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Page 39
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."
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