stand there, heading off the Kid and del Rio.  So they
+can't get with the others, you know. . . .  Why didn't somebody tell me
+about this?" he broke off, his voice shrill.  "I haven't a rifle, just
+a cursed revolver.  Who will ..."
+
+Again Norton interrupted sternly.
+
+"Let's have it straight, Elmer," he commanded.  "Brocky and his men are
+along the arroyo, you say?  And they're trying to keep between del Rio
+and the Kid's crowd and the other crowd?  Some of the others are still
+on the mountain, then?"
+
+"The mountain is full of them.  They're pouring down and shooting as
+they come; Brocky's in between. . . ."
+
+"How many men are with him?"
+
+"About twenty.  But . . . my God!  Rickard's men and del Rio's are
+shooting from the east and the others are shooting from the west . . .
+poor old Tommy Rudge got shot in the stomach and Denny Blain is down
+and . . ."
+
+"Del Rio and Rickard didn't come in machines did they?"
+
+"No.  Brocky said tell you they'd left their cars, sent them on filled
+with loot toward the south, where a lot of other Greasers are waiting
+for them; then the Kid and del Rio and about fifty men altogether
+started a big herd of horses and cattle this way.  Brocky tried to
+stampede the herds, but the others are more than two to one, so he got
+his men in the arroyo and they're giving 'em hell from there."
+
+"Galloway's on the other side?"
+
+"No.  Brocky said tell you Galloway hadn't shown up yet.  We think he
+didn't expect things to get started so soon.  One of Brocky's men
+riding in a little while ago from the other side of San Juan thought
+that he had seen Galloway and some one that looked like a girl riding
+with him toward the old crossroads where the Denbar place used to be.
+Brocky thinks maybe you can come in and head Galloway off and bust up
+the whole play that way."
+
+So Galloway and "some one who looked like a girl" had ridden toward the
+old Denbar cross-roads.  And Galloway had not yet joined his forces.
+
+"Elmer," said Norton quickly, "ride on to San Juan.  Tell John Engle
+what you have told me about Galloway.  Tell him . . ."
+
+"I won't!" cried Elmer, on the verge of hysteria.  "I won't do it.  Do
+it yourself; send some one else.  I want to go with you; I want a
+rifle, I tell you!  Didn't I see Tommy Rudge go down with a bullet in
+his belly?  Didn't I see Denny when the Kid shot him?"
+
+Norton laid a hand on Elmer's arm, speaking quietly.
+
+"Listen, Elmer," he said.  "We will do what we can where Brocky is.
+But that isn't all of the devilment to-night.  Galloway got Florrie
+away somehow; she was the one riding with him toward the crossroads.
+It's up to you to ride on and ride like the devil and tell John
+Engle. . . .  Come on, boys!"
+
+Elmer sagged in his saddle as though he had been struck a heavy
+physical blow.
+
+"Galloway got Fluff!" he muttered dully.
+
+His gaze trailed along after the departing posse.  Norton on his big
+roan was setting the pace, the steady swinging gallop to eat up the
+miles swiftly and yet not kill the horses before the journey's end.
+The others followed him, stringing out single file to take advantage of
+the trail.  The moon picked them out with clear relief, a grim line of
+retribution.  And yet the boy, while his eyes wandered after them, saw
+only little Fluff struggling in Jim Galloway's arms. . . .
+
+Then suddenly he, too, was riding, but at a pace which took no heed of
+a horse's endurance, riding a gallant brute that stretched out its
+neck, nostrils flaring, hammering hoofs beating out the very staccato
+of urgent speed upon the flying sands.  Already his revolver was tight
+clinched in a lifted hand.  Already he had swerved a little from the
+distant lights of San Juan.  He was taking the shortest line which led
+to Denbar's crossroads.
+
+"Galloway's got Fluff," he said over and over, choking on the words.
+
+
+An hour later Norton heard the first spitting of rifles.  Another
+fifteen minutes of shod hoofs pounding through the broken hills and he
+saw the first spurts of flame cutting through the shadows where the
+trees clung to the arroyo.  As he drew in his horse the men behind him
+closed up about him.  He threw out his arm, pointing.
