"Heavens!" I ejaculated. "We can't let them tie us up!"
"I don't think they are going to be able to. Benedict is feeling a little better now and he thinks he has them sewed up in a blanket, only he won't tell me how, and you never can tell what's going to happen when the lawyers get at you. There are lots of holes in the legal skimmer: for example, at the preliminary hearing Blackwell had three surveyors who went on the stand and swore flat-footed that the lines on our side of the spur were all wrong; that the Lawrenceburg group of claims covered not only our original triangle, but the Mary Mattock as well. Paid-for perjury, of course, but we couldn't prove it; so there you are."
At my urging Barrett would have gone into this phase of the trouble more deeply, but just then Polly and her father came across the rotunda and we all went to the dining-room together. I shall never forget, the longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us, and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current, winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off the cues.
We had got as far as the black coffees, and Barrett was joking Polly and telling her that she shouldn't take sugar, when I saw, through a vista of the tourists, a square-shouldered, dark-faced man rising from his place at a distant table. There was no mistaking him. He was the man I had seen in the dining-room of the hotel at the Grand Canyon.
As he came toward us between the tables the resemblance, which I had so confidently assured myself was only a resemblance, transformed itself slowly into the breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up, wild-eyed and speechless, into the face of the deputy warden, Cummings, when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for the others to hear:
"You've led us a pretty long chase, Weyburn, but we don't often miss, and it's ended at last. I guess you'll have to come with me, now."
XXII
A Woman's Love
It is useless for me to try to picture the consternation which fell upon the four of us when the deputy warden touched me on the shoulder and spoke to me. I can't describe it. I only know that Barrett sprang up, gritting out the first oath I had ever heard him utter; that a look of shocked and complete recognition leaped into the mild brown eyes of the old metallurgist; that Polly was standing up with her arms outstretched across the table as if she were trying to reach me and drag me out of the crushing wreck of all our hopes.