In spite of him a quick flush ran up to Thornton's brow. For his first thought was that Winifred Waverly....

"Wrong guess, Buck," chuckled Comstock, his good humour seemingly flowing from an inexhaustible source. "It's from a man."

"Who?" demanded Thornton sharply, putting out his hand.

Comstock's amus.e.m.e.nt welled up into open laughter.

"It's a prime joke of the Fates," he cried cheerfully. "Here is William Comstock, United States Deputy Marshal, carrying a message from no less a person than Jimmie Clayton, jail bird, crook and murderer! A man wanted in two states!"

"Clayton!" said Thornton in amazement. "You don't mean to tell me...."

"Oh, he'd never seen me, you know. Nor I him. But then I've seen his picture more than once and I know all about him. He's keeping low but he took a chance on me. I was just a whiskey drummer last night, you know, and happened to let it out that I was riding this way this morning on my way to Dry Town. So Jimmie slipped me the letter! Read it."

Thornton took it, wondering. The envelope was sealed and much soiled where Jimmie Clayton's hand had closed the mucilaged flap. He tore it open and read almost at a glance:

Deere buck come the same place tonight I want to put you wise. Theare is sum danger to you buck. Keap your eyes open on the way. I will be there late tonight.

j.C.

Thornton looked up to see the twinkling eyes of Two-Hand Billy Comstock watching him.

"You had better tell me what he says," said Comstock coolly. "I don't know but that I should have been well within my rights to open it, eh?

But I hate to open another man's private mail."

Thornton hesitated.

He must not forget that Comstock was an officer--that even now he was upon a state errand--that it was his duty to bring such men as Jimmie Clayton to justice. He must not forget that Clayton had been a friend to him--or, at least, that he had credited the crook with a feeling of friendship and the care of a friend.

True, Comstock, who seemed to know everything, had said in a matter-of-fact way that it had been Jimmie Clayton who had shot him that night between Juarez and El Paso. But nothing was proven. He had long thought of Clayton as a man to whom he owed a debt of grat.i.tude, and now with the man, hunted as he was, his sympathy naturally went out to him, evil-doer as he knew him to be.

Evidently Comstock read what was pa.s.sing in the cowboy's mind.

"I'm not asking you to squeal on him, Buck," he said quietly. "Look here, I could have taken him in last night if I had wanted to. I could have got him a week ago if I had wanted him. But I didn't want him--I don't want him now. I'm hunting bigger game."

Still Thornton hesitated, but now his hesitation was brief. He swung his horse around toward the cabin.

"Let's ride back, Comstock," he said shortly. "I want a good long talk with you."

Not another word about the matter did either man say as they unsaddled or as they went up the knoll to the cabin. Not a word until the fragrance of boiling coffee and frying bacon went out to mingle with the freshness of the new day. Then as they sat at table and Comstock began to soak the biscuits Thornton had made in the bacon gravy, they looked at each other, and their eyes were alike grave and equally stern.

"First thing," began Comstock, "let me finish my news. Charley Bedloe was murdered last night."

"I know."

"The devil you do? All right. Then here's something else. His brother, the Kid, they call him, swears that you killed him."

"I know," nodded Thornton as quietly as before.

Comstock made no pretence of hiding his surprise.

"I thought you had left before the shooting happened. I was all over town; no one saw you...."

"Except the Kid. He did. He saw me outside the window through which somebody shot Charley."

Comstock returned his attention to his biscuit and gravy.

"I'm a failure as a news monger," he grunted. "Go on. You tell _me_."

And Thornton told him. Before he had finished Comstock had pushed back his chair and was letting his coffee go cold. For Thornton had told him not alone of what had happened at the Here's How Saloon last night, but of the work that Broderick and Pollard were doing, of all of his certainties and his suspicions, of the "planted" evidence he had found in the hay loft, of the missing saddle. Only he did not mention the name of a girl, and he remembered that Pollard was her uncle and spared him where he could.

"What a game! By high heaven, what a game!" Comstock pursed his lips into a long whistle. Then he banged his first down upon the table, his eyes grown wonderfully bright and keen, crying softly, "I've got him, I've got him at last, and he's going to pay to the uttermost for all he has done in the last seven years ... and before! Got him--by thunder!"

"Pollard?" asked the cowboy quickly.

"No. Not Pollard."

"Then Broderick?"

"Not Broderick."

"Bedloe?... The Kid?"

"What does his name matter? I'll give him a dozen names when the time comes, and by heaven he's got a crime to pay for for every name he ever wore!"

He grew suddenly silent and sat staring out through the open door at the distant mountains. At last he turned back toward Thornton, his eyes very clear, his expression placid.

"Guess why they are waiting five days more before springing their mine?"

he asked abruptly.

"Yes. I figured it out a little while ago, after I found the truck in my loft. In five days it'll be the first of the month. On the first of the month the stage from the Rock Creek Mines will be worth holding up. It carried in ten thousand dollars last month. At times, there has been a lot more. Just as sure as a hen lays eggs, it is due to be robbed on the first; they'll find something here to prove I was the hold up man, and I...."

"And you go over the road for life or take a drop at the end of a rope?

And they quit being badmen and buy ranches? That it?"

"That's it. It's a gamble, but...."

"But it's a d.a.m.ned good gamble," laughed Comstock softly. "You ought to be sheriff, Buck."

But Buck, thinking of how blind to all this he had been so long, how not even now would he have his eyes open were it not for a girl, longed with an intense longing for the end of this thing when she might be free to go from the house of a man like Henry Pollard, when he might be free to go to her and...

"How does it happen," he asked suddenly, "that you are not after Jimmie Clayton?"

"When I'm out for a big grizzily," returned Comstock, "I can't waste my time on little brown bears! That's one thing. Another is that Jimmie Clayton never had a chance of getting away. If he lives ten days he'll be nabbed, and he won't live ten days. He's shot to pieces and he's sick on top of it. I told you last night the poor devil is a fool and a tool rather than a real badman. If he's got a chance to die quietly, why let him die outside of jail. It's all one in the end."

Thornton had always felt a sort of pity for Jimmie Clayton; it had always seemed to him that the poor devil was merely one of the weaker vessels that go down the stream of life, borne this way and that by the current that sweeps them on, with little enough chance from the beginning, having come warped and misshapen from the hands of the potter. And now Jimmie was about to die. Well, whether it had been Jimmie Clayton or another who had shot him that night down in Texas, he would heed the entreaty of the letter and go to him for the last time.

So that night, when darkness came, Thornton left Comstock at the cabin and rode out towards the mountains, towards the Poison Hole and the dugout at its side.