On the day he reached this decision his brother returned from Golden looking dejected. “They’ve quarrelled,” was Curtis’s inward comment. He said nothing, nor did Homer mention Lucy’s name, contrary to his custom of talking much about her after a day in her society. He was also less talkative than usual upon other subjects. During the evening, while Curtis read, Homer sat by the open door and smoked in gloomy silence, listening to the pouring rain and the rolling and echoing thunder. He was wondering, half in lover’s anger and half in lover’s downheartedness, why Lucy had been so unreasonable that day, and why she had acted as if she did not care whether he came or stayed away. Well, he would not trouble her with his company again very soon. He and Pendleton had been talking about a camping and hunting trip in the Mogollon Mountains, and he would see if they couldn’t get up the party and go at once.
The next morning a sky of pure, deep, brilliant blue shone over a freshening, greening plain. Homer rose from the breakfast table and walked out into the corral, throwing back his shoulders and breathing deeply of the dry, cool, exhilarating air. It seemed a different world from that of yesterday. There was no hurry about the camping trip, after all. “I think I’ll ride over to Golden,” he said to his brother, “and see if that storm last night did much damage. It looked black in the mountains when I was coming home in the afternoon, and a bad flood may have come down the ravine.”
Curtis smiled quizzically. A certain eager masterfulness in the young man’s air brought to his mind conviction of the real purport of his brother’s errand, and he felt no doubt of its result. “A good idea,” he assented. “It was a bad storm and may have done a lot of harm. But I’ll have to use Brown Betty myself to-day. You can have your pick of the others.”
He stood by and called out, “Good luck, old fellow!” as Homer mounted his horse, and laughed and swung his sombrero as the other turned away a blushing face. Curtis gazed after him, a swift vision filling his mind of the look that countenance would wear when he returned to tell him proudly that he had won Lucy’s promise to be his wife. “And by that time I’m going to know who Delafield is,” he thought, his lips compressed, as he turned quickly into the corral.
“José,” he called, “I want you to go to Adobe Springs this morning and see if any of the cattle are mired in the overflow from the storm last night. Then deepen the outlet so the water will all be carried away. You’d better start at once. I’ll come after you in about half an hour and show you about digging out the outlet.”
As Gonzalez mounted his horse at the corral gate he looked back and saw Conrad standing beside his mare, making her hunt through his pockets for sugar. “A brave man is Don Curtis,” his thoughts ran. “He is so brave it does not seem right that he must die. But—” and he shrugged his shoulders with the air of one who says, “What would you?”
When José was well out of sight Conrad started after him, at first at a slower pace than usual. His mind was not upon the expected encounter, with its doubtful issue, nor upon the information, so long and ardently desired, that he hoped to extort from the Mexican. A month previous he would have been intent on that one thing, his thoughts absorbed in it, and his heart on fire with anticipation. Now he dwelt upon the idea of marriage between Lucy and Homer. “The lad’s a better man than I,” he was thinking. “There’s more in him, and ten years from now I shan’t be able to stack up alongside of him and make any showing at all—even if I’m not in prison or hanged by the neck until dead long before.”
He bared his brow, curiously white above the rest of his sunburned face, to the south wind. His lips tightened and his eyes glowed as he looked out over the gray road stretching before him, while his inward vision flashed down the grim and lonely path that led into the future. It was the way he had chosen, the one he had travelled with eager feet for fifteen years, and he must follow it to the end. A few miles farther on that gray track, perhaps just beyond that next hill, the longed-for knowledge was awaiting him. He would force it from Gonzalez, and then—Delafield! The thought fired his heart once more and his eyes blazed with the old indignation as his mind went back to the grief and loss of his early years, to that lonely night of hate and anger when his deadly purpose was born. He touched Brown Betty with his spur, quickening her pace to a smart gallop as he searched the road and plain with ardent eyes. His heart was bounding forward with anticipation, the savor of longed-for vengeance once more strong in his throat. In front of him lay a wide, shallow valley, with steep, storm-torn rims and brows shaggy with mesquite.
“I reckon, Betty B.,” he said aloud, “it’s about time to be looking for José, and this draw seems a likely sort of place for him.”
He drew his revolver, glanced at its chambers, held it across the pommel in his right hand, and made sure of the handful of cartridges he had put in his pocket on leaving home. Brown Betty cantered across the bottom of the valley and, as she climbed the steep bank on the other side, lifted her head and neighed. From somewhere in the distance came an answering whinny. “It’s one of our horses,” thought Conrad.