“You’ll do it—for Barbara—won’t you? Say you will, man! Let me hear you say it—now!”
“I’m givin’ you my word,” returned Harlan slowly. And now he leaned still closer to the dying man and whispered long to him.
When he concluded Morgan fought hard to raise himself to a sitting posture; he strained, dragging himself in the sand in an effort to see Harlan’s face. But the black desert night had settled over them, and all Morgan could see of Harlan was the dim outlines of his head.
“Say it again, man! Say it again, an’ light a match so’s I can see you while you’re sayin’ it!”
There was a pause. Then a match flared its light revealing Harlan’s face, set in serious lines.
“I wouldn’t lie to you—now—Morgan,” he said; “I’m goin’ to the Lamo country to bust up Deveny’s gang.”
Morgan stared hard at the other while the flickering light lasted with a strained intensity that transfigured his face, suffusing it with a glow that could not have been more eloquent with happiness had the supreme Master of the universe drawn back the mysterious veil of life to permit him to look upon the great secret.
When the match flickered and went out, and the darkness of the desert reigned again, Morgan sank back with a tremulous, satisfied sigh.
“I’m goin’ now,” he said; “I’m goin’—knowin’ God has been good to me.” He breathed fast, gaspingly. And for a moment he spoke hurriedly, as though fearful he would not be given time to say what he wanted to say:
“Someone plugged me—last night while I was sleepin’. Shot me in the chest—here. Didn’t give me no chance. There was three of them. My fire had gone out an’ I couldn’t see their faces. Likely Laskar an’ Dolver was two. The other one must have sloped. It was him shot me. Tried to knife me, too; but I fought him, an’ he broke away. It happened behind a rock—off to the left—a red boulder.
“I grabbed at him an’ caught somethin’. What it was busted. I couldn’t wait to find out what it was. I’m hopin’ it’s somethin’ that’ll help you to find out who the man was. I ain’t goin’ to be mean—just when I’m dyin’; but if you was to look for that thing, find it, an’ could tell who the man is, mebbe some day you’d find it agreeable to pay him for what he done to me.”
He became silent; no sound except his fast, labored breathing broke the dead calm of the desert night.
“Somethin’ more than the gold an’ Barbara back of it all,” he muttered thickly, seeming to lapse into a state of semiconsciousness in which the burden that was upon his mind took the form of involuntary speech: “Somethin’ big back of it—somethin’ they ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about. But Harlan—he’ll take care of—” He paused; then his voice leaped. “Why, there’s Barbara now! Why, honey, I thought—I—why——”
His voice broke, trailing off into incoherence.
After a while Harlan rose to his feet. An hour later he found the red rock Morgan had spoken of—and with a flaming bunch of mesquite in hand he searched the vicinity.
In a little depression caused by the heel of a boot he came upon a glittering object, which he examined in the light of the flaming mesquite, which he had thrown into the sand after picking up the glittering object. Kneeling beside the dying flame he discovered that the glittering trifle he had found was a two- or three-inch section of gold watch chain of peculiar pattern. He tucked it into a pocket of his trousers.
Later, he mounted Purgatory and fled into the appalling blackness, heading westward—the big black horse loping easily.
The first streaks of dawn found Purgatory drinking deeply from the green-streaked moisture of Kelso’s water-hole. And when the sun stuck a glowing rim over the desert’s horizon, to resume his rule over the baked and blighted land, the big black horse and his rider were traveling steadily, the only life visible in the wide area of desolation—a moving blot, an atom behind which was death and the eternal, whispered promise of death.
CHAPTER III
A GIRL WAITS
Lamo, sprawling on a sun-baked plain perhaps a mile from the edge of the desert, was one of those towns which owed its existence to the instinct of men to foregather. It also was indebted for its existence to the greed of a certain swarthy-faced saloon-keeper named Joel Ladron, who, anticipating the edict of a certain town marshal of another town that shall not be mentioned, had piled his effects into a prairie schooner—building and goods—and had taken the south trail—which would lead him wherever he wanted to stop.
It had chanced that he had stopped at the present site of Lamo. Ladron saw a trail winding over the desert, vanishing into the eastern distance; and he knew that where trails led there were sure to be thirsty men who would be eager to look upon his wares.
Ladron’s history is not interesting. As time fled to the monotonous clink of coins over the bar he set up in the frame shack that faced the desert trail, Ladron’s importance in Lamo was divided by six.
The other dispensers had not come together; they had appeared as the needs of the population seemed to demand—and all had flourished.
Lamo’s other buildings had appeared without ostentation. There were twenty of them. A dozen of the twenty, for one reason or another, need receive no further mention. Of the remaining few, one was occupied by Sheriff Gage; two others by stores; one answered as an office and storage-room for the stage company; and still another was distinguished by a crude sign which ran across its weather-beaten front, bearing the legend: “Lamo Eating-House.” The others were private residences.
Lamo’s buildings made some pretense of aping the architecture of buildings in other towns. The eating-house was a two-story structure, with an outside stairway leading to its upper floor. It had a flat roof and an adobe chimney. Its second floor had been subdivided into lodging-rooms. Its windows were small, grimy.
Not one of Lamo’s buildings knew paint. The structures, garish husks of squalor, befouled the calm, pure atmosphere, and mocked the serene majesty of nature.
For, beginning at the edge of “town,” a contrast to the desert was presented by nature. It was a mere step, figuratively, from that land from which came the whisper of death, to a wild, virgin section where the hills, the green-brown ridges, the wide sweeps of plain, and the cool shadows of timber clumps breathed of the promise, the existence, of life.
To Barbara Morgan, seated at one of the east windows of the Lamo Eating-House—in the second story, where she could look far out into the desert—the contrast between the vivid color westward and the dun and dead flatness eastward, was startling. For she knew her father had entered the desert on his way to Pardo, on some business he had not mentioned; and the whispered threat that the desert carried was borne to her ears as she watched.
On a morning, two days before, Morgan had left the Rancho Seco for Pardo. The girl had watched him go with a feeling—almost a conviction—that she should have kept him at home. She had not mentioned to him that she had a presentiment of evil, for she assured herself that she should have outgrown those puerile impulses of the senses. And yet, having watched him depart, she passed a sleepless night, and early the next morning had saddled her horse to ride to Lamo, there to await her father’s return.
It was late in the afternoon when she reached Lamo; and she had gone directly