Halfway back to the ranch, and he met Ramon riding hard. "Ride back," said Waring. "Hook up to the wagon and come to the arroyo."
"Have you found the Señor Pat?"
"Yes. He is dead."
Ramon whirled his pony and pounded away in the darkness.
Out on the highway two long, slender shafts of light slid across the mesa, dipped into an arroyo, and climbed skyward as a machine buzzed up the opposite pitch. The lights straightened again and shot on down the road, swinging stiffly from side to side. Presently they came to a stop. In the soft glow of their double radiance lay a yellow-wheeled buckboard, shattered and twisted round a telegraph pole. The lights moved up slowly and stopped again.
A man jumped from the machine and walked round the buckboard. Beneath it lay a crumpled figure. The driver of the machine ran a quick hand over the neck and arms of Waco, who groaned. The driver lifted him and carried him to the car. Stacey lay some twenty miles behind him. He was bound south. The first town on his way was thirty miles distant. But the roads were good. He glanced back at the huddled figure in the tonneau. The car purred on down the night. The long shafts of light lifted over a rise and disappeared.
In about an hour the car stopped at the town of Grant. Waco was carried from the machine to a room in the hotel, and a doctor was summoned. Waco lay unconscious throughout the night.
In the morning he was questioned briefly. He gave a fictitious name, and mentioned a town he had heard of, but had never been in. His horses had run away with him.
The man who had picked him up drove away next morning. Later the doctor told Waco that through a miracle there were no bones broken, but that he would have to keep to his bed for at least a week. Otherwise he would never recover from the severe shock to his nervous system.
And Waco, recalling the horror of the preceding day, twisted his head round at every footstep in the hall, fearing that Waring had come to question him. He knew that he had done no wrong; in fact, he had told Pat that they had better drive back home. But a sense of shame at his cowardice, and the realization that his word was as water in evidence, that he was but a wastrel, a tramp, burdened him with an aching desire to get away—to hide himself from Waring's eyes, from the eyes of all men.