Until now he had not seen the gun in her hand. Her quick gesture showed it to him.

"Charles Patten," she told him emphatically, "I am risking Mr. Norton's life; I am therefore risking my own. Understand what that means.

Understand just what you have got to win or lose by to-night's work.

Consider that I pledge you my word not to implicate you in what you do; that if worse came to worse, you could claim and I would admit that you were forced at the point of a gun to do as I told you. Oh, I can shoot straight! And finally, I will shoot straight, as G.o.d watches me, rather than let you go now and stop what I have undertaken! Think of it well, Charles Patten!"

Patten, being as weak of mind as he was pudgy of hand, having besides that peculiar form of craft which is vouchsafed his type, furthermore more or less of a coward, saw matters quite as Virginia wished him.

Together they awaited the coming of the dawn. The girl, realizing to the uttermost what lay before her, forced herself to rest, lying still under the stars, schooling herself to the steady-nerved action which was to have its supreme test.

Just before the dawn they had coffee and a bite to eat from Norton's little pack. Close to the drugged man they builded a rude low table by dragging the squared blocks of fallen stone from their place by the wall. Upon this Virginia placed the saddle-blankets, neatly folded.

Already Patten was showing signs of nervousness. Looking into her face he saw that it was white and drawn but very calm. Patten was asking himself countless questions, many of them impossible of answer yet.

She was closing her mind to everything but the one supreme matter.

He helped her give the chloroform when she told him that there was sufficient light and that she was ready. He brought water, placed instruments, stood by to do what she told him. His nervousness had grown into fear; he started now and then, jerking about guiltily, as though he foresaw an interruption.

Together they got Norton's inert form upon the folded blankets.

Patten's hands shook a little; he asked for a sip of brandy from her flask. She granted it, and while Patten drank she cut away the hair from the unconscious man's scalp. Long ago her fingers had made their examination, were a.s.sured that her diagnosis was correct. Her hands were as untrembling as the steel of her knife. She made the first incision, drawing back the flap of skin and flesh, revealing the bone of the skull. . . .

For forty-five minutes she worked, her hands swift, sure, capable, unerring. It was done. She was right. The under-table of the skull had been fractured; there was the bone pressure upon the underlying area of brain-tissue. She had removed the pressure and with it any true pathological cause of the theft impulse.

She drew a bandage about the sleeping eyes. She made Patten bring his own saddle-blanket; it was fixed across the entrance of the anteroom of the King's Palace, darkening it. Then she went to the ledge just outside and stood there, staring with wide eyes across the little meadow with its flowers and birds and water, down the slope of the mountain, to the miles of desert. She had now but to await the awakening.

CHAPTER XXII

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

When Norton stirred and would have opened his eyes but for the bandage drawn over them, she was at his side. She had been kneeling there for a long time, waiting. Her hand was on his where it had crept softly from his wrist.

"You must lie very still," she commanded gently. "I am with you and everything is all right. There was . . . an accident. No, don't try to move the cloth; please, Roderick." She pushed his hand back down to his side. "We are in the King's Palace, just you and I, and everything is all right."

He was feverish, and she soothed him; sick, and she mothered him and nursed him; troubled, uncertain, perplexed, and she comforted him. At the first she went no further than saying that there had been an accident; that already she had sent to San Juan for all that was needed to make him comfortable; that Mr. Engle had been instructed to speed a man to the railroad for further necessities; that now for his own sake, for her sake, he must just lie very still . . . try not even to think.

He was listless, seeming without volition, quite willing to surrender himself into her keeping. What dazed thoughts were his upon this first awakening were lost, forgotten in the brief doze into which she succeeded in luring him. When again he stirred and woke she was still at his side, kneeling upon the hard rock floor beside him. . . . She had had Patten help her to lift him down from the table before she despatched Patten with the note for John Engle. Again she pleaded with him to lie still and just trust to her.

He was very still. She knew that he was trying to piece together his fragmentary thoughts and impressions, seeking to bridge over from last night to to-day. So she talked softly with him, soothing him alike with the tenderness of her voice and the pressure and gentle stroke of her hand upon his hand and arm. He had had an accident but was going to be all right from now on. But he must not be moved for a little.

Therefore Engle would come soon, and perhaps Mrs. Engle with him. And a wagon bringing a real bed and fresh clean sheets and all of those articles which she had listed. It would not be very long now until Engle came.

But at last when she paused his hand shut down upon hers and he asked quietly:

"I didn't dream it all, did I, Virginia? It is hard to know just what I did and what I dreamed I did. But it seems more than a dream. . . .

Was it I who robbed Kemble of the Quigley mines?"

"Yes," she told him lightly, as though it were a matter of small moment. "But you were not responsible for what you did."

"And there were other robberies? I even tried to steal from you?"

"Yes," she answered again.

"And you wanted to have me submit to an operation? And I would not?"

