The train that carried Corrigan’s letter eastward bore, among its few other passengers, a young man with a jaw set like a steel trap, who leaned forward in his seat, gripping the back of the seat in front of him; an eager, smoldering light in his eyes, who rose at each stop the train made and glared belligerently and intolerantly at the coach ends, muttering guttural anathemas at the necessity for delays. The spirit of battle was personified in him; it sat on his squared shoulders; it was in the thrust of his chin, stuck out as though to receive blows, which his rippling muscles would be eager to return. Two other passengers in the coach watched him warily, and once, when he got up and walked to the front of the coach, opening the door and looking out, to let in the roar and whir and the clatter, one of the passengers remarked to the other: “That guy is in a temper where murder would come easy to him.”
The train left Manti at nine o’clock in the evening. At midnight it pulled up at the little frame station in Dry Bottom and the young man leaped off and strode rapidly away into the darkness of the desert town. A little later, J. Blackstone Graney, attorney at law, and former Judge of the United States District Court at Dry Bottom, heard a loud hammering on the door of his residence at the outskirts of town. He got up, with a grunt of resentment for all heavy-fisted fools abroad on midnight errands, and went downstairs to admit a grim-faced stranger who looked positively bloodthirsty to the Judge, under the nervous tension of his midnight awakening.
“I’m ‘Brand’ Trevison, owner of the Diamond K ranch, near Manti,” said the stranger, with blunt sharpness that made the Judge blink. “I’ve a case on in the Manti court at ten o’clock tomorrow—today,” he corrected. “They are going to try to swindle me out of my land, and I’ve got to have a lawyer—a real one. I could have got half a dozen in Manti—such as they are—but I want somebody who is wise in the law, and with the sort of honor that money and power can’t blast—I want you!”
Judge Graney looked sharply at his visitor, and smiled. “You are evidently desperately harried. Sit down and tell me about your case.” He waved to a chair and Trevison dropped into it, sitting on its edge. The Judge took another, and with the kerosene lamp between them on a table, Trevison related what had occurred during the previous morning in Manti. When he concluded, the Judge’s face was serious.
“If what you say is true, it is a very awkward, not to say suspicious, situation. Being the only lawyer in Dry Bottom, until the coming of Judge Lindman, I have had occasion many times to consult the record you speak of, and if my memory serves me well, I have noted several times—quite casually, of course, since I have never been directly concerned with the records of the land in your vicinity—that several transfers of title to the original Midland grant have been recorded. Your deed would show, of course, the date of your purchase from Buck Peters, and we shall, perhaps, be able to determine the authenticity of the present record in that manner. But if, as you believe, the records have been tampered with, we are facing a long, hard legal battle which may or may not result in an ultimate victory for us—depending upon the power behind the interests opposed to you.”
“I’ll fight them to the Supreme Court of the United States!” declared Trevison. “I’ll fight them with the law or without it!”
“I know it,” said Graney, with a shrewd glance at the other’s grim face. “But be careful not to do anything that will jeopardize your liberty. If those men are what you think they are, they would be only too glad to have you break some law that would give them an excuse to jail you. You couldn’t do much fighting then, you know.” He got up. “There’s a train out of here in about an hour—we’ll take it.”
About six o’clock that morning the two men stepped off the train at Manti. Graney went directly to a hotel, to wash and breakfast, while Trevison, a little tired and hollow-eyed from loss of sleep and excitement, and with a two days’ growth of beard on his face, which made him look worse than he actually felt, sought the livery stable where he had left Nigger the night before, mounted the animal and rode rapidly out of town toward the Diamond K. He took a trail that led through the cut where on another morning he had startled the laborers by riding down the wall—Nigger eating up the ground with long, sure, swift strides—passing Pat Carson and his men at a point on the level about a quarter of a mile beyond the cut. He waved a hand to Carson as he flashed by, and something in his manner caused Carson to remark to the engineer of the dinky engine: “Somethin’s up wid Trevison ag’in, Murph—he’s got a domned mean look in his eye. I’m the onluckiest son-av-a-gun in the worruld, Murph! First I miss seein’ this fire-eater bate the face off the big ilephant, Corrigan, an’ yisterday I was figgerin’ on goin’ to town—but didn’t; an’ I miss seein’ that little whiffet of a Braman flyin’ through the windy. Do ye’s know that there’s a feelin’ ag’in Corrigan an’ the railroad in town, an’ thot this mon Trevison is the fuse that wud bust the boom av discontint. I’m beginnin’ to feel a little excited meself. Now what do ye suppose that gang av min wid Winchesters was doin’, comin’ from thot direction this mornin’?” He pointed toward the trail that Trevison was riding. “An’ that big stiff, Corrigan, wid thim!”
Trevison got the answer to this query the minute he reached the Diamond K ranchhouse. His foreman came running to him, pale, disgusted, his voice snapping like a whip:
“They’ve busted your desk an’ rifled it. Twenty guys who said they was deputies from the court in Manti, an’ Corrigan. I was here alone, watchin’, as you told me, but couldn’t move a finger—damn ’em!”