“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit,” Mr. Manley answered. “He’s not there any more, you know. He ducked out. It may be—I don’t say it is—but it’s just possible that he and his friends got the rustlers out of jail. Boys, I hate to say it, but somehow it looks like trouble was stirrin’ up.”
“But why?” Teddy asked insistently. “What makes you say that, Dad? Roy’s been like that all day, too. Why the worry?”
“So you been thinkin’ too, have you, Roy?” the ranch owner repeated, glancing over at his son. “Well, I’ll tell you, Teddy. All of us have our friends and our enemies. When my dad—your grandfather, that was—first settled here there was nothin’ but a lot of space. Pop Burns can tell you about that. Then later Eagles came, and with it some punchers that wanted money without workin’ for it. About six years ago they wanted me to go into a scheme of weighting the cattle scales down at the railroad corral. But I soon set ’em right on that!”
Teddy and Roy nodded.
“Pop told us,” Roy stated. “That put you sort of in wrong, didn’t it?”
“Yep. Then a queer gang from the East began to head for Eagles. You know most of ’em I guess. That barkeeper was the worst of the lot. They joined up with the element that had it in for me. You know the result—how we had our horses stolen and our cattle rustled. Then, when we landed the gang an’ jailed ’em, I figured they were out of the way for a while. But now—they’re out. An’ I get this note.”
Slowly he took the paper from his pocket and gazed at it.
“Reltsur,” he mused. “Sounds like a foreign name. Well, by jinks, whoever he is—” The man’s eyes blazed and he crumpled the paper up and flung it savagely from him. “Whoever he is, if he fools around here he’ll wish he hadn’t! An’ that’s that!”
Turning, he strode into the house.
“You were right, Roy,” Teddy remarked in a low voice, watching his father’s form pass through the door. “Dad does take it seriously. He’s all het up. I wonder what— Oh, fishcakes! What’s the use of wondering? I’m going in.”