Impatience, intolerable and vicious, gripped Trevison as he rode homeward after his haunting vigil at Manti. The law seemed to him to be like a house with many doors, around and through which one could play hide and seek indefinitely, with no possibility of finding one of the doors locked. Judge Graney had warned him to be cautious, but as he rode into the dusk of the plains the spirit of rebellion seized him. Twice he halted Nigger and wheeled him, facing Manti, already agleam and tumultuous, almost yielding to his yearning to return and force his enemy to some sort of physical action, but each time he urged the horse on, for he could think of no definite plan. He was half way to the Diamond K when he suddenly started and sat rigid and erect in the saddle, drawing a deep breath, his nerves tingling from excitement. He laughed lowly, exultingly, as men laugh when under the stress of adversity they devise sudden, bold plans of action, and responding to the slight knee press Nigger turned, reared, and then shot like a black bolt across the plains at an angle that would not take him anywhere near the Diamond K.
Half an hour later, in a darkness which equaled that of the night on which he had carried the limp and drink-saturated Clay Levins to his wife, Trevison was dismounting at the door of the gun-man’s cabin. A little later, standing in the glare of lamplight that shone through the open doorway, he was reassuring Mrs. Levins and asking for her husband. Shortly afterward, he was talking lowly to Levins as the latter saddled his pony out at the stable.
“I’ll do it—for you,” Levins told him. And then he chuckled. “It’ll seem like old times.”
“It’s Justice versus Law, tonight,” laughed Trevison; “it’s a case of ‘the end justifying the means.’”
Manti never slept. At two o’clock in the morning the lights in the gambling rooms of the Belmont and the Plaza were still flickering streams out into the desert night; weak strains of discord were being drummed out of a piano in a dance hall; the shuffling of feet smote the dead, flat silence of the night with an odd, weird resonance. Here and there a light burned in a dwelling or store, or shone through the wall of a tent-house. But Manti’s one street was deserted—the only peace that Manti ever knew, had descended.
Two men who had dismounted at the edge of town had hitched their horses in the shadow of a wagon shed in the rear of a store building, and were making their way cautiously down the railroad tracks toward the center of town. They kept in the shadows of the buildings as much as possible—for space was valuable now and many buildings nuzzled the railroad tracks; but when once they were forced to pass through a light from a window their faces were revealed in it for an instant—set, grim and determined.
“We’ve got to move quickly,” said one of the men as they neared the courthouse; “it will be daylight soon. Damn a town that never sleeps!”
The other laughed lowly. “I’ve said the same thing, often,” he whispered. “Easy now—here we are!”
They paused in the shadow of the building and whispered together briefly. A sound reached their ears as they stood. Peering around the corner nearest them they saw the bulk of a man appear. He walked almost to the corner of the building where they crouched, and they held their breath, tensing their muscles. Just when it seemed they must be discovered, the man wheeled, walked away, and vanished into the darkness toward the other side of the building. Presently he returned, and repeated the maneuver. As he vanished the second time, the larger man of the two in wait, whispered to the other:
“He’s the sentry! Stand where you are—I’ll show Corrigan—”