21She pulled the trigger, but Wiley was watching her and he ducked down behind the radiator.
Clank, went the hammer and with a wail of rage the Widow snapped the other barrel.
“You, Virginia!” she cried in a terrible voice, “have you been monkeying with my shotgun?”
The answer was lost in a series of explosions that awoke every echo in Keno, and Wiley Holman leapt into his machine. He jerked off his brake and stepped on the foot throttle but as he roared off up the street he waved a grimy hand at Virginia.
22CHAPTER III
The Shadow
The old, settled quiet returned to sleepy Keno–the quiet of the desert and of empty, noiseless houses stretching in long, sunburned rows down the canyon. The black lava patch, laid across the gray rhyolite flank of Shadow Mountain like the shade of an angry cloud, still frowned down upon the town like a portent of storms to come. But the sky was hot and gleaming and no storms came; nor did Wiley Holman return, though the Widow waited for him patiently. After all his boldness, his unbelievable effrontery in trying to steal her Paymaster stock, he had gone on laughing to seek other adventures and left her with the mine on her hands. But he would come back, she knew it; and with her gun loaded with buckshot she watched from the shelter of the gallery.
Yet the days went by and then the weeks and at last the Widow, with a sigh of vexation, put up her gun and retired within. Now that the episode was over she felt vaguely regretful that he had failed, after all, in his purpose. If he had procured his option, under cover of her blindness, and obtained her quit-claim to the mine, she 23would at least have had the satisfaction of obtaining her own terms–and she would have the twenty thousand to spend. It was maddening, disgusting, when she thought it over, that he had turned out to be Holman’s son, and she never quite forgave Virginia for dinning the fact into her ears. For what you don’t know will never hurt you, and she had lost her last chance to sell. When she went back into the house she went back into the kitchen, and there she would have to stay. Either that or take Honest John’s money.
But he wanted the property–the Widow knew it–else why had he sent his son? All the wise-acres in Keno agreed with the Widow that Honest John had designs on her property and Death Valley Charley, who had jumped half the claims in the district, began once more to carry his gun. It was by virtue of that, more than of assessment work done or of any other legal right, that Charley held title to his claims; and until Wiley had come through town and attempted to bond the Paymaster he had feared no one but Stiff Neck George. Stiff Neck George had been Blount’s gunman on the momentous occasion when they had tried to jump the Paymaster–and the Widow Huff had put him to flight with one blast from her trusty shotgun. But now that big interests were sending in their experts and mining was picking up everywhere Stiff Neck George might forget that humiliating defeat, so Death Valley Charley put on his six-shooter.
24He was a little, stooping man, burned chocolate brown by the sun and with eyes half blinded by the glare, and as the Widow gave up her fruitless vigil, Death Valley Charley took her place. But he was not alone, for through all the weary weeks Virginia had been watching her mother. She had slipped in and out, now lingering on the gallery, now listening through the doorway, expectant but at the same time afraid. She knew Wiley Holman much better than her mother, and she knew that he would come back. He was patient, that was all, more patient than an Indian, and he had his eye on their mine. For ten years and more Colonel Huff, and now the Widow, had held physical possession of the Paymaster. Every great iron-bound door was locked and padlocked and the Huff family held the keys, but in all those ten years Holman had never come near it and Blount had merely seized it on a labor lien. The very title to the mine was shrouded in mystery, for no one could locate the shares, and to openly lay claim to it and produce a majority of the stock would be equivalent to a confession of treachery. All that anyone knew surely was that some one of the three original owners–or some unsuspected party outside–had bought in and sequestered the almost valueless stock and was patiently biding his time. Since the Huffs did not own the stock themselves they knew for a certainty that it was held by either Holman or Blount.