As the clerk vanished, to spread the news to the rest of the hotel help, Bertram stood a moment in thought. Then the significance of one of Swingley’s remarks came to him, full force.
“By all the gods!” he exclaimed, slapping his leather-clad thigh. “Swingley was careful to tell me that Hoog had been around here all the afternoon. It was an alibi he was parroting. That’s slip number one. The rest will follow fast.”
Walking swiftly to the barroom the Texan drove his arm against the swinging doors and opened them with a bang. Facing the inquiring crowd he stood looking for Swingley and Hoog. The cowboy’s attitude was tense, and his hands were close to the butts of the guns that showed low on his hips.
Swingley and his lieutenant were gone. Turning as suddenly as he had entered the Texan strode out of the hotel and flung himself on his horse.
As he sped toward the foothills, the rage, which had prompted him to kill at sight, died out of his heart, and it was succeeded by a cold determination to bring retribution to those who had committed this new crime. With such retribution would come proofs, which would satisfy others as well as himself, that justice had not miscarried.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MARK OF THE BEAST.
Little Jimmy Coyle would not ride his beloved range again for many a long month. The boy was battling with death when the Texan saw him, but Uncle Billy, who was in attendance, said, he would recover. The lad’s chaparajos and the rest of his cowboy trappings were on a chair at his bedside, a pathetic reminder, Bertram thought, of the active life the boy loved. His .38 rifle, the weapon which he intended to exchange for a .45 some day, when he grew strong enough, stood at the head of his bed, and no one was permitted to handle either it or the garments. Such were the orders of the new district attorney, young Isham Woods, it was explained.
Alma had found Jimmy at the mouth of a wide moraine, leading out upon a mesa, something over a mile from the ranch house. She had thought he was dead, from a wound just above the heart, but she had found that some remnant of life remained. She had attended as best she could to the wound, and then she had carried the boy to the ranch house, the crisis giving her strength far in excess of normal.
The Texan did not tarry at the ranch house after he learned that Jimmy stood a fair chance of recovery. Following Alma’s directions he rode to the scene of the shooting. The moraine afforded an admirable hiding place. In its wide, bowlder-strewn depression one could command an excellent view of the mesa, on which there were always cattle grazing.
Several neighbors were going over the ground, and so was Woods, the district attorney, who had shown an unexpected and most disconcerting disposition to inquire into some of the affairs of the newly organized association of cattlemen. In fact it was currently reported that Woods, who had been figured on as a quiescent tool, had been visited several times by Swingley, with threats of the loss of his political and legal suture unless he mended his ways.