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Page 86
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.
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