+
+"Brocky's boys must be right down there," he said sharply.  "The Kid
+and del Rio will be yonder; those are their horses.  Young Page says
+there are about fifty of them."
+
+A fusillade of rifle-shots interrupted him.  Along a fifty or sixty
+yard front the Kid's and del Rio's men had crept in closer to Brocky's
+arroyo, worming their way upon their stomachs, and now fired together.
+There came a rattling reply from the creek, the shouting of cowboys.
+
+"We'll take those fellows first," ordered Norton quickly.  "They will
+see us when we climb that little rise.  Spread out; go easy until we
+get to the top.  Then, boys, let's see who can give them hell first and
+fastest."
+
+They looked to their rifles for the last time and rode slowly up the
+short slope of the low-lying ridge.  Then, as the first man topped it,
+there came a shout from the shadows in front, another shout, and the
+whizzing of rifle-balls.  Norton used his spurs then; his big roan
+leaped forward and was racing down the farther slope; his men in a long
+line rode with him.  And as he rode he lifted his own gun and poured
+his lead into the thickest of the shadows.
+
+A wild shout of cheering broke from the arroyo; rifle-barrels grew hot
+in hot hands.  On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's
+posse, some of them firing as they rode, others saving their lead.  To
+be seen from afar now, they drew many a shot toward themselves.  And
+yet the target of a man riding swiftly over uneven ground and in the
+moonlight is not to be found overreadily by questing lead.  When Norton
+called to his men to stop and dismount, taking advantage of a row of
+scattered boulders, not a saddle was empty.
+
+[Illustration: On through the bright moonlight came the sheriff's
+posse.]
+
+Every man as he dismounted threw his horsed reins to the ground; the
+animals might bolt or they might not, some of them might not stop for
+many a mile, others would be found a hundred yards away.  But they must
+all think less of that now than of what lay in front of them.
+
+"That you, Norton?" came a cheery voice booming suddenly through the
+silence which had shut down as the newcomers disappeared among the
+boulders.
+
+"Here, Brocky!" shouted Norton.  "All right down there?"
+
+"Pretty well," called Brocky.  "They've winged three or four of
+us . . . they're damned rotten shots, Roddy.  We've popped over a dozen
+of them."
+
+There were other shouts then, tenor Mexican voices for the most part
+with the Kid's unmistakable snarl running through them.  Men were
+calling in Spanish to their fellows across the arroyo.  Whatever it was
+that Brocky was trying to say was lost in the din.  And then again came
+a volley of rifle-shots.
+
+Norton rose slowly to his feet, studying the situation with frowning
+eyes.  A bullet hissed high overhead, another cut by his side, another
+went shrieking off into the night.  But while they whined in his ears
+he laid his rude plans.
+
+The arroyo wound and twisted this way and that through the broken
+uplands.  Where Brocky Lane had placed his men so as to defy the union
+of the two bands of outlaws it described a wide rude arc curving about
+the spur from Mt. Temple.  Here the cowboys, with some twenty or thirty
+feet separating each man from his nearest fellow, were extended along a
+line which must be about two hundred yards long.  The Mexicans to the
+eastward, where del Rio and Kid Rickard and Moraga were, were bunched
+in the protecting shadows of a field of boulders such as those where
+the sheriff's men lay.
+
+"We could stick here all night and get nothing done," said Norton to
+the men close to him.  "Rickard's gang could have charged down on
+Brocky long ago if they'd had the stomach for that sort of thing.
+They've got the numbers on us; they more than had the count on Brocky's
+outfit; with those jaspers on the mountainside they could have turned
+the trick.  But that sort hasn't the desire for a scrap unless they can
+pull it from behind a rock.  And, by the same token, they won't last
+five minutes in the face of a charge.  Get me?"
+
+"But the ginks on the mountain will pick us off pretty lively as we hit
+the trail down the slope here," said a thoughtful voice.
+
+Then Norton explained further.  He meant to eliminate the other crowd;
+it could be done.  When he gave the word every man was to jump to his
+feet and make the first half of his charge the bloodless one down into
+the arroyo toward Brocky Lane.  Then, Norton's men and Brocky's united,
+they could surge up the creek's banks and make their flying attack,
+coming in between the two other factions so that the men on the
+mountain must hold their fire or kill as many of their own crowd as of
+the others.
