gayety which partook of
excitement. In ten minutes he went his way, drawing her musing eyes
after him. Until he had reached his own door and turned it at the Casa
Blanca the two girls on Struve's veranda were silent. Florrie's
thoughts were flitting hither and yon, bright-winged, inconsequential,
fluttering about Jim Galloway, deserting him for Roderick Norton,
darting off to Elmer Page, coming home to Florrie herself. As for
Virginia, conscious of a sort of dread, she was oppressed with the
stubbornly insistent thought that if Jim Galloway cared to amuse
himself with Florrie he was strong and she was weak; if he called to
her she would follow. . . .

Virginia was not the only one whom Galloway had set pondering; certain
of his words spoken to the sheriff when the two faced each other on the
Tecolote trail gave Norton food for thought. For the first time Jim
Galloway had openly offered a bribe, one of no insignificant
proportions, prefacing his offer with the remark: "I have just begun to
imagine lately that I have doped you up wrong all the time." If
Galloway had gone on to add: "Time was when I didn't believe I could
buy you, but I have changed my mind about that," his meaning could have
been no plainer. Now he held out a bribe in one hand, a threat in the
other, and Norton riding on to Tecolote mused long over them both.

In Tecolote, a straggling village of many dogs and swarthy, grimy-faced
children, he tarried until well after dark, making his meal of coffee,
_frijoles_, and _chili con carne_, thereafter smoking a contemplative
pipe. Abandoning the little lunch-room to the flies and silence he
crossed the road to the saloon kept by Pete Nunez, the brother of the
man whom it was Norton's present business to make answer for a crime
committed. Pete, a law-abiding citizen nowadays, principally for the
reason that he had lost a leg in his younger, gayer days, swept up his
crutch and swung across the room from the table where he was sitting to
the bar, saying a careless "Que hay?" by way of greeting.

"Hello, Pete," Norton returned quietly. "Haven't seen Vidal lately,
have you?"

Besides Vidal's brother there were a half dozen men in the room playing
cards or merely idling in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp swung
from the ceiling, men of the saloon-keeper's breed to the last man of
them. Their eyes, the slumbrous, mystery-filled orbs of their kind,
had lifted under their long lashes to regard the