She left off her desultory arranging of bottles, and leaned toward him, across the counter.
“Hallard bought the range off’n an Easterner named Oliphant,” she began. “He was goin’ to stock it, an’ then you’d never a’ seen me here. He’s got the deed all square, an’ he leaves it with me till he goes down to Phoenix to record it. Then he goes and gits killed bustin’ an outlaw horse fer Hod Granger, and leaves me to manage fer myself.”
The stranger uttered a little murmur of sympathy.
“But you had the deed,” he suggested, as Mrs. Hallard seemed lost in thought.
“Oh, yes! I had it all right. But I give it to Frank Arnold to record fer me. He was goin’ down to Phoenix, an’ I guess they was some hoodoo onto it; fer Frank, he got killed too—got killed in a cloudburst—an’ when they found his body every bone in it was broke an’ they was hardly a rag onto it. So the deed was lost.”
“But surely this man Oliphant would have made it right for you?”
“Would he though? That’s where you ain’t guessin’ right.” Mrs. Hallard’s laugh had no mirth in it.
“That’s what they told me,” she said. “An’ so I see a lawyer, an’ he undertakes to write Oliphant, that’s gone back east. But after a spell he comes an’ tells me the sneakin’ thief’s gone an’ sold that prop’ty twice, an’ cleared out. Think o’ that, will you, an’ him a old, old man.... Out here fer his health, he was. Lord! if he don’t need a hotter climate ’n even this is.”
“Was the second deed recorded?”
“You bet your life it was. The man that’d bought it saw to that, an’ he didn’t have the luck to git killed, neither.”