"Damn you and your Mamma Jeanne!" cried Drennen. "Tell me about this girl. Who went with her?"
"Not so many," muttered Marquette, "because she go quiet, in the dark. In the day the whole Settlement would follow, non? But Marc Lemarc, he go; an' M'sieu Sefton, he go; an' M'sieu Ramon, he go.…"
"I'll give you a hundred dollars if you can tell me which way they went!" broke in Drennen crisply. "I'll give you five hundred if you can tell me why?"
"Qui sait?" grumbled Marquette. "They go, they go In the dark, they go with horses runnin' like hell. M'am'selle sleep; then come Lemarc, fas', to knock on her window. I hear. She dress damn fas', too, or she don't dress at all; in one minute she's outside with Lemarc. I hear Sefton; I hear Ramon Garcia, a little song in his throat. I hear horses. I hear M'am'selle Ygerne laugh like it's fon! Then she wake me an' she pay me; I see Lemarc give her money, gol' money, to pay. Me, I go back to bed an' Mamma Jeanne suspec' it might be I flirt with the M'am'selle by dark!"
He chuckled again and closed the door as Drennen turned abruptly and went back down the street towards his dugout.
Marc Lemarc had robbed him of the ten thousand dollars. He began there, strangely cool-thoughted. That didn't matter. He had half expected it all along. He knew now, clearly, that, more than that, he had half hoped for it. The money meant less than nothing to him; the theft of it, he had thought, would show Ygerne just what sort of man Lemarc was, would separate her from her companions, would draw her even closer to him. But Ygerne, too, had gone with the money and with Lemarc. Marquette had seen him hand her the gold that she might pay her reckoning. Here was a contingency upon which he had not counted.
As soon as Lemarc had returned she had gone. Sefton had gone with them. Ramon Garcia, too. Why Garcia?
A scene he had not forgotten, which now he could never forget, occupied his mind so vividly that he did not see the material things among which he was walking: Ramon Garcia at Ygerne's window, the gift of a few field flowers, the kissing of a white hand.
Men who had known Drennen for years and who would have been surprised at what was in the man's face yesterday, saw nothing new to note in him to-day. He went his own way, he was silent, his face was hard and not to be read. All day he was about the Settlement, in his own dugout a large part of the time, going to his meals regularly at Joe's. It was rumoured that he had sold his claim; men began to doubt it. He wasn't scattering money as men had always done when they had made a fortune at a turn of the wheel; he wasn't getting drunk which was the customary thing; he wasn't even looking for a game of cards or dice. There was no sign of any new purpose in the man.
And yet the purpose was there, taken swiftly, to be acted upon with a cold leisure. Drennen was not hurrying now. There was no other horse like Major, his recently purchased four-year-old, and Drennen knew it. He had ridden Major hard yesterday; to-day the brute must rest and be ready for more hard riding.