"Her fiancé?" Fairchild asked the question with misgiving. The miner finished his stretch and added a yawn to it. Then he looked appraisingly up the street toward the retreating figures. "Well, some say he is and some say he ain't. Guess it mostly depends on the girl, and she ain't telling yet."
"And the man—who is he?"
"Him? Oh, he 's Maurice Rodaine. Son of a pretty famous character around here, old Squint Rodaine. Owns the Silver Queen property up the hill. Ever hear of him?"
The eyes of Robert Fairchild narrowed, and a desire to fight—a longing to grapple with Squint Rodaine and all that belonged to him—surged into his heart. But his voice, when he spoke, was slow and suppressed.
"Squint Rodaine? Yes, I think I have. The name sounds rather familiar."
Then, deliberately, he started up the street, following at a distance the man and the girl who walked before him.
CHAPTER VI
There was no specific reason why Robert Fairchild should follow Maurice Rodaine and the young woman who had been described to him as the daughter of Judge Richmond, whoever he might be. And Fairchild sought for none—within two weeks he had been transformed from a plodding, methodical person into a creature of impulses, and more and more, as time went on, he was allowing himself to be governed by the snap judgment of his brain rather than by the carefully exacting mind of a systematic machine, such as he had been for the greater part of his adult life. All that he cared to know was that resentment was in his heart,—resentment that the family of Rodaine should be connected in some way with the piquant, mysterious little person he had helped out of a predicament on the Denver road the day before. And, to his chagrin, the very fact that there was a connection added a more sinister note to the escapade of the exploded tire and the pursuing sheriff; as he walked along, his gaze far ahead, Fairchild found himself wondering whether there could be more than mere coincidence in it all, whether she was a part of the Rodaine schemes and the Rodaine trickery, whether—
But he ceased his wondering to turn sharply into a near-by drug store, there absently to give an order at the soda fountain and stand watching the pair who had stopped just in front of him on the corner. She was the same girl; there could be no doubt of that, and he raged inwardly as she chatted and chaffed with the man who looked down upon her with a smiling air of proprietorship which instilled instant rebellion in Fairchild's heart. Nor did he know the reason for that, either.