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Page 25
"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!
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