Monty hedged. “Well, he ain’t been keepin’ house here for a week, anyway. It’s a week ago yesterday I rode over here from my camp. Things are just as they was then.”
“You have something else on your mind, Mr. Girard. What was it that made you wire about foul play? I’ll have to know anyway, and I wish you’d tell me now, before that boy comes in from fussing with the car.”
Monty was filling the coffeepot. He set it on the hottest part of the stove and turned toward her commiseratingly.
“I reckon I had better tell yuh-all,” he said gently. “The thing that scared me was that this man, Hawkins, come here and made his brags about how he got the best of yuh-all in that agreement. Him and Gary had some words over it, the way I got it, and they like to have had a fight—only Hawkins didn’t have the nerve. He beat it out of here and Gary rode over to my place that same day and was tellin’ me about it.
“I told him then to look out for Hawkins. He sounded to me like a bad man to have trouble with; or dealin’s of any kind. That was three weeks ago, Miss Connolly—four weeks now, it is. I was away for three weeks, and when I got back I rode over here and found the place deserted. Gary’s hawse was in the corral and the two pigs was shut up in the pen, so it looked like he ought to be around somewheres close. Only he wasn’t. I hunts the place over, from one end to the other. But there wasn’t no sign of him, except——”
“Except what? I want to know all that you know about it, Mr. Girard.”
Monty hesitated, and when he spoke his reluctance was perfectly apparent to Patricia.
“Well, there’s something else I didn’t like the looks of. Up the creek here a piece, there’s a grave that wasn’t there the last time I was over here. I’m pretty sure about that, because I recollect I led my hawse down to the creek right about there, to water him. It’s about straight down from the corral, and I’d have noticed it.”
“I don’t believe a word of it—that it has anything to do with Gary!” cried Patricia vehemently, and she went over and pressed her face against Gary’s coat.
Monty took a step toward her but reconsidered and went on with his preparations for supper. Instinctively he felt that he would do Patricia the greatest possible service if he made her physically comfortable and refrained from intruding upon the sacred ground of her thoughts concerning Gary.