“Did your father buy this sunset with the ranch? And has he got a guarantee that it will perform every night?” he asked.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” she cried. “I have looked at them all my life and I never get tired.”
He laughed softly, his indolent, sleepy look on her. “Some things I would never get tired of looking at either.”
Without speaking she nodded, still absorbing the sunset.
“But it wouldn’t be that kind of scenery,” he added. “How tall are you, muchacha?”
Her glance came around in surprise. “I don’t know. About five foot five, I think. Why?”
“I’m working on that ad. How would this do? ‘Miss Three-Quarters-Past-Seventeen wants to meet up with gentleman between eighteen and forty-eight. Object, matrimony. Description of lady: Slim, medium height, brunette, mop of blue-black hair, the prettiest dimple you ever saw——’ ”
“Now I know you’re making fun of me. I’m mad.” And the dimple flashed into being.
“ ‘—mostly says the opposite of what she means, has a——’ ” 53
“I don’t. I don’t”
“ ‘—has a spice of the devil in her, which——’ ”
“Now, I am mad,” she interrupted, laughing.
“ ‘—which is excusable, since she has the reddest lips for kissing in Arizona.’ ”
He had gone too far. Her innocence was in arms. Norris knew it by the swiftness with which the smile vanished from her face, by the flash of anger in the eyes.
“I prefer to talk about something else, Mr. Norris,” she said with all the prim stiffness of a schoolgirl.
Her father relieved the tension by striding across from the stable. With him came a bowlegged young fellow in plain leathers. The youngster was Charley Hymer, one of the riders for the Bar Double G.
“You’re here at the right time, Norris,” Lee said grimly. “Charley has just come down from Antelope Pass. He found one of my cows dead, with a bullet hole through the forehead. The ashes of a fire were there, and in the brush not far away a running iron.”
The eyes of Norris narrowed to slits. He was the cattle detective of the association and for a year now the rustlers had outgeneraled him. “I’ll have you take me to the spot, Charley. Get a move on you and we’ll get there soon as the moon is up.”
Melissy gripped the arms of her chair tightly with both hands. She was looking at Norris with a new expression, a kind of breathless fear. She 54 knew him for a man who could not be swerved from the thing he wanted. For all his easy cynicism, he had the reputation of being a bloodhound on the trail. Moreover, she knew that he was no friend to Jack Flatray. Why had she left that running iron as evidence to convict its owner? What folly not to have removed it from the immediate scene of the crime!
The cattle detective and her father had moved a few steps away and were talking in low tones. Melissy became aware of a footfall. The man who called himself Morse came around the corner of the house and stopped at the porch steps.
“May I speak to you a moment, Miss Lee?” he said in a low voice.
“Of course.”
The voice of Norris rose to an irritated snarl. “Tell you I’ve got evidence, Lee. Mebbe it’s not enough to convict, but it satisfies me a-plenty that Jack Flatray’s the man.”
Melissy was frozen to a tense attention. Her whole mind was on what passed between the detective and her father. Otherwise she would have noticed the swift change that transformed the tenderfoot.
The rancher answered with impatient annoyance. “You’re ’way off, Norris. I don’t care anything about your evidence. The idea is plumb ridiculous. Twenty odd years I’ve known him. He’s the best they make, a pure through and through. Not a 55 crooked hair in his head. I’ve eat out of the same frying pan too often with that boy not to know what he is. You go bury those suspicions of yours immediate. There’s nothing to them.”
Norris grumbled objections as they moved toward the stable. Melissy drew a long breath and brought herself back to the tenderfoot.
He stood like a coiled spring, head thrust far forward from the shoulders. The look in his black eyes was something new to her experience. For hate, passion, caution were all mirrored there.
“You know Mr. Norris,” she said quickly.
He started. “What did you say his name was?” he asked with an assumption of carelessness.
“Norris—Philip Norris. He is a cattle detective.”
“Never heard of Mr. Norris before in my life,” he answered, but it was observable that he still breathed deep.
She did not believe him. Some tie in their buried past bound these two men together. They must have known each other in the South years ago, and one of them at least was an enemy of the other. There might come a day when she could use this knowledge to save Jack Flatray from the punishment dogging his heels. Melissy filed it away in her memory for future reference.
“You wanted to speak to me,” she suggested.
“I’m going away.”
“What for?” 56
“Because I’m not a hound. I can’t blackmail a woman.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean that you’ve found work here for me because I saw what you did over by Antelope Pass. We made a bargain. Oh, not in words, but a bargain just the same! You were to keep my secret because I knew yours. I release you from your part of it. Give me up if you think it is your duty. I’ll not tell what I know.”
“That wasn’t how you talked the other day.”
“No. It’s how I talk now. I’m a hunted man, wanted for murder. I make you a present of the information.”
“You make me a present of what I already know, Mr. Diller, alias Morse, alias Bellamy.”
“You guessed it the first day?”
“Yes.”
“And meant to keep quiet about it?”
“Yes, I meant to shelter you from the punishment you deserve.” She added with a touch of bitter self-scorn: “I was doing what I had to do.”
“You don’t have to do it any longer.” He looked straight at her with his head up. “And how do you know what I deserve? Who made you a judge about these facts? Grant for the sake of argument I killed him. Do you know I wasn’t justified?”
His fierce boldness put her on the defense. “A man sure of his cause does not run away. The paper said this Shep Boone was shot from ambush. 57 Nothing could justify such a thing. When you did that——”
“I didn’t. Don’t believe it, Miss Lee.”
“He was shot from behind, the paper said.”
“Do I look like a man who would kill from ambush?”
She admitted to herself that this clear-eyed Southerner did not look like an assassin. Life in the open had made her a judge of such men as she had been accustomed to meet, but for days she had been telling herself she could no longer trust her judgment. Her best friend was a rustler. By a woman’s logic it followed that since Jack Flatray was a thief this man might have committed all the crimes in the calendar.
“I