“Oh, I hope not,” she told him impulsively. “We must always be friends.”
He laughed ruefully. “Your father wouldn't indorse those unwise sentiments, I reckon—and I'd hate to bet your husband would,” he added audaciously, with a glance at Collins. “But I love to hear you say it, even though we never could be. You're a right game, stanch little pardner. I'll back that opinion with the lid off.”
“You should be a good judge of those qualities. I'm only sorry you don't always use them in a good cause.”
He swung himself to his saddle. “Good-by.”
“Good-by—till we meet again.”
“And that will be never. So-long, sheriff. Tell Forbes I've got a particular engagement in the hills, but I'll be right glad to meet him when he comes.”
He rode up the draw and disappeared over the brow of the hillock. She caught another glimpse of him a minute later on the summit of the hill beyond. He waved a hand at her, half-turning in his saddle as he rode.
Presently she lost him, but faintly the wind swept back to her a haunting snatch of uncouth song:
“Oh, bury me out on the lone prairee,
In my narrow grave just six by three,”
Were the words drifted to her by the wind. She thought it pathetically likely he might get the wish of his song.
To Sheriff Forbes, dropping into the draw a few minutes later with his posse, Collins was a well of misinformation literally true. Yes, he had followed Miss Mackenzie's trail into the hills and found her at a mountain ranch-house. She had been there a couple of days, and was about to set out for the Rocking Chair with the owner of the place, when he arrived and volunteered to see her as far as her uncle's ranch.
“I reckon there ain't any use asking you if you seen anything of Wolf Leroy's outfit,” said Forbes, a weather-beaten Westerner with a shrewd, wrinkled face.
“No, I reckon there's no use asking me that,” returned Collins, with a laugh that deceptively seemed to include the older man in the joke.
“We're after them for rustling a bunch of Circle 33 cows. Well, I'll be moving. Glad you found the lady, Val. She don't look none played out from her little trek across the desert. Funny, ain't it, how she could have wandered that far and her afoot?”
The Arizona sun was setting in its accustomed blaze of splendor, when Val Collins and Alice Mackenzie put their horses again toward the ranch and the rainbow-hued west. In his contented eyes were reflected the sunshine and a serenity born of life in the wide, open spaces. They rode in silence for long, the gentle evening breeze blowing in soughs.
“Did you ever meet a man of such promises gone wrong so utterly? He might have been anything—and it has come to this, that he is hunted like a wild beast. I never saw anything so pitiful. I would give anything to save him.”
He had no need to ask to whom she was referring. “Can't be done. Good qualities bulge out all over him, but they don't count for anything. 'Unstable as water.' That's what's the matter with him. He is the slave of his own whims. Hence he is only the splendid wreck of a man, full of all kinds of rich outcropping pay-ore that pinch out when you try to work them. They don't raise men gamer, but that only makes him a more dangerous foe to society. Same with his loyalty and his brilliancy. He's got a haid on him that works like they say old J. E. B. Stuart's did. He would run into a hundred traps, but somehow he always worked his men out of them. That's Leroy, too. If he had been an ordinary criminal he would have been rounded up years ago. It's his audacity, his iron nerve, his good horse-sense judgment that saves his skin. But he's certainly up against it at last.”
“You think Sheriff Forbes will capture him?”
He laughed. “I think it more likely he'll capture Forbes. But we know now where he hangs out, and who he is. He has always been a mystery till now. The mystery is solved, and unless he strikes out for Sonora, Leroy is as good as a dead man.”
“A dead man?”
“Does he strike you as a man likely to be taken alive? I look to see a dramatic exit to the sound of cracking Winchesters.”
“Yes, that would be like him,” she confessed with shudder. “I think he was made to lead a forlorn hope. Pity it won't be one worthy of the best in him.”
“I guess he does have more moments set to music than most of us, and I'll bet, too, he has hidden way in him a list of 'Thou shalt nots.' I read a book once by a man named Stevenson that was sure virgin gold. He showed how every man, no matter how low he falls, has somewhere in him a light that burns, some rag of honor for which he is still fighting I'd hate to have to judge Leroy. Some men, I reckon, have to buck against so much in themselves that even failure is a kind of success for them.”
“Yet you will go out to hunt him down?” she' said, marveling at the broad sympathy of the man.
“Sure I will. My official duty is to look out for society. If something in the machine breaks loose and goes to ripping things to pieces, the engineer has to stop the damage, even if he has to smash the rod that's causing the trouble.”
The ponies dropped down again into the bed of the wash, and plowed across through the heavy sand. After they had reached the solid road, Collins resumed conversation at a new point.
“It's a month and a day since I first met you Miss Mackenzie,” he said, apparently apropos of nothing.
She felt her blood begin to choke. “Indeed!”
“I gave you a letter to read when I was on the train.”
“A letter!” she exclaimed, in well-affected surprise.
“Did you think it was a book of poems? No, ma'am, it was a letter. You were to read it in a month. Time was up last night. I reckon you read it.”
“Could I read a letter I left at Tucson, when it was a hundred miles away?” she smiled with sweet patronage.
“Not if you left it at Tucson,” he assented, with an answering smile.
“Maybe I DID lose it.” She frowned, trying to remember.
“Then I'll have to tell you what was in it.”
“Any time will do. I dare say it wasn't important.”
“Then we'll say THIS time.”
“Don't be stupid, Mr. Collins. I want to talk about our desert Villon.”
“I said in that letter—”
She put her pony to a canter, and they galloped side by side in silence for half a mile. After she had slowed down to a walk, he continued placidly, as if oblivious of an interruption:
“I said in that letter that I had just met the young lady I was expecting to marry.”
“Dear me, how interesting! Was she in the smoker?”
“No, she was in Section 3 of the Pullman.”
“I wish I had happened to go into the other Pullman, but, of course, I couldn't know the young lady you were interested in was riding there.”
“She wasn't.”
“But you've just told me—”
“That I said in the letter you took so much trouble to lose that I expected to marry the young woman passing under the name of Miss Wainwright.”
“Sir!”
“That I expected—”
“Really, I am not deaf, Mr. Collins.”
“—expected to marry her, just as soon as she was willing.”
“Oh, she is to be given a voice in the matter, is she?”
“Ce'tainly,