But the next instant she was defending herself with the argument that Billy Gee was bent on mending his ways. He had promised her he would reform. She believed him. If he were captured——
For some reason she felt no anxiety on that score. He had been too confident of his ability to evade the posses, had shown no alarm over the information that they were out in numbers; besides, he had mentioned having relatives living close at hand, denoting that he would find safety with them until such time as he could leave the country.
“You’re goin’ to hear from me, Miss Huntington, some time,” he had said.
She experienced a strange little thrill when she recalled that he was giving up his vicious career solely because she had asked him to. It was such a satisfying thought, such a proud conceit, to feel that she, Dot Huntington, had exerted an influence over this elusive terror of the Southwest who laughed at the law and recognized nothing binding upon him save the fulfillment of his own personal desires. Yet, she told herself, she would look forward from now on, hopefully, with keen anticipation, to the day when she would hear from him.
While thinking thus, she had been standing near her bed, gazing abstractedly at the old-fashioned bureau opposite. Now her eyes became attracted to a narrow edge of green showing just over the top of the middle drawer. Thoughtfully, she reached down and plucked at it with thumb and forefinger. She drew it out—a ten-dollar greenback. For one long instant she stared dumfounded at it. Then she pulled out the drawer and fell back with a low cry, gazing at the interior in wide-eyed, fearful amazement. The drawer was piled high with a disordered mass of currency of all denominations.
CHAPTER VI—AFTERMATH
Geerusalem was a camp of many people of many waspish dispositions. The engrossing business of making money and spending it kept this isolated desert settlement steering a more or less wabbly, law-abiding course, for, like frontier camps the world over, it had its furious six-shooter forays, stealthy knifings, mob uprisings, its denizens of dive and den. These things were simply because civic unity was an unknown quality at the time, the population of the fly-by-night variety, and the county officials too busy serving the communities where the majority vote held forth to concern themselves with the “scattering returns.”
Established before the “blue-sky” law was written into the statute books of California, this metropolis of Soapweed Plains was the Mecca of the “wildcatter”—that thrifty, gentlemanly rascal who tempts gullible men and women of other climes to invest their nest eggs in mining stock fit only to start the kitchen fire. These gentry were the leading citizens of Geerusalem, though their neighbors knew them for what they were; autocratic, pompous fellows, skimming just under the surface of the law, clever swindlers who paid homage to none save the mining engineer and the occasional moody geologist who dropped unannounced into camp. A mineralogist’s O. K. was a valuable thing to have on a stock prospectus.
The .45-caliber brains with which Lemuel Huntington hobnobbed, belonged, for the most part, to these wildcatters—promoters, they styled themselves. He was their standing joke, their dub, the something at which they could sling the garbage of their talk. From which it may be surmised that he did not rank very high in the estimation of this fraternity. Yet, heretofore, he had felt oddly gratified over the thought that he could associate with them; they were “big guns,” financially powerful, influential to a great degree, and they had seemed, to his way of thinking, to be exemplars of education and refinement.
This morning, however, as he rode into camp from his ranch, on what he had led Dot to believe was a borrowing expedition, his viewpoint had undergone a change. He was a far different Lemuel Huntington from the tolerant, good-natured dub of yesterday. He had captured the terrible, much-feared desperado, Billy Gee. He had won a comfortable fortune by his bravery. His Dot was going to receive that long-dreamed-of education. His breast was filled with it; his head reeled with his own importance.