“You said they robbed another man at the same time they killed that Dent.”
“Yes; and it only goes to show the hellish crooks they are. It was another man in the saloon. He was drunk. They made him believe he had killed Dent. Then said they’d help him to get away if he gave them his property. He was a rich fellow who had come out from the east and gone to ranching, a tenderfoot. They took his stuff and he skipped the country with his wife. That was the last of him, and I reckon he believes to this day that he’s a murderer. And that’s how they got the start of their wealth, or a big part of it, Sorenson and Vorse and the other two. They’ve got the San Mateo Cattle Company, with fifty thousand head of steers, and ten or twenty bands of sheeps and ranches, and the bank, and all the rest, and they walk around like honest men. But they’re thieves and murderers, Mary, thieves and murderers! I’d rather be the man I am, poor and with nothing but this little mortgaged piece of ground and my few cattle, than them, who robbed Dent and killed him and then robbed and drove out Weir.”
“Was that the other man’s name?”
“Yes.”
“That’s funny. The same as the man who brought me home.”
“There are lots of Weirs, like the Johnsons.”
“Not so many, I guess. Maybe they’re related. Did the man who skipped have any children?”
“No. None I ever heard of, though I didn’t know much about him. Just him and his wife, I think.”
Johnson had perceived no resemblance between the engineer and the vanished man of whom he spoke. As for that, however, he had no clear recollection of the elder Weir’s face; he was but twelve years old at the time of the dramatic event, thirty years before.