"Good Lord!" cried Wayne. "No pressing importance! You'd handle my business for me, keep all knowledge of a foreclosure from me, until the year of redemption had pa.s.sed? You'd let Martin Leland close me out, would you? You and Hume and Leland would take the water from the river. Good G.o.d! I never thought this sort of thing of you or Leland!

You'd all get rich by smashing me, and then you, you two-faced little cur, would buy the Bar L-M back from Leland for nothing, with money you'd taken from Arthur and me! Why, you pet.i.t [Transcriber's note: petty?] larceny sneak, I don't know why I am talking with you instead of slapping your dirty face!"

"If you will talk reasonably--"

"Talk reasonably? You're d.a.m.ned right I will! Why did Arthur borrow twenty-five thousand dollars to begin with? What went with it? Who got it?"

"I don't know what he wanted it for," snapped Garth. "I don't know what went with it. I suppose the man who murdered him robbed him, too."

"You don't mean he had a sum like that with him in cash?"

"Yes. He insisted upon it. I was with Leland when the money was turned over."

"And you--_forgot_--to tell me that!"

Conway, though his lips moved, made no audible reply. Wayne stood staring at him a moment, his face white with pa.s.sion. Suddenly he cried out in a voice shaking with fury as he lifted one hand high above his head and brought it smashing down into his open palm.

"Get off of the place!" he shouted. "Sneak back to Leland; go whimper about Sledge Hume's legs. Tell Leland that I said that you are a d.a.m.ned scoundrel and that he's another! Tell him that I said that I am going to make the whole thieving pack of you eat out of my hand before I let up on you. And now, for G.o.d's sake, go!"

He whirled and went back to the house with long strides. He flung wide the door, and as he came swiftly to the fireplace, his face still white and hard, he thrust out his hand to Helga Strawn, grasping hers as though it had been a man's.

"I'm with you," he said crisply. "I'll see Ruf Ettinger myself to-morrow."

Her eyes which had been frowning during Dart's latest attempt to be entertaining, grew suddenly brilliant, her cheeks flushed happily.

"Dart," Wayne, continued, turning to the little man who had begun nodding his head approvingly when Wayne's shoulder had struck the door and who was still nodding, "you've done me a good turn to-night. I'm not ungrateful. But Miss--"

"Hazleton," prompted Dart.

"--will have to be going right away and I want to talk with her alone."

"Sure," agreed Dart. "I'll get my book and go down to the bunk house.

I'm reading a swell story about a guy named Jupiter and a skirt named--"

For the first and only time on record Willie Dart stopped his flow of words because of the look he saw on a man's face. He went out s.n.a.t.c.hing his book from the table as he pa.s.sed. On his way to the bunk house he stopped long enough to shake his head and rub his chin.

"I'm giving odds, ten to one," he reflected, "that the Weak Sister don't loaf around here all night counting snowflakes."

"Something has happened, Mr. Shandon," Helga said sharply.

Shandon laughed shortly and picked up his pipe.

"A great deal has happened," he told her. "I've been a fool and an overgrown baby long enough. Let's get down to business. You can't stay here all night."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"For want of a chaperon, I suppose? I'm not worried about what people say or think, Mr. Shandon. And, besides, there's no place to go."

"You can't stay, any way," he answered a little roughly. "You can get back to the Leland place. They'll keep you over night. Now, let's get this thing straight. You hope to get back your property from Hume?"

Swiftly their roles had changed; he was dominant now, he asked his question in a tone that demanded an answer and she gave the answer.

"Yes."

"How?"

"I can't tell you definitely. If you'll come to me in two weeks or a month I can tell you. For one thing, Hume is a man, I am a woman."

"You are going to try to make him fall in love with you?"

"Other men have done it," she said indifferently.

"Other men are not Sledge Hume. But that is your end of it. I am going to tie up Ruf Ettinger and any other stragglers I can get my hands on. If you can get back the property we'll take you in. We'll form a company, we'll pool our interests. We'll force these other fellows to sell to us at our own figure, by the Lord! I've got the water!"

"If I could force Sledge Hume to sell his inherited interest to me,"

she cried, "if I could make him sell to me as I sold to him, for a wretched twenty-five thousand dollars--"

"What!" he broke in excitedly. "How much did Hume pay you?"

"Twenty-five thousand. Why?" curiously.

"_When_?"

"I remember the date exactly."

She told him. It was barely two weeks after the death of Arthur Shandon.

Sudden suspicion in Wayne Shandon's brain had sprung full grown into positive certainty.

"If you can't get your property back one way," was the last thing he said, "I can get it for you in another. Helga Strawn, you had better leave Sledge Hume to me."

CHAPTER XIX

SHANDON TAKES HIS STAND

Dart had been quite right concerning the actions of Garth Conway. It hardly required a clairvoyant mother for any man who knew both Conway and Wayne Shandon to predict the haste with which Conway saddled and left the Bar L-M, nor the direction he went.

"Old Mart's going to sleep restless to-night," mused Dart, to whom the adventures of a guy named Jupiter, and a skirt who shall be nameless, no longer appealed. "Them haymakers don't know enough to walk crooked and cover their tracks the same time. Now with Red on the war path, and me shaping his play right along--"

He grew deeply thoughtful over the delightful possibilities unfolding to his highly coloured imagination. There was going to be something doing now that would put an edge to this dull life. With what was equivalent to a lining up of forces and an open declaration of hostilities, with Red on the one hand pitted against the trio whom Dart called the Haymakers, with a murder mystery to untangle, a robbery to solve, and--not to be forgotten--Little Saxon guarded through the winter months so that a winning horserace could be run in the spring, Mr. Dart looked forward happily to a very busy time. Then there was the Dry Valley irrigation scheme of which his limited knowledge must be enlarged immediately, in order that he might "sc.r.a.pe up a few beans and get them down while the game was wide open." And there was Helga Strawn.

"I wouldn't have missed this here," said Mr. Dart solemnly, nodding his head at a picture in his book of a lady without arms or superfluous clothing, "not for the boodle of a U. S. senator."

He went to the bunk house door in time to see Garth riding out of the corral, his horse floundering awkwardly in the drifts that were steadily piling higher. Dart spat contemptuously.

"A measly little cur," he declared softly. "Crooked just because he ain't got the guts to go straight. Them's the worst kind. They get scared stiff and shoot you when you come in late, thinking you're a second-story artist, and then they're sorry. Chances are he's repenting right now and wishing he was dead and by morning he'll be doing the knife act some more."