He finished a little ruefully, with a questioning inflection on the last words. Gard laughed.
“I’m not, I guess,” he said, “leastways not so ’s to hurt me.”
“That’s good,” the cow-puncher nodded, approvingly, “Though religion don’t hurt a good person,” he added, meditatively.
He removed his broad-brimmed felt hat and peered into the crown. His head was thatched with close-cropped, grizzly-gray hair; his face was tanned and seamed by wind and weather, thin-lipped and stern as to the mouth, under his short moustache, with steadfast blue eyes that had the plainsman’s and the sailor’s trick of vigilance. It was a face to be trusted—shrewd, honest, capable, yet full of a simplicity that was almost childlike. Gard found himself warming to the fellow.
“I suppose you belong about here?” he suggested.
“Sure. My name’s Sandy Larch. I’m foreman out ’t the Palo Verde, below here. Know the range?”
Gard admitted that he did not. “I’m new ’round here,” he explained, as he told his name.
“I’m looking for a man,” he added, tentatively, “a notary named Sawyer: Arthur Sawyer. Ever hear of him?”
Sandy Larch reflected, repeating the name thoughtfully. “Was he a lunger?” he finally asked, “A little feller, with broken wind, an’ a cough that ’d drive you wild to hear?”
“I don’t know.” The description took Gard’s memory back to the days when he, too, had had such a cough. “I never saw him,” he explained, “But I’m mighty anxious to get hold of him.”