"Oh," said Gloria, "I'll just poke around. It will be fun to see what kind of people live here."

He put the horses in the stable, watered and fed them himself, and came back to her outside the front double doors. She had dropped down on a box in the sun; he thought that there was a little droop to her shoulders. And small wonder, he admitted, with a tardy sense of guilt.

All these hours in the saddle----

"Tired much?" he asked solicitously.

The shoulders straightened like a soldier's; she jumped up and whirled smilingly.

"Not a bit tired," she told him brightly.

"That's good. But I could get a room for you at the hotel; you could lie down and rest a couple of hours----"

Gloria would not hear to it; if she did want to lie down she'd go out under one of the trees and rest there. She trudged along with him to the post-office; she watched as Mark called for and got a registered parcel.

Further, she marked that the postmaster appeared curious about the package so heavily insured until over Mark's shoulder he caught a glimpse of her, and that thereafter, craning his neck as they went out, he evidenced a greater interest in her than in a bundle insured for three thousand dollars. She was smiling brightly when Mark King hurried off to his meeting with old Loony Honeycutt.

Honeycutt's shanty, ancient, twisted, warped, and ugly like himself, stood well apart from the flock of houses, as though, like himself even in this, it were suspicious and meant to keep its own business to itself. Only one other building had approached it in neighbourly fashion, and this originally had been Honeycutt's barn. Now it had a couple of crazy windows cut crookedly into its sides and a stovepipe thrust up, also crookedly, through the shake roof, and was known as the McQuarry place. Here one might count on finding Swen Brodie at such times as he favoured Coloma with his hulking presence; here foregathered his hangers-on. An idle crowd for the most part, save when the devil found mischief for them to do, they might be expected to be represented by one or two of their number loafing about headquarters, and King realized that his visit to Loony Honeycutt was not likely to pa.s.s unnoticed. What he had not counted on was finding Swen Brodie himself before him in Honeycutt's shanty.

King, seeing no one, walked through the weeds to Honeycutt's door. The door was closed, the windows down--dirty windows, every corner of every pane with its dirty cobweb trap and skeletons of flies. As he lifted his foot to the first of the three front steps he heard voices. Nor would any man who had once listened to the deep, sullen ba.s.s of Swen Brodie have forgotten or have failed now in quick recognition. Brodie's mouth, when he spoke, dripped the vilest of vocabularies that had ever been known in these mountains, very much as old Honeycutt's toothless mouth, ever screwed up in rotary chewing and sucking movements, drooled tobacco juice upon his unclean shirt. Brodie at moments when he desired to be utterly inoffensive could not purge his utterance of oaths; he was one of those men who could not remark that it was a fine morning without first d.a.m.ning the thing, qualifying it with an epithet of vileness, and turning it out of his big, loose mouth sullied with syllables which do not get themselves into print.

What King heard, as though Brodie had held his speech for the moment and hurled it like a challenge to the man he did not know had come, was, when stripped of its cargo of verbal filth:

"You old fool, you're dying right now. It's for me or Mark King to get it, and it ain't going to be King."

Honeycutt all the time was whining like a feeble spirit in pain, his utterances like the final dwindlings of a mean-spirited dog. King had never heard him whine like that; Honeycutt was more given to chucklings and clackings of defiance and derision. Perhaps Brodie as the ultimate argument had manhandled him. King threw open the door.

There stood old Honeycutt, tremblingly upheld upon his sawed-off broom-handle. Beyond him, facing the door, was Swen Brodie, his immense body towering over Honeycutt's spindling one, his b.e.s.t.i.a.l face hideous in its contortions as at once he gloated and threatened. In Brodie's hands, which were twice the size of an ordinary man's, was a little wooden box, to which Honeycutt's rheumy eyes were glued with frantic despair. Evidently the box had only now been taken from its hiding-place under a loose board in the floor; the board lay tossed to one side, and Brodie's legs straddled the opening.

Honeycutt did not know immediately that any one had entered; either his old ears had not heard, or his excited mind was concentrated so excludingly on Brodie that he had no thought of aught else. Brodie, however, turned his small, restless eyes, that were like two shiny bright-blue b.u.t.tons, upon the intruder. His great mouth stood open showing his teeth. On that lower, deformed, undershot jaw of Swen Brodie were those monstrous teeth which were his pride, a misshapen double row which he kept clean while his body went unwashed, and between which the man could bend a nail.

Swen Brodie was the biggest man who had ever come to the mountains, men said, unless that honour went to one of the Seven who more than a half-century ago had perished with Gus Ingle. And even so Brodie kept the honour in his own blood, boasting that Ingle's giant companion, the worst of a bad lot, was his own father's father. The elder Brodie had come from Iceland, had lived with a squaw, had sired the first "Swen"

Brodie. And this last scion of a house of outlawry and depravity, the Blue Devil, as many called him, stood six or eight clear inches above Mark King, who was well above six feet. Whatever pride was in him went first to his teeth, next to his enormous stature; he denied that his father had been so big a man; he flew into a towering rage at the suggestion; he cursed his father's memory as a fabric of lies. His head was all face, flattening off an inch above the hairless brows; his face was all enormous, double-toothed mouth.

Slowly the big mouth closed. The shiny blue eyes narrowed and glinted; the coa.r.s.e face reddened. Brodie's throat corded, the Adam's apple moved repeatedly up and down as he swallowed inarticulately. This old Honeycutt saw. He jerked about and quick lights sprang up in his despairing eyes. He began to sputter but Brodie's loud voice had come back to him and drowned out the old man's shrillings. Brodie ripped out a string of oaths, demanding:

"Who told _you_ to come in? You--you----"

"He was aiming to kill me," cried old Honeycutt, dragging and pulling at King's sleeve. "He was for doin' for me--like that!"

He pointed to the floor. There lay a heavy iron poker bent double.

"He done it. Brodie done it. He was for doin' me----"

"You old fool, I'll do you yet," growled Brodie. "And you, King, what are you after?"

Always truculent, to-day Brodie was plainly spoiling for trouble. King had stepped in at a moment when Brodie was in no mood to brook any interruption or interference.

"I came for a word with Honeycutt, not with you," King flashed back at him. "And from the look of things Honeycutt is thanking his stars that I did come."

"If you mean anything by that," shouted Brodie threateningly, "put a name to it."

"If it's a fight you want," said King sharply, "I'm ready to take you on, any time, and without a lot of palaver."

Old Honeycutt began sidling off toward the back door, neither of his two visitors noticing him now as their eyes clashed.

"What I come for I'm going to have," announced Brodie. "It's mine, anyhow, more than any other man's; I could prove it by law if I gave the snap of a finger for what the law deals out, hit or miss. Was there a King with Gus Ingle's crowd? Or a Honeycutt? No, but there was a Brodie!

And I'm his heir, by thunder. It's mine more'n any man's."

King laughed at him.

"Since when have you been studying law, Brodie? Since you got back this last trip, figuring you might have a word with the sheriff?"

"Sheriff? What do you mean, sheriff?"

"I happened to see you and Andy Parker standing together on the cliffs.

I saw Andy go overboard. What is more, I had a talk with him before I buried him."

Again Brodie's big mouth dropped open; his little blue eyes rounded, and he put one hand at his throat nervously.

"Andy's a liar; always a liar," he said thickly. But he seemed annoyed.

Then his face cleared, and he too laughed, derision in his tone.

"Anyway, he's dead and can't lie no more, and your word against mine ain't more'n an even break. So if your nosing sheriff gets gay with me I'll twist his cursed neck for him."

"Suit yourself. I've told you already I came for a talk with Honeycutt and not with you."

"Then you'll wait until I'm done with him," roared Brodie, all of his first baffled rage sweeping back through his blood. "And now you'll clear out!"

King stooped forward just a little, gathering himself and ready as he saw Brodie crouch for a spring. It was just then that both remembered old Honeycutt. For the old man, tottering in the opening of the rear door, was muttering in a wicked sort of glee:

"Up with them hands of your'n, Swen Brodie. High up an' right quick, or I'll blow your ugly head off'n your shoulders!"

In his trembling hands was a double-barrelled shotgun, sawed off and doubtless loaded to the muzzle with buckshot. Though the thing wavered considerably, its end was not six feet from Brodie's head, and both hammers were back, while the ancient nervous fingers were playing as with palsy about the triggers. King expected the discharge each second.

Brodie whirled and drew back, his face turning grey.

"Put it down, you old fool; put it down!" he cried raspingly. "I'll go."

The old man cackled in his delight.

"I'll put nothin' down," he announced triumphantly. "You set down that box."

Hastily Brodie put it on the table. He drew further away, backing toward the front door.

"Git!" cried old Honeycutt.

They could hear the air rushing back into Brodie's lungs as he came to the door and his fear left him.

"I'll be back, Honeycutt, don't you fear," he growled savagely. "As for you, King, you and me ain't done. I'll get you where there's no old fool to b.u.t.t in, and I'll break every bone in your body."