+
+The suggestion was accepted without discussion.  When Norton said
+"Ready," they were ready; when he jumped to his feet and ran down
+toward the arroyo, they ran with him.  A shout of laughter went up from
+each side of the dry water-course as jeering voices announced
+triumphantly that the Gringoes were afraid.  And with the shouts came
+rifle-shots.
+
+But to the last man of them they reached the arroyo safely, and ducking
+low, trotted on to join the cowboys.  In a moment more Norton had found
+Brocky Lane, had explained his plan, had had Brocky's silent nod for an
+answer.  In quiet voices the men passed the word along the line.  Those
+from the farther end drew in closer so that their whole body of
+something better than thirty men occupied but a brief section of the
+arroyo.
+
+"Get your wind first, boys," Norton admonished them.  "Better fill your
+clips, too, while you've got the chance.  And count on using a six gun
+before you're through.  All right?  Let's show 'em the sort of a scrap
+a Gringo _can_ put up."
+
+Then again they were running, the unwavering line of thirty men, but
+with a difference which the outlaws might not mistake.  And as they ran
+they held their fire for a little, knowing how useless and suicidal it
+would be to pause half-way.  But presently they were answering shot
+with shot, pausing, going down upon one knee, taking a moment's
+advantage of a friendly rock, pouring lead into the agitated groups
+among the boulders, springing up, running on again, every man fighting
+the fight his own way, the thirty of them making the air tingle with
+their shouts as they bore onward.
+
+Then it was man to man and often enough one man to two or three, dark
+forms struggling, men striking with clubbed guns, men snatching at
+their side-arms, going down, rising or half rising, firing as long as a
+charge was in a gun or strength in a body.  And as they fired and
+struck and called out after the fashion of the cowboy in a scrimmage
+the body of men before them wavered and broke and began to fall back.
+
+Norton swung his clubbed empty rifle up in both hands and beat down a
+man firing at him with a revolver.  All about him were struggling forms
+and he was sore beset now and then to know who was who.  A
+fierce-mustachioed, black-browed man thrust a rifle toward his breast
+and pulled the trigger and screamed out his curses as Norton put a
+revolver bullet through him.  A slender, boyish form sprang up upon a
+rock recklessly, training his rifle upon Brocky Lane.  It was the Kid.
+But the Kid had met a man quicker, surer, than himself, and Brocky
+fired first.  Kid Rickard spun and fell.  Norton saw him drop but lost
+sight of him before the body struck the earth.  He had found del Rio;
+del Rio had found him.
+
+Two smoking revolvers were jerked up, two guns spoke through the clamor
+as one gun.  The men were not ten feet apart as their guns spoke.
+Norton felt a bullet rip along his outer arm, the sensation that of a
+whip-lash cutting deep.  He saw del Rio stagger back under the impact
+of a forty-five-caliber bullet which must have merely grazed him, since
+it did not knock him off his feet.  Del Rio, his lips streaming his
+curses and hatred, fired again.  But his wound had been sorer than
+Norton's, his aim was less steady, and now as he gave back it was to
+fall heavily and lie still.
+
+It had lasted less than five minutes.  "It's Jim Galloway's fight and
+Galloway don't come!" some one had shouted.  They broke again, gave
+back and back . . . and then were running, every man of them scenting
+defeat and much worse than defeat unless he came to a horse before
+another five minutes.  And after them, firing now as they ran, came
+Brocky's cowboys and Norton's men.
+
+"They've got all of their horses over there together," yelled Brocky
+into Norton's ear.  "The horses for those Ginneys who have been hiding
+out in the mountains, too.  That's why I cut in between them that way.
+Now if we can only scatter their cayuses . . . why, Roddy, we'll have
+every damned one of 'em afoot to be rounded up when we get ready!"
+
+And Brocky, limping as he went, had raced along after the others.
