Agnes had said little about the money which Dr. Slavens had taken from Shanklin at the gambler’s own crooked game. Whether she countenanced it or not, Slavens did not know. Perhaps it was not honest money, in every application of the term, but it was entirely current, and there was a most comfortable sense in the feel of it there bulked in the inner pocket of his coat. He had no qualms nor scruples about it at all. Fate had put it in his hands for the carrying out of his long-deferred desires. If it hadn’t worked honestly 302 for Shanklin, it was about to set in for a mighty reformation.
But there was the trouble of Agnes’ absence, which persisted between him and sleep when he arranged himself in his blankets. He turned with it, and sighed and worked himself into a fever of anxiety. Many times he got up and listened for the sound of hoofs, to go back to his tent and tell himself that it was unreasonable to think that she would ride by night over that lonely road.
When morning began to creep in it brought with it a certain assurance that all was well with her, as daylight often brings its deceptive consolation to a heart that suffers the tortures of despair in the dark. Sleep caught him then, and held him past the hour that he had set for its bound. When he awoke the sun was shining over the cold ashes of his last night’s fire.
Slavens got up with a deeper feeling of resentment against Boyle than he ever had felt for any man. It seemed to come over him unaccountably, like a disagreeable sound, or a chill from a contrary wind. It was not a pettish humor, but a deep, grave feeling of hatred, as if the germ of it had grown in the blood and spread to every tissue of his body. The thought of Boyle’s being so near him was discordant. It pressed on him with a sense of being near some unfit thing which should be removed.
Dr. Slavens never had carried arms in his life, and he had no means of buckling Hun Shanklin’s old revolver 303 about him, but he felt that he must take it with him when he left the tent. Big and clumsy as it was, he thrust it under the belt which sustained his trousers, where it promised to carry very well, although it was not in a free-moving state in case an emergency should demand its speedy use.
There would be no time for breakfast. Even then he should have been in Comanche, he told himself with upbraidings for having slept so long. His horse had strayed, too. Slavens went after it in resentful mood. The creature had followed the scant grazing to the second bench, an elevation considerably above its present site.
Slavens followed the horse’s trail, wondering how the animal had been able to scramble up those slopes, hobbled as it was. Presently he found the beast and started with it back to camp. Rounding the base of a great stone which stood perched on the hillside as if meditating a tumble, Slavens paused a moment to look over the troubled slope of land which had been his two days before.
There was Boyle’s tent, with a fire before it, but no one in sight; and there, on the land which adjoined his former claim on the south, was another tent, so placed among the rocks that it could not be seen from his own.
“It wasn’t there when I left,” Slavens reflected. “I wonder what he’s after?”