Morning found him still wide-eyed, staring unseeingly out of the car window at the multiplying miles of rich San Joaquin Valley acreage flashing by. Around seven o’clock the train stopped for a few minutes at Tracy, a junction town, and passengers from the north began piling in.
A newsboy came hurrying down the aisle, clamoring his wares excitedly. Lemuel hailed the youngster and bought a paper. Dot still slept and, seeing this, he settled himself comfortably in the seat to read. The following instant he caught his breath in sudden alarm, and sat bolt upright. His face paling through its tan, he glared with bulging eyes at the three words printed in large display type across the top of the first page.
DESPERATE BANDIT ESCAPES!
Billy Gee Attacks Sheriff, Plunges From Fast-moving Train Near Burbank.
For a long moment, Lemuel continued to glare fearfully at those headlines, then he sank limply back in his seat.
He felt Dot stir and, looking guiltily at her, saw that she was waking. Whereupon, he stuffed the paper into his pocket and presently rose and walked unsteadily out of the coach, heading for the smoking car. From that instant forward, he carried day and night in his mind a picture of Billy Gee standing in Sheriff Warburton’s room in Geerusalem and he heard again the bandit’s ominous threat:
“Huntington, I’m goin’ to be free one of these days. When I am, I’m huntin’ you up. An’ you’re goin’ to pay, Huntington. Remember that! Damn you, you’ll pay like you never paid in yore life!”
CHAPTER VIII—LAVENDER AND OLD LACE
Alexander Sangerly—“Lex” Sangerly, his friends called him—was a democratic type of Californian, who did not believe that the fact of his father being Western manager of the Mohave & Southwestern Railroad system should of necessity mean that that father’s son must take any exalted credit unto himself. So, notwithstanding the