“Not altogether. But—but it’s one of the reasons.”
“An’ it’s important, ain’t it, honey?” As he spoke he bent his head and gazed up into her face, his expression crafty, knowing.
“Not so important as caring for you, daddy,” she returned brokenly. “Nothing in this world matters so much as that.”
He did not press the subject. He sat back in his seat and studied his horny hands wistfully.
Shortly afterward, Dot began arguing against this decision of his to send her to school. They talked for two straight hours, she objecting on every ground she could think of, he countering stubbornly, now besting her, again being himself bested. Spiritedly she protested. She was too old to go to school; they needed the money for other purposes; she wouldn’t leave him to live alone on the ranch; she didn’t want an education. But all her vehemence and tears and supplications were of no avail. There was no shaking the determination of Lemuel Huntington.
So, in sheer exhaustion, she finally gave up and, lapsing into silence, devoted herself to the solution of the momentous problem of what she should do with the stolen treasure she was bringing along with her, wrapped in her mother’s old silk shawl.
After long reflection she concluded she would turn it over to the San Francisco authorities on her arrival, reasoning that it really did not matter which civil authorities received it, since it would be forwarded to the railroad company anyway. Having relieved her mind thus, her thoughts drifted to Billy Gee, and she found herself wondering lingeringly about him and if the wound in his head were giving him much trouble, where he might be in that great, lonely void of desert far to the south, if he were thinking of her. Foolish, vagrant little thoughts, they were; but somehow, they seemed to her to be very serious indeed, and so pleasing as to bring a warmth to her cheeks, and so tragic as to cause the tears to form in her eyes.
Lemuel sat and also reflected, but his thoughts were of another sort, a legion of sleep-dispelling meditations that crowded his brain, clamoring for review. He was so jubilant with himself and the fulfillment of the big dream of his life. His mind in a riot of joyous anticipation, he sat planning to make his brief stay in San Francisco an epochal event.
He threw back his head against the high back of his plush seat and chuckled silently at the clever manner in which he had enticed Dot into leaving the ranch, how splendidly his lie about borrowing two thousand dollars from Sheriff Warburton had worked out, how successfully he had manipulated affairs so that Dot would possibly never know that her father had played the sneak to effect the capture of Billy Gee. Yes, and there was also considerable satisfaction for him in the knowledge that he, Lemuel, had spirited his Dot out of the country before Sangerly and his bloodhounds could even see her, not to mention interview her.
He told himself that if for no other reason than to insure her against annoyance he would likewise keep her whereabouts secret. No one would know that she was attending the Longwell Seminary until the search for the missing twenty thousand dollars had come to an end. Meanwhile, he would contrive to question her and find out what she knew about those saddlebags and their contents. Dot would tell him, of that he felt quite sure; and some day perhaps, when the whole thing was ancient history, and she had graduated with high honors, he would tell her how her father had captured, single-handed, the far-famed daring desperado, Billy Gee, and why he had done it.