“Yes. She ain’t dead yet, but she can’t live long. Poor woman, it’d been a lot better for her if she’d missed that tree—she wouldn’t be sufferin’ now. But then, there wouldn’t be a proof against him if she had. Where you been all day? You must be the only one into the Traps that ain’t heard. I was down here twice—I wanted to tell you so’s you’d look out. They ain’t caught Snake yet, and he might—well, you better watch out.”
She turned, sweeping the darkling road with her eyes. Nothing moved there. No sound came, except the doleful sigh of a cold night breeze.
“Come in.” He moved back. “I want to know all about this. The fire’s going—I was just getting supper. Come in and keep warm.”
For an instant she hesitated, instinctively dreading entrance into the sinister house where her father and Jake Dalton had met nameless doom. But then, realizing that Douglas had lived here for weeks without harm, she followed him in. Her moving feet made an unwonted noise on the boards—the patter of leather-heeled shoes, which the gnawing chill had at last compelled her to don. The sombre echo of the sound in the bare room halted her again.
“Ain’t you got a light?” she requested. “I—I don’t like this place, so dark and holler.”
“I’ll light up. Take this chair.” The one chair in the place came rumbling toward her, and she sank on it as he worked on the lamp. When the white flame was lighting up the room he set the illuminator on the table and turned to her, neglecting to draw the burlap window-curtains which he had made some time ago.
“I was up in the rocks all day,” he explained. “Found something, too, that may help to catch Snake. But now tell me all about it.”
“Well, this is what I hear, and it’s what Lou said her own self after she got so’s she could talk. Snake took her up on top the Big Wall last night and throwed her off——”
“Good God! Threw her off the Wall?”
“That’s right. Snake ain’t been to home much lately—you know that—but he’s come in a few times, and then he was so ugly to her she dasn’t go lookin’ round to find out where he was when he was away. He told her if she stepped a foot away from the house he’d know about it, and he’d fix her so’s she wouldn’t be able to walk or talk any more, and if anybody come a-huntin’ him she’d got to say she didn’t know where he was, and so on. But last night he come in ’long toward dark, and he was laughin’ fit to kill. And he said he’d got an awful good joke onto the detectives.