"Then we'll drop that subject. I'll ask you a question. Can you tell me where I can find a paroled convict named Blackwell?"

Fendrick shook his head. "Don't know the gentleman. A friend of yours?"

"One of yours. Better come through, Ca.s.s. I'm satisfied you weren't actually in this robbery, but there is such a thing as accessory after the fact. Now, I'm going to get that man. If you want to put yourself right, it's up to you to give me the information I want. Where is he?"

"Haven't got him in _my_ pocket."

The officer rose, not one whit less amiable. "I didn't expect you to tell me. That's all right. I'll find him. But in the meantime I'll have to lock you up till this thing is settled."

From his inside coat pocket, Fendrick drew a sealed envelope, wrote the date across the front, and handed it to O'Connor.

"Keep this, Bucky, and remember that I gave it to you. Put it in a safe place, but don't open the envelope till I give the word. Understand?"

"I hear what you say, but I don't understand what you mean--what's back of it."

"It isn't intended that you should yet. I'm protecting myself. That's all."

"I guessed that much. Well, if you're ready, I'll arrange your lodgings for the night, Ca.s.s. I reckon I'll put you up at a hotel with one of the boys."

"Just as you say."

Fendrick rose, and the two men pa.s.sed into the street.

CHAPTER XIV

A TOUCH OF THE THIRD DEGREE

Cullison was not the man to acknowledge himself beaten so long as there was a stone unturned. In the matter of the Del Oro homestead claim he moved at once. All of the county commissioners were personal friends of his, and he went to them with a plan for a new road to run across the Del Oro at the point where the canon walls opened to a valley.

"What in Mexico is the good of a county road there, Luck? Can't run a wagon over them mountains and down to the river. Looks to me like it would be a road from nowhere to nowhere," Alec Flandrau protested, puzzled at his friend's request.

"I done guessed it," Yesler announced with a grin. "Run a county road through, and Ca.s.s Fendrick can't fence the river off from Luck's cows.

Luck ain't aiming to run any wagon over that road."

The Map of Texas man got up and stamped with delight. "I get you. We'll learn Ca.s.s to take a joke, by gum. Luck sure gets a county road for his cows to amble over down to the water. Ca.s.s can have his darned old homestead now."

When Fendrick heard that the commissioners had condemned a right of way for a road through his homestead he unloaded on the desert air a rich vocabulary. For here would have been a simple way out of his trouble if he had only thought of it. Instead of which he had melodramatically kidnapped his enemy and put himself within reach of the law and of Cullison's vengeance.

Nor did Luck confine his efforts to self-defense. He knew that to convict Fendrick of the robbery he must first lay hands upon Blackwell.

It was, however, Bucky that caught the convict. The two men met at the top of a mountain pa.s.s. Blackwell, headed south, was slipping down toward Stone's horse ranch when they came face to face. Before the bad man had his revolver out, he found himself looking down the barrel of the ranger's leveled rifle.

"I wouldn't," Bucky murmured genially.

"What you want me for?" Blackwell demanded sulkily.

"For the W. & S. robbery."

"I'm not the man you want. My name's Johnson."

"I'll put up with you till I find the man I do want, Mr. Johnson," Bucky told him cheerfully. "Climb down from that horse. No, I wouldn't try that.

Keep your hands up."

With his prisoner in front of him, O'Connor turned townward. They jogged down out of the hills through dark gulches and cactus-clad arroyos. The sharp catclaw caught at their legs. Tangled mesquite and ironwood made progress slow. They reached in time Apache Desert, and here Bucky camped.

He hobbled his prisoner's feet and put around his neck a rope, the other end of which was tied to his own waist. Then he built a small fire of greasewood and made coffee for them both. The prisoner slept, but his captor did not. For he could take no chances of an escape.

The outlines of the mountain ranges loomed shadowy and dim on both sides.

The moonlight played strange tricks with the mesquit and the giant cactus, a grove of which gave to the place an awesome aspect of some ghostly burial ground of a long vanished tribe.

Next day they reached Saguache. Bucky took his prisoner straight to the ranger's office and telephoned to Cullison.

"Don't I get anything to eat?" growled the convict while they waited.

"When I'm ready."

Bucky believed in fair play. The man had not eaten since last night. But then neither had he. It happened that Bucky was tough as whipcord, as supple and untiring as a hickory sapling. Well, Blackwell was a pretty hard nut to crack, too. The lieutenant did not know anything about book psychology, but he had observed that hunger and weariness try out the stuff that is in a man. Under the sag of them many a will snaps that would have held fast if sustained by a good dinner and a sound night's sleep.

This is why so many "bad men," gun fighters with a reputation for gameness, wilt on occasion like whipped curs. In the old days this came to nearly every terror of the border. Some day when he had a jumping toothache, or when his nerves were frayed from a debauch, a silent stranger walked into his presence, looked long and steadily into his eyes, and ended forever his reign of lawlessness. Sometimes the two-gun man was "planted," sometimes he subsided into innocuous peace henceforth.

The ranger had a shrewd instinct that the hour had come to batter down this fellow's dogged resistance. Therefore he sent for Cullison, the man whom the convict most feared.

The very look of the cattleman, with that grim, hard, capable aspect, shook Blackwell's nerve.

"So you've got him, Bucky."

Luck looked the man over as he sat handcuffed beside the table and read in his face both terror and a sly, dogged cunning. Once before the fellow had been put through the third degree. Something of the sort he fearfully expected now. Villainy is usually not consistent. This hulking bully should have been a hardy ruffian. Instead, he shrank like a schoolgirl from the thought of physical pain.

"Stand up," ordered Cullison quietly.

Blackwell got to his feet at once. He could not help it, even though the fear in his eyes showed that he cowered before the antic.i.p.ated attack.

"Don't hit me," he whined.

Luck knew the man sweated under the punishment his imagination called up, and he understood human nature too well to end the suspense by making real the vision. For then the worst would be past, since the actual is never equal to what is expected.

"Well?" Luck watched him with the look of tempered steel in his hard eyes.

The convict flinched, moistened his lips with his tongue, and spoke at last.

"I--I--Mr. Cullison, I want to explain. Every man is liable to make a mistake--go off half c.o.c.ked. I didn't do right. That's a fac'. I can explain all that, but I'm sick now--awful sick."

Cullison laughed harshly. "You'll be sicker soon."

"You promised you wouldn't do anything if we turned you loose," the man plucked up courage to remind him.

"I promised the law wouldn't do anything. You'll understand the distinction presently."