“I don’t say I’m going to get him,” responded Bertram. “But whoever does get him will probably land his game in some totally unexpected place. Wild Horse wouldn’t be a bad place to look. I think I’ll drift around there a little more than I have been.”
Bertram followed out the hint he dropped to his partner. He rode to Wild Horse, where he had seldom been seen since he and Archie had taken up their homestead.
Wild Horse was typical of the towns of the frontier. Most of its one-story business houses were spread along both sides of a broad street. There were a few general stores, two banks, a hotel, several restaurants, and numerous saloons and gambling places. All were prosperous, and, while the sun might cease to illumine Wild Horse at evening, there was plenty of light there, of an artificial kind, till well along toward the next daybreak.
The topic of conversation in Wild Horse, as everywhere else, was the work of the masked horseman. But here the comments were a little more guarded, on account of the feeling that some inside ring of the cattle interests was prompting the assassinations, and Wild Horse was headquarters of those interests, which fact Swingley did not allow to be forgotten for a moment.
Bertram had hardly seated himself in the hotel restaurant before Swingley saw him and came over to his table. “Milt,” he said, “you’re too good a man to be wastin’ your young years on a hopeless homestead proposition like the one you’ve got. If you’ve come up here, prepared to listen to reason and to throw in with us again, I can put you where you’ll be on the road to a fortune in the cow game.”
“I’m glad it’s the cow game and not making go-devils,” said the young Texan, as he poured his coffee with a steady hand.
Swingley smiled saturninely. “I’ve got it figgered out what’s turned you wrong,” he said. “When you first agreed to go along with us you didn’t have any particular idee of kickin’ over the traces, did you?”
“Maybe not.”
“Well, you met this girl, and then you got some foolish idees in your head. As a matter of fact the killin’ of Nick Caldwell wasn’t nothin’ for you to be sore about, as Nick deserved what he got. It is true he was good enough to that stepdaughter of his, who took his name, and who looked on him as a father. But he was the leader of the rustler crowd.”
“I don’t know whether he was or not,” replied the Texan, with a keen glance at Swingley. “I’ve sort of drawn some conclusions of my own to the effect that Caldwell was really a power with the cattle interests, though maybe only a little inside circle knew what he was doing. He might have had a falling out with a big man in that inside circle. Maybe that other man was jealous of Nick’s power.