Jerry sat back in the seat and grinned. He fished out his tobacco pouch and filled his pipe. There were times when he considered himself fairly mature, fairly well balanced. Yet he was as ready as the next to build a house of mystery out of the insubstantial timber of ignorance.
Of course there was a reasonable explanation. They must have walked from the railroad. It was a good many miles, but it was perfectly possible.
Feeling better, Jerry followed the tortuous road to the western crest. His long legs hadn't taken him far from the car when he heard a harsh, "Hold up!"
First one, then the other Carver brother stepped out from a scrub oak thicket—short, leathery old men, with ragged whiskers and dirt seamed into their faces and wrists. They eyed him malevolently over raised shotguns.
"Came to talk to you," Jerry said mildly.
One of them—he thought it was Ed—spat.
"Ah, now," Jerry went on in an aggrieved tone, "that's a fine way to treat a son of Jack Bronson."
The Carver brothers glanced at one another, then the shotguns lowered. "Come along," they said gruffly. In the littered yard by their cabin, they pointed to a bench and squatted down before it on their thin old shanks.
"New people in Dark Valley."
They nodded.