+
+But Norton did not follow.  His eyes had gone to the horses which he
+and the San Juan men had left beyond the little line of boulders.  And,
+travelling that way, he had seen a lone horseman far off to the south,
+a horseman riding frantically, seeking to come to the lower slopes of
+Mt. Temple.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+THE BELLS RING
+
+"Galloway!"
+
+It seemed almost as though some great voice had shouted it to him
+through the din.  Yonder, riding on his spurs, come at this late
+moment, was Jim Galloway.  The man responsible for all of to-night's
+bloodshed, for the disappearance of Florrie, for the death of Billy
+Norton.
+
+"Coming, Jim Galloway!"
+
+Did he say it?  Or again was it a voice shouting to him, urging him on?
+He looked off to the east.  Flying forms everywhere with other racing
+forms pursuing, firing as they ran.  Horses jerking back, rearing,
+breaking away from the few men guarding them.  Full defeat for Jim
+Galloway there.  But to the west?  Galloway coming on at top speed,
+shouting as he came, and, upon the mountain's lower slope the others of
+Galloway's men, armed and bloodthirsty.  If Galloway came to them,
+whipped them with his tongue, stirring them with his magnetism . . .
+why, then, the fight was all to be fought over.
+
+Now again Norton, too, was running, bearing down upon the straggling
+horses.  He caught up the first dragging reins to lay his hand to,
+swung up into the saddle, measured swiftly the distance between
+Galloway and the men on the mountain . . . and used his spurs.
+
+On came Jim Galloway, his wide, heavy shoulders not to be mistaken in
+the rich moonlight, his hat gone, his head up, a rifle across the
+saddle in front of him.  Norton lost sight of him as he swept down into
+the bed of the arroyo, caught sight of him again from the farther side.
+Already Galloway was appreciably nearer his men, driving his horse
+mercilessly.
+
+"If he comes to his crowd before I can stop him," was Norton's thought,
+"he'll put his game across on us yet.  I've got to head him off and
+take the chances."
+
+Nor were the odds to be overlooked.  Galloway was still too far away to
+be stopped by a rifle-ball, and Norton, heading him off, would expose
+himself not only to Galloway's fire but to that of the men who were
+moving to a lower slope to meet their leader.  And yet, with fate in
+the balance, here was no time for hesitation.
+
+Now Galloway had seen him, had recognized him, perhaps, the thought
+coming naturally to him that it would be Roderick Norton who rode to
+cut him off.  He shifted his rifle so that his right hand was on the
+grip, the barrel caught in his left; he had dropped his horse's reins.
+Norton was slipping a fresh clip into his gun, his own reins now upon
+his horse's neck.  And now both men knew that unless a bullet stopped
+him Norton would cut across Galloway's path before he could come to his
+men.
+
+"At him, Roddy, old boy!  We're coming!"
+
+Norton glanced over his shoulder and pressed on.  Brocky had missed
+him, had seen, had called back a half dozen of his men and was
+following.  Well, if he dropped, maybe Brocky and the others could get
+Jim Galloway.  It really began to look as though Galloway had played
+out his string.
+
+They were firing from the mountainside now, the bullets thus far flying
+wild of their rushing target.  Norton shook his head and urged his
+horse to fresh endeavor.  In a moment he would be fairly between
+Galloway and Galloway's last chance.  His eye picked out the spot where
+he would dismount at that moment, a tumble of big boulders.  He would
+swing down so that they would be between him and the mountain, so that
+nothing but moonlit open space lay between him and Jim Galloway.
+
+While rifles cracked and spat fire and sprayed lead over him and about
+him he rode the last fifty yards.  He reached the boulders, set his
+horse up, threw himself from the saddle, and with his back to the rock,
+his face toward Galloway, he lifted his rifle.  Galloway, almost at the
+same instant, jerked in his own horse.  He was so close that Norton
+caught his cry of rage.
+
+"Hands up, Galloway!" cried the sheriff.  "Hands up or I'll drop you."
+
+But at last Galloway had come out into the open; at last there was no
+subterfuge to stand forth at his need; at last, gambler that he was, he
+accepted the even break of man to man.  As Norton's voice rang out
+Galloway fired.
+
+He shot twice before Norton pulled the trigger.  Norton shot but the
+once.  Galloway dropped his rifle, sat rigid a moment, toppled from the
+saddle.  And his men, seeing him go down, cried out to one another and
+drew back into the mountain canons.
+
+
+"Funny thing," said Brocky Lane afterward.  "Had the picture of a kid
+of a girl in his pocket!  Must have carted it around for a year.  Old
+Roddy's bullet tore right square through it."
+
+It was a picture of Florrie Engle, taken years before.  As Brocky said:
+"Just a kid of a girl."  Where he got it nobody knew.  But then there
+were other things about Jim Galloway which no one knew.  Perhaps . . .
+Quien sabe!
+
+
+During the late hours of the night and the following forenoon the thing
+was ended.  Sheriff Roberts's deputies with a posse in automobiles had
+raced southward, intercepting those other cars despatched toward the
+border by the Kid and del Rio.  Brocky Lane with a score of men had
+swept down upon the stolen herds, scattered them, fired fifty shots,
+emptied some three or four saddles, and sent the escaping rustlers
+flying toward the Mexican line.  Singly and in small groups other men,
+farmers, cowboys, miners, and the dwellers of small settlements, joined
+with Norton's men, giving battle to those of Galloway's crowd who had
+drawn back into the fastnesses of Mt. Temple.  In the afternoon Norton,
+with the aid of a handful of cowboys from Brocky's outfit and from Las
+Flores, escorted fifteen anxious-faced prisoners to the county-seat,
+where jail capacity was to be taxed.  And night had come again, serene
+and peaceful with the glory of the moon and stars, when he rode once
+more into San Juan, sore and saddle-weary.
+
+At the hotel he learned that Virginia had gone to the Engles.  He left
+his jaded horse with Ignacio and walked down the street.  In front of
+the Casa Blanca he stopped a moment, staring musingly at the solid
+adobe walls gleaming white in the moonlight.  The place was quiet,
+deserted.  No single light winked at him through door or window.  It
+seemed to him to be brooding over the passing of Jim Galloway.
+
+He found Florrie and Elmer strolling under the cottonwoods.  They had
+scant interest in him, little time to bestow upon a mere mortal.
+Florrie could only cry ecstatically that Black Bill was a hero!  He,
+all alone, had terrorized the Mexican woman guarding her, had saved
+her, had brought her back.  And Elmer could only look pleased and
+stammer and whisper to Fluff to be still.
+
+Virginia had heard his voice, the voice she had been listening for
+throughout so many long hours, and met him before he had come to the
+door.
+
+"Oh, thank God, thank God!" she cried softly.  "But . . . you are hurt?"
+
+He forgot his wound as both arms closed about her.  From somewhere at
+the rear of the house he heard Mrs. Engle's voice crying eagerly; "It's
+Roddy!"  She was hurrying to greet him.  What he had to say must be
+said briefly.
+
+"My work is done," he said quickly.  "I have put in my resignation this
+afternoon.  They can get a new sheriff.  I am going to be a rancher, my
+dear.  And, Virginia . . ."
+
+He was whispering to her, his lips close to her hair.  And Virginia,
+though her face was suddenly hot with the flush mounting to her brow,
+gave him steadily for answer:
+
+"Whenever you wish, Rod Norton!"
+
+So it was only twenty-four hours later that Ignacio Chavez stood in the
+old Mission garden and made his bells talk, just the three upon the
+western arch, the Little One, La Golondrina, and Ignacio Chavez, the
+golden-throated trio that tinkled to the touch of his cunning hand and
+seemed to laugh and sing and proclaim the gladdest of glad tidings.
+Then Ignacio drew his enrapt gaze earthward from the full moon and made
+out a man and a girl riding out into the night, riding toward the Ranch
+of the Flowers.  And he made the bells laugh again.
+
+"And to-morrow," vowed Ignacio solemnly, "not later than to-morrow or
+the day thereafter, you shall have your reward, _amigos_.  You have
+told the world of heavy doings; you have rung for Jim Galloway dead;
+you have made the music for the wedding of _el_ Senor Nortone.  And it
+shall be I who will make a little roof like a house over you.  You will
+see!"
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELLS OF SAN JUAN***
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