"I confess to you that with all the talk of thieving I've wondered if he didn't know more about it than he gave me to understand, but what he did the other day seems, in all reason, to wipe that suspicion out."
He said: "It seems you've answered your own question. When you've said that he went a long ways to prove that he's the man you want by what he's just done, you've said all there was to say."
"But do you mean that? Are you keeping some suspicion of your own from me?"
He deliberated a moment, then smiled.
"It's easy to suspect but it don't pay very big until you know somethin'. Then you don't need to."
They climbed out of the gulch, horses breathing loudly as they made the last steep ascent and gained the ridge they were to follow and there was little more talk until they stopped and sat looking down across the great flat-bottomed cavity of Devil's Hole. It was a pear-shaped depression, perhaps four miles from rim to rim at the widest point and fully a score of miles in length. Its sides were sprinkled with cedars which clung to the sheer cliffs determinedly, but its bottom was blanketed with thrifty sage brush, purple in the sunlight that was just then slanting across the floor and beneath this sheen they could see the bright green of new grasses. A dark line marked with the clarity of a map the course of the creek and half way down toward the neck of the Hole was a small cabin erected by the man who had filed on the land for Colonel Hunter and who had drifted on without establishing title.
"There's your neighbor," Beck said.
Jane looked for a moment, then lifted her eyes to the country which showed through the narrow outlet of the deep valley. Behind her endless ridges tossed upward to a sharp horizon, but out through that gap the range lay in a vast basin, rising gently to diminutive lavendar buttes plastered against the sky many miles away. It seemed soft and vague and unreal ... like one of the unreal paintings Beck had seen hanging within walls.
Tom led the way through trees and among upstanding ledges of rock into the narrow, dangerous trail and as he went down, his big roan picking the way quickly yet cautiously, he half turned in his saddle to explain the significance of the descent.
It was the only egress on that side of the Hole. There was one trail on the far side, so steep and hazardous that a man must lead his horse either up or down. The only other outlet was through the narrow Gap where the wash of flood water during storms had made the going easy for men and stock. Out to the northwest, however, lay miles of desert, the great basin of which Jane had had a glimpse, well enough to use for range in three seasons, but in summer it became parched and useless. In the Hole cattle could feed on the abundant gramma, could drink from the creek, but getting them out and over the divide to the more plentiful water of Coyote Creek was an undertaking.