"In particular you don't want Jim Galloway to know?"
"In particular I don't want Jim Galloway to so much as suspect that Brocky Lane or Tom Cutter or myself have any interest in Mt. Temple," he said emphatically.
"But if the man who shot him is one of Galloway's crowd, as you say. . . ."
"He'll do no talking for a while. After having seen Brocky drop he took one chance and showed half of his cowardly carcass around a boulder. Whereupon Brocky, weak and sick and dizzy as he was, popped a bullet into him."
She shuddered.
"Is there nothing but killing of men among you people?" she cried sharply. "First the sheepman from Las Palmas, then Brocky Lane, then the man who shot him. . . ."
"Brocky didn't kill Moraga," Norton explained quietly. "But he dropped him and then made him throw down his gun and crawl out of the brush. Then Tom Cutter gathered him in, took him across the county line, gave him into the hands of Ben Roberts who is sheriff over there, and came on to San Juan. Roberts will simply hold Moraga on some trifling charge, and see that he keeps his mouth shut until we are ready for him to talk."
"Then Brocky Lane and Tom Cutter were together on Mt. Temple?"
"Near enough for Tom to hear the shooting."
They grew silent again. Clearly Norton had done what explaining he deemed necessary and was taking her no deeper into his confidences. She told herself that he was right, that these were not merely his own personal secrets, that as yet he would be unwise to trust a stranger further than he was forced to. And yet, unreasonably or not, she felt a little hurt. She had liked him from the beginning and from the beginning she felt that in a case such as his she would have trusted to intuition and have held back nothing. But she refrained from voicing the questions which none the less insisted upon presenting themselves to her: What was the thing that had brought both Brocky Lane and Tom Cutter to Mt. Temple? What had they been seeking there in a wilderness of crag and cliff? Why was Roderick Norton so determined that Jim Galloway should not so much as suspect that these men were watchful in the mountains? What sinister chain of circumstance had impelled Moraga, who Norton said was Galloway's man, to shoot down the cattle foreman? And Galloway himself, what type of man must he be if all that she had heard of him were true; what were his ambitions, his plans, his power?