“You wasn’t figurin’ to let Barbara play it a lone hand?” he said.
“Hell’s fire—no!” denied Morgan, his eyes blazing. “I’ve been watchin’ the Rancho Seco—as I told Haydon. I saw Barbara set out for Lamo. There was no one followin’ her, an’ so I thought she’d be all right. That mixup at Lamo slipped me. But I seen you an’ Barbara come back, an’ I heard the boys talkin’ about what happened at Lamo. I’d heard of you, too; an’ when I seen you come back with Barbara I watched you. An’ I seen you was square, so I trusted you a heap.
“An’ I had a talk with Sheriff Gage about you, an’ he told me my dad had sent to Pardo for you, through Dave Hallowell, the marshal of Pardo. Gage said you was out to clean up Deveny an’ Haydon, an’ so I knowed I could depend on you.”
“Barbara don’t know you’re hangin’ around here—she ain’t known it?”
“Shucks, I reckon not,” grinned Morgan. “I didn’t come here for six months after I left the Rancho Seco—until I growed a beard. Barbara’s been within a dozen feet of me, an’ never knowed me. I’ve been thinkin’ of telling her, but I seen Haydon was sweet on her, an’ I didn’t dare tell her. Women ain’t reliable. She’d have showed it some way, an’ then there’d have been hell to pay.”
“An’ I’ve been pridin’ myself on takin’ care of Barbara,” said Harlan. “I feel a heap embarrassed an’ useless—just like I’d been fooled.”
“You’ve done a thing I couldn’t do,” confessed Morgan; “you’ve busted Haydon’s gang wide open. If you hadn’t showed up there’d have been nothin’ done. There’s some of the boys that ain’t outlaws—boys that are with me, havin’ sneaked into the gang to help me out. But we wan’t makin’ no headway to speak of.”
Harlan looked at Haydon. “That guy was educated,” he said. “What was his game? I’ve felt all along that there was somethin’ big back of him—that he wasn’t here just to steal cattle an’ rob folks, an’ such.”
“You ain’t heard,” smiled Morgan. “Of course you wouldn’t—unless Gage had gassed to you.
“There’s a gang of big men in Frisco, an’ in the East, figurin’ to run a railroad through the basin. A year or so ago there was secret talk of it in the capital. It leaked out that the railroad guys was intendin’ to run their road through the basin. They was goin’ to build a town right where the Rancho Seco lays; an’ they was plannin’ to irrigate a lot of the land around there. The governor says it was to be big—an’ likely it’ll be big, when they get around to it.