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Page 44
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 Nu�ez, 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 Nu�ez
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.
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