“Huh!” snorted Charlie See.
“Of course if I make a get-away it looks bad—like admitting the murder. On the other hand, if I’m hanged, my friends would always hate it. So there we are. On the whole, I judge it would be best to go. Say, Gwinne’ll be calling me to chuck. Reckon I better beat him to it. You run on, now, and roll your hoop. I’ll be thinking it over. G’night!”
His face disappeared from the embrasure. Charlie See retired Indian-fashion to the nearest cover, straightened up, and wandered discontentedly down the hill to Hillsboro’s great white way.
XI
“We retired to a strategic position prepared in advance.”
—Communiqués of the Crown Prince.
Charlie See was little known in the county seat. It was not his county, to begin with, and his orbit met Hillsboro’s only at the intersection of their planes. Hillsboro was a mining town, first, last and at all intervening periods. Hillsboro’s “seaport,” Lake Valley, was the cowman’s town; skyward terminus of the High Line, twig from a branch railroad which was itself a feeder for an inconsiderable spur. The great tides of traffic surged far to north and south. This was a remote and sheltered backwater, and Hillsboro lay yet twelve miles inland from Lake Valley. Here, if anywhere, you found peace and quiet; Hillsboro was as far from the tumult and hurly-burly as a corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
Along the winding way, where lights of business glowed warm and mellow, feverish knots and clusters of men made a low-voiced buzzing; a buzzing which at See’s approach either ceased or grew suddenly clear to discussion of crossroads trivialities. From one of these confidential knots, before the Gans Hotel, a unit detached itself and strolled down the street.