He met her glance as he came into the court-room surrounded by a troop of his friends, surrounded by lawyers and mining experts and geologists who professed to see through the earth, and before her gaze he halted and blenched. There was another person there who regarded him coldly with a glance like a rapier thrust; but it was not of Stoddard he was afraid. It was of Mary Fortune, who had come out against him and who could hear through walls with her 'phone. What she knew might have helped him, but she was against him now—and she had told him in advance that he would lose.
As Rimrock sat thinking, his eyes cast down and his mind far back in the past, a great blow was struck by the bailiff's mallet and the crowd rose up to its feet. A stern-faced judge, robed in the black cloak of his office, stepped out through the curtains behind the bench and as Rimrock stared the bailiff beckoned him sharply and he scrambled to his feet with the rest.
"Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!" cried the bailiff in the words that echoed of the past. "The United States District Court is now in session!"
He struck again as the judge took his seat and Rimrock sank down into his chair. But he had stood in respect to the majesty of the law and it was then that his hunch came back. For this was no appeal to an elected judge or the easily swayed emotions of a jury; it was an appeal to the cold, passionless mind of a man who considered nothing but the law.
Ike Bray was there, looking pinched and scared, and the two guards who had witnessed his relocation, and they testified to the facts. In vain Rimrock's lawyers orated and thundered or artfully framed up their long questions; it took days to do it, but when the testimony was all in it was apparent that Ike Bray's claim would hold. But this was only the beginning of the battle, the skirmish to feel out the ground; and now the defense brought up its big guns. One after the other they put experts on the stand to testify to the geology of the Tecolote; but Cummins and Ford produced others as eminent who testified to the opposite effect. So the battle raged until the wearied judge limited the profitless discussion to one more day, and then Cummins and Ford launched their bombshell.
"Your Honor," began Cummins as he rose with a great document. "I should like to introduce as evidence this report, which unfortunately has only just come to hand. As Your Honor has intimated the testimony of hired experts is always open to suspicion of bias, and especially where great interests are at stake; but I am able to offer for the information of the Court a document both impartial and thorough. It is the combined reports of three practical geologists employed by the Tecolote Company itself, though at a time preceding this suit and intended solely for the purposes of exploration. As Your Honor will observe, although the reports were made independently and under orders to seek nothing but the facts, they agree substantially in this: that, within an extension of its end-lines, the Old Juan claim is the true apex of the entire Tecolote ore body."
He handed over the report and sat down in triumph, while Rimrock's lawyers all objected at once. The argument upon admitting to evidence this secret but authoritative report, consumed the greater part of the day; and at the end the plaintiff rested his case. Throughout the din of words, the verbal clashes, the long and wearisome citing of authorities and the brief "Overruled!" of the judge, Rimrock Jones sat sullen and downcast; and at the end he got up and went out. No one followed to cheer or console him—it was his confession of utter defeat. And the following day, when the Court convened, a verdict was rendered for the plaintiff. The lawyers and experts took their checks and departed and Rimrock Jones went home.
He went back to Gunsight where he had seen his greatest triumphs and his days of blackest defeat and waited for Stoddard to strike. It was all over now—all over but the details and the final acceptance of terms—and, while he waited, he packed up to go. No one knew better than Rimrock himself that it was right and fitting to move on. Old hatreds and animosities, old heart-burnings and recriminations, would make Gunsight a hell-spot for him, and thwart him at every move. It was best to go on to Mexico. Even Hassayamp and L. W. agreed in this, although L. W. insisted upon staking him and declared it was all his own fault. But Mary Fortune, whether she gloried in his fall or pitied him for his great loss, kept discreetly out of his way.
She faced him the first time at the special meeting when Stoddard came to lay down his terms. As a legal fiction, a technical subterfuge, he still claimed to have bought up Bray's claim; but no one was deceived as to his intent. If he had bought Bray out it was not for the Company, but for Whitney H. Stoddard personally; and with no intention of compromising. He came in briskly, his face stern and forbidding, his eyes burning with ill-suppressed fire; and he sat down impatiently to wait. Then as Rimrock slouched in and called the meeting to order Stoddard picked up a piece of blank paper and began to tear it into long, slender shreds.
"Well, to get down to business," said Rimrock at last after the various reports had been read, "we have come here, I take it, for a purpose."