"Yes."

"And then . . . then you . . . you did it?"

So she explained, feeling that certainty would be less harmful to him now than a continual struggle to penetrate the curtain of semidarkness obscuring his memory.

"I took it upon myself," she told him at the end. "I took the chance that you might die; that it might be I who had killed you. Perhaps I had no right to do it. But I have succeeded; I have drawn you back from kleptomania to your own clear moral strength. You will get well, Rod Norton; you will be an honest man. But I took it upon myself to take the chances for you. Now . . . do you think that you can forgive me?"

He appeared to be pondering the matter. When his reply came it was couched in the form of a question:

"Would you have done it, Virginia . . . if you didn't love me a little as I love you?"

And her answer comforted him. He was sleeping when the Engles came.

Later came the big wagon, one of Engle's men driving, Ignacio Chavez and two other Mexicans accompanying on horseback. Virginia had forgotten nothing. Quick hands did her bidding now, altering the anteroom of the King's Palace into a big airy bedroom. There was a great rug upon the floor, a white-sheeted and counterpaned bed, fresh pajamas, table, chair, alcohol-stove, gla.s.ses and cups and water-pitchers. There were cloths for fresh bandages, wide palm-leaf fans . . . there was even ice and the promise of further ice to come.

The sun was shut out by heavy curtains across the main entrance and the broken-out holes in the easterly wall.

"My dear," said Mrs. Engle, taking both of Virginia's hands into her own, "I don't know just what has happened and I don't care to know until you get good and ready to tell me about it. But I can see by looking at you that you are at the end of your tether. I'm going to take care of Roddy now while you sleep at least a couple of hours."

She and Engle had asked themselves the question as soon as Virginia's note came to them: "What in the world were she and Norton doing on the mountainside at that time of night?" But they had no intention of asking it of any one else. Rather John Engle hastened to answer it for others.

"_Muchachos_" he said to the men when he sent them back to San Juan, "there was an accident last night. Senor Norton had a fall from his horse, striking his head. My cousin, Miss Page, together with Senor Norton and Senor Patten, was taking a short cut this way to make a call at Pozo. Senor Patten and Miss Page succeeded in getting Senor Norton here, where they had to operate upon him immediately. He is doing well now, thanks to their prompt action; he will be well soon. You may tell his friends."

And then, seeing little that he could do here and much that he might accomplish elsewhere, John Engle rode on his spurs back to San Juan to lay down the law to Patten.

Throughout the days and nights which followed, Virginia and Mrs. Engle nursed Norton back into a semblance of strength. One of them was always at his side. When at last the bandage might be removed from the blindfolded eyes Norton's questing glance found Virginia first of all.

"Virginia," he said quietly, "thanks to you I can start in all over now."

She understood. So did Mrs. Engle. For Norton had explained to both the banker and his wife, holding nothing back from them, telling them frankly of crimes committed, of his attempted abduction of the girl who in turn had "abducted him." He had rest.i.tutions to make without the least unnecessary delay. He must square himself and he thanked G.o.d that he could square himself, that his crimes had been bloodless, that he had but to return the stolen moneys. And, to wipe his slate clean, he stood ready to pay to the full for what he had done, to offer his confession openly, to accept without a murmur whatever decree the court might award him.

Again John Engle did his bit. He went to the county-seat and saw the district attorney, an upright man, but one who saw clearly. The lawyer laid his work aside and came immediately with Engle to the King's Palace.

"Any court, having the full evidence," he said crisply, "would hold you blameless. Give me the money you have taken; I shall see that it is returned and that no questions are asked. And if you've got any idiotic compulsion about open confession . . . Well, think of somebody besides yourself for a change. Try thinking about the Wonder Girl a little, it will be good for you."

For he never called her anything but that, the Wonder Girl. When he had heard everything, he came to her after his straightforward fashion and gripped her hand until he hurt her.

"I didn't know they made girls like you," he told her before she even knew who he was.

It was he who, summoning all of his forensic eloquence, finally quieted Norton's disturbed mind. Norton in his weakened condition was all for making a clean breast before the world, for acknowledging himself unfit for his office, for resigning. But in the end when he was told curtly that he owed vastly more to the county than to his stupid conscience, that he had been chosen to get Jim Galloway, that that was his job, that he could do all the resigning he wanted to afterward, and that finally he was not to consider his own personal feelings until he had thought of Virginia's, Norton gave over his regrets and merely waxed impatient for the time when he could finish his work and go back to Las Flores rancho. For it was understood that he would not go alone.

"I'll free del Rio because I have to, not because I want to," said the lawyer at the end. "Trusting to you to bring him in again later. He is one of Galloway's crowd and I know it, despite his big bluffs.

Galloway is away right now, somewhere below the border. Just what he is up to I don't know. I think del Rio does. When Galloway gets back you keep your eye on the two of them."