He went back to Winifred Waverly's letter. She had ended by saying,
"I know that Henry Pollard suspects me of knowing more than I have admitted to him; I suppose I did not entirely deceive him about that yellow envelope. He is watching me all the time. That is why I have written this to be ready to give it to you if I get the chance, if I dare not talk with you. Don't try to see me. I am in no danger now, but if you came, if he knew that we were seeing each other…. I don't know."
At last when Thornton got up and went to his door day was breaking. He returned to his table where his lamplight was growing a sickly, pale yellow in the dawn, and holding Winifred's letter over the chimney burned it. He took her other little note from his pocket and let the yellow flame lick it up. Then, grinding the ashes under his heel, he put out the light and went again to the door.
The recent shooting at the Here's How Saloon by some man who had stood almost at the cowboy's elbow, he had for a little forgotten as he pondered on his own personal danger and admitted that the case was going to look bad against him in spite of what he might do. But now, for a moment, he forgot his own predicament to become lost in frowning speculation upon the night's crime.
He knew that men like the Bedloes, hard men living hard lives, have many enemies. There were the men whom they had cheated at cards, and who had cheated them, with whom they had drunk and quarrelled. It was clear to him that any one of a dozen men, bearing a grudge against Charley Bedloe, but afraid to attack in the open any one of these three brothers who fought like tigers and who took up one another's quarrels with no thought of the right and the wrong of it, might have chosen this method.
Yes, this was clear. But one thing was not. The night had passed and neither the Kid nor Ed Bedloe had called to square with him. He did not understand this. For he did not believe that even their affiliation with Broderick and Pollard would have held the Kid and Ed back from their vengeance now. It was patent that the Kid had leaped to the natural conclusion that he had killed Charley Bedloe; he understood the emotion which he had seen depicted in the Kid's twisted face as Charley staggered and fell at his brother's feet. It was a great, blind grief, unutterable, wrathful, terrible, like the unreasoning, tempestuous grief of a wild thing, of a mother bear whose cubs had been shot before her eyes. For the one thing which it seemed God had put into the natures of these men was love, the love which led them to seek no wife, no friend, no confidante outside their own close fraternity. And yet the night had passed and neither the Kid nor Ed had come.
"Something happened to stop them," mused Thornton. "For a few hours only. They'll come. And I'd give a hundred dollars to know who the jasper was that put that bullet into Charley."
He went back into his cabin, put his two guns on the table, threw out the cartridges, and for fifteen minutes oiled and cleaned. Then, with a careful eye to every shell, he loaded them again. When he once more threw his door open and went outside his eyes were a little regretful but very, very hard.
He was inclined to believe that Winifred was mistaken in judging Ben Broderick's to be the brains of this thing. He thought that he saw Pollard's hand directing. Until now he had fully expected to go to Dry Town, to raise the four thousand five hundred dollars with which to make his last payment upon the Poison Hole ranch. Now he more than suspected that this was but a play of Pollard's to get him out of the way while the last crime be perpetrated, to have him out upon one of his lonely rides so that he could prove no alibi, perhaps even to rob him of the four thousand five hundred dollars before he could come with it to Hill's Corners. Now he made up his mind that he was not going to give Pollard this one last chance he wanted. For, he felt convinced, if he did succeed in getting through with the money without a bullet in the back, and if he actually brought it to Pollard the latter would tell him that he had changed his mind, and so the rash act would have been done uselessly. Having no way of holding Pollard to his bargain he had little wish to make the long ride to Dry Town and back.
Thornton for several days had planned to ride out to the borders of his range and see his cowboys, giving them full instructions for work to be done during the week which followed in case he should not be able to give more time to them. Now, with a great deal to think about, he was not averse to a solitary day in the saddle.