The moon was just rising, flooding the gaunt land with its soft, compassionate glow. There was a subtle charm in that desert realm; a strange beauty in the night. But Dot was oblivious to these enchantments, ideal though they were for tender words of love, for the delicious ecstasies of that first embrace, that first kiss. Her heart was brimful of grief, weighed down with an overwhelming sadness greater than she had ever known. Billy Gee was surrendering to the law in the morning. He was passing out of her life, forever.
CHAPTER XXIV—WARBURTON GETS SQUARE
Walking their horses down Geerusalem Gulch, they went, riding side by side. Neither spoke. They passed the lonely, dilapidated rock hut where Lennox, wounded, had applied for help on that exciting night of his flight from camp, and crossed the monumented gravel bar that was to be known thereafter as Quintell’s Unlucky Boy. Ahead of them spread the great, gray floor of Soapweed Plains, looking under the sheen of the moon like some placid ghostly sea. From out of the immeasurable distances came the pitiful howl of a wild dog foraging hopelessly for food.
As they reached the point in the gulch where it began to spill its rocky bottom over the bosom of the plains, Dot turned her head and looked at Billy Gee. Her face was pale, her lips drawn.
“Why did you ever do it, Jerome?” she asked in dead tones.
He bent a sharp glance at her. Her cheeks shone wet in the moonlight.
“I’m glad now I did, Dot,” he said simply. “But he had me dead to rights—arrested. I couldn’t help it. It was my only way out. An’ I wanted to save you folks, an’ there was Lex bein’ swindled on that placer proposition. I wouldn’t stand for——”
“How did you know?”
“I seen him. It was right out yonder,” he said, pointing back up the wash where he had overheard Quintell and Harrison discussing the salting of the Lucky Boy group the night before. He explained the incident briefly to her. “He lit a match, an’ I got a look at his face an’ knowed him. You can’t ever guess how I felt about it, Dot,” he went on, in a harsh voice. “Here was the man who had made me a bandit, the man I bin huntin’ and huntin’ for three years. When he planted that evidence against me to clear himself an’ make me out the thief, I was one of his clerks, an’ I’d already bin talked about to run against him at the next election. That’s why he done it, I reckon. Well, it’s all over now.”
“But Pete knew all about it. Oh, Jerome, why didn’t you let him swear out a warrant for Quintell’s arrest!” cried Dot miserably.