He broke off suddenly, but did not remove his eyes from hers. It was she who turned away, pretending to find it necessary to adjust the window-curtain. It was impossible to sit quietly while he looked at her that way, his eyes all without warning filling with a look for any girl to read a look of glowing admiration, almost a look of pure love-making. Norton sighed and again his head moved restlessly on his pillow.

"I've had time to think here of late," he said after a little. "More time to think than I've ever had before in my life. About everything; myself and Jim Galloway and you. . . . I have decided to send word to the district attorney to let Galloway go," he added, again watching her. "I am not going to appear against him and there's no case if I don't."

"But . . ." she began, wondering.

"There are no buts about it. Suppose I can get him convicted, which I doubt; he'd get a light sentence, would appeal, at most would be out of the way a couple of years or so. And then it would all be to do over again. No; I want him out in the open, where he can go as far as he wants to go. And then . . ."

She saw how his body stiffened as he braced himself with his feet against the foot-board.

"We won't talk shop," she said gently. "It isn't good for you. Don't think about such things any more than you have to."

"I've got to think about something," he said impatiently. "Can I think about you?"

"Why not?" she answered as lightly as she had spoken before.

"Maybe that isn't good for me either," he answered.

"Nonsense. It's always good for us to think about our friends."

His eyes wandered from hers, rested a moment upon the little table near his bedhead and came back to her, narrowing a little.

"Will you set a chair against that window-shade?" he asked. "The light at the side hurts my eyes."

It was a natural request and she turned naturally to do what he asked.

But, even with her back turned, she knew that he had reached out swiftly for something that lay on the table, that he had thrust it out of sight under his pillow.

Mrs. Engle returned and Virginia, staying another minute, said good-by.

As she went out she glanced down at the table. In her room she asked herself what it was that he had s.n.a.t.c.hed and hidden. It seemed a strange thing to do and the question perplexed her; while she attached no importance to it, it was there like a pebble in one's shoe, refusing to be ignored.

That night, just as she was going to sleep, she knew. Out of a half doze she had visualized the table with its couple of bottles, a withering rose, a sc.r.a.p of note-paper, a fountain pen. The pen . . .

it was Patten's . . . had evidently leaked and had been wiped carelessly upon the sheet of paper, left lying with the paper half wrapped around it. She had noted carelessly a few scrawled words in Patten's slovenly hand. And she knew that it had been removed while she turned her back, removed by a hand which, in its haste, had slipped the pen with it under the pillow.

She went to sleep incensed with herself that she gave the matter another thought. But she kept asking herself what it was that Patten had written that Roderick Norton did not want her to read.

CHAPTER XIV

A FREE MAN

"I am a free man, if you please." The sheriff stood in the hotel doorway, looking down upon her as she sat in her favorite veranda chair. "I have given my keeper his fee and sent him away. May I watch you while you read?"

Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of welcome. He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt and haggard.

"I shouldn't be reading in this light, anyway," she said. "I hadn't noticed that the sun was down. It is good to be what you call free again, isn't it?"

He laughed softly, put back his head, filled his lungs. Then he came on to her and stood leaning against the wall, his hat c.o.c.ked to one side to hide the bandage.

"The world is good," he announced with gay positiveness. "Especially when you've been away from it for a spell and weren't quite sure what was next. And especially, too, when you've had time to think. Did you ever take off a week and just do nothing but think?"

"One doesn't have time for that sort of thing as a rule," she admitted.

"There's a chair standing empty if you care to let me in on your deductions."

"I don't want to sit down or lie down until I'm ready to drop," he grinned down at her. "A bed makes me sick at my stomach and a chair is pretty nearly as bad. I'd like almighty well to get a horse between my knees . . . and _ride_! Suppose I'd fall to pieces if I tried it right now?"

"Sure of it. And not so sure that you haven't discharged your keeper prematurely. You mustn't think of such things."

"There you go. Forbidding me to think again! . . . Believe I will sit down; would you believe that a full-grown man like me could get as weak as a cat this quick?"

He took the chair just beyond her, tilted it back against the wall, his booted heels caught under its elevated legs, and glanced away from her to the colorful sky above San Juan's scattered houses in the west.

"Yes, sir," he continued his train of thought, "I'd like a horse between my knees; I'd like to ride out yonder into the sunset, to meet the night as it comes down; I'd like the feeling of nothing but the stars over me instead of the smothery roof of a house. Doesn't it appeal to you, too?"

"Yes," she said.

"You on Persis, with me on my big roan, riding not as we rode that other night, but just for the fun of it. I'd like to ride like the devil. . . . You don't mind my saying what I mean, do you? . . . to go scooting across the sage-brush letting out a yell at every jump, boring holes in the night with my gun, making all of the racket and dust that one man can make. Ever feel that way? just like getting outside and making a noise? Let me talk! I'm the one who has been shut up for so long my tongue has started to grow fast to the roof of my mouth. At first I could do nothing but lie flat on my back in a sort of fog, seeing nothing clearly, thinking not at all. Then came the hours in which I could do nothing but think, under orders to keep still. Think?

Why, I thought about everything that ever happened, most things that might happen, and a whole lot that never will. Now comes the third stage; I can talk better than I can walk. . . . Do you mind listening while a man raves?"

"Not in the least." She found his mood contagious and, smiling in that quick, bright way natural to her, showed for a moment the twin dimples of which together with a host of other things he had had ample time to think during his bedroom imprisonment. "Please rave on."

"In due course," he mused, "the fourth stage will arrive and I can be doing something besides talk, can't I? Now let me tell you about the King's Palace."

"You begin well."

"The King's Palace is where we are going on our first outing. That was decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M. You and I and, if you like, Florrie and your kid brother. We'll ride out there in the very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone. We'll lunch and loaf there all day. For lunch we will have bacon and coffee, cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms. We will have some trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about. We will have cheese, perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert. We'll ride home in the dusk and the dark."

"The King's Palace?" she asked curiously. "I never heard of such a place. Are you making it all up?"

"Not a bit of it. It's all that's left of some of the old ruins of the same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs. . . . Do you know why I am bound to get Jim Galloway's tag soon or late?"

Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.

"Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other words, because he opposes the law and you represent it."

"Because he plays the game wrong! Some more results of a long week of nothing to do but think things out. There is just one way for a law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it."

"You mean that a man can get away with it? Surely not for good?"

But he nodded thoughtfully at the slowly fading strata of shaded colors splashed across the sky.

"A man can get away with it for keeps . . . if he plays the game right.

Jim Galloway isn't that man and so I'll get him. He has ignored the first necessary principle, which is the lone hand."

"You mean he takes men into his confidence?"

"And he goes on and ignores the second necessary principle; a man must stop short of murder. If he turns gangman and killer, he ties his own rope around his neck. If a man like Galloway, a man with brains, power, without fear, without scruple, should decide to loot this corner of the world or any other corner, and set about it right, playing the lone hand invariably, he would be a man I couldn't bring in in a thousand years. But Galloway has slipped up; he has too many Moragas and Antones and Vidals at his heels; he has been the cause, directly or indirectly, of too many killings. . . . A theft will be forgotten in time, the hue and cry die down; spilled blood cries to heaven after ten years."

"Galloway is back in San Juan."