asked. "They're likely to be, expecting your arrest."

"Then we'll have to wait till they leave it. But I don't believe
they're there. They won't want to show their hand even by being on the
scene."

"Probably they've found out Gordon is dead."

"Probably. But on the other side, they suppose now that the dam has
been destroyed and that I'm locked up," Weir said. "Still, I'll guess
that if they've learned Pollock and Martinez and I were at Gordon's
all the afternoon, and he committed suicide, they'll be worrying some
just the same."

Madden glanced at his companion.

"I don't believe we'll bring Vorse in--alive," he said.

"That's the way I want him, and Sorenson, too. I want to see them go
up for life, but if not that then hanged. But a life term for both,
along with Burkhardt, is my choice. I want them to suffer as my father
suffered. Only worse. Dying's too easy for them. Let them have hell
here for awhile before they get it on the other side. Let the iron
bars and stone walls kill them. I hope they live for twenty years to
gnaw out their hearts every day and every night behind steel doors.
That wouldn't half pay what they owe. But if they finish in prison,
knowing there's no hope, knowing I've put them there for what they did
to my father and Jim Dent, knowing that all the money and cattle they
stole had slipped through their fingers, that they've lost all they
gained and more, that their curses and crimes are crushing their own
heads, why, that will help. And Sorenson--Sorenson there every day
knowing his son lies a helpless cripple, without the money that has
been piled up for him! I couldn't invent a worse hell for him. And
that's the hell he's going to have!"

Though a man not easy to move, Madden at Weir's cold implacable
expression of hatred shivered slightly. Sorenson and his accomplices
would be lucky indeed if they died by the rope.

CHAPTER XXVIII

VORSE

Across the main street the two men walked, wearing their hats low and
making no answer to shouted questions of those hurrying to the
courthouse yard. Already the grounds about the court house and the
street in front were jammed with eager, excited Mexicans, thrilled
with an expectation of something to happen, though they knew not
exactly what. The murderer, the killer, they have taken the killer,
was the constant statement tossed from mouth to mouth.

"But not the killer they think," Madden said, in a low aside to Weir
as they moved