Dusk gathered. The pearl-gray mist of the evening sky merged into the lucent shroud of a plains night. Crickets chirped in the grass. The Marias whispered its sibilant song in a stony bed. A lamp glowed through a window in the house. Rock saw the girl sitting by the table again, as when he first saw her, elbows on the wood, face buried in her palms.
“She aches inside,” he thought. “Poor devil! She needs folks or friends or something, right now.”
But he couldn’t be one or the other, he knew. He was too sensible to blunder with well-meant, useless words. She had forgotten he was there. So he walked softly down to the stable, drew his blankets in the canvas tarpaulin off to one side, under the stars, and turned in.
So the Seventy Seven did locate on the Marias instead of the Judith? Uncle Bill was right. This might be no healthier a neighborhood for him than it had proved for his double.
“Well, you got to be in this neighborhood for a spell, whether it’s dangerous or not, you darned fool,” Rock apostrophized himself. “This is the Maltese range, and you’ve promised to look over the Cross.”
Thus Rock, with the blankets drawn up to his chin and his gaze meditatively on the three stars that make Orion’s belt.
His last drowsily conscious act was to smile at the obliquity of his thought. In the morning he would do whatever that dark-haired, gray-eyed young woman requested. He had ridden slap into this thing. Whatever it was, he would see it through. Yet he couldn’t imagine her requiring anything of him except that he would perhaps ride into Fort Benton and notify whatever authorities functioned there that a man had been shot on the Marias. And that didn’t call for any great resolution on his part.
Just the same, he desired greatly to know who this man was who looked so much like him, who shot him, and why?
CHAPTER V—WRAPPED IN CANVAS
Birds twittering in the poplars and willows by the river wakened Rock when the rose-pink dawn was turning to gold. He lay watching, listening. He could hear the ripple of running water. He could see the bleached hills rising abrupt from the gray-green valley floor. The cool air was like balm on his face. Beyond all doubt this was a pleasant country. If a man could settle on one of these river bottoms, with a couple of hundred cows, in ten years—— But Rock was a long way from peering anxious-eyed into the future.