"Shut up, you idiot! I want to read."
"Oh, very well, then! I'll grind the coffee."
Men crept close to the open door on each side of the kitchen. Stella slipped a pan of biscuits in the oven; she laid the table briskly, with a merry clatter of tinware; her face was cheerful and unclouded. The Major leaned back in one chair, his feet on another; he was deep in the paper; he puffed his pipe. John Wesley Pringle twirled the coffee mill between his knees and sang a merry tune:
"There were three little mice, playing in the barn—
Inky, dinky, doodum, day!
Though they knew they were doing what was very, very wrong—
Inky, dinky, doodum, day!
And the song of the owls, it sounded so nice
That closer and closer crept the three little mice.
And the owls came and gobbled them——"
A shadow fell across the floor.
"Hands up!" said the sheriff of Dona Ana. "We want Chris Foy!"
Chapter IV
Navajo, Pima, and Hopi enjoy seven cardinal points—north, east, west, south, up, down, and right here. In these and any intermediate directions from the Vorhis Ranch the diligent posse comitatus made swift and jealous search through the slow hours of afternoon. It commandeered the V H Saddle horses in the corral; it searched for sign in the soft earth of the wandering draws between the dozen low hills scattered round Big Thumb Butte and Little Thumb Butte; it rode circles round the ranch; the sign of Christopher Foy's shod horse was found and followed hotfoot by a detachment. Eight men had arrived in the first bunch, with the sheriff; others from every angle joined by twos and threes from hour to hour till the number rose to above a score. A hasty election provided a protesting cook and a horse wrangler; a V H beef was slaughtered.
The posse was rather equally divided between two classes—simpletons and fools. The first unquestionably believed Foy to be a base and cowardly murderer, out of law, whom it were most righteous to harry; else, as the storied juryman put it, "How came he there?" The other party were of those who hold that evildoing may permanently prosper and endure.
In the big living room of the adobe ranch house much time had been wasted in cross-questions and foolish answers. Stella Vorhis had been banished to her own room and Sheriff Matt Lisner had privately told off a man to make sure she did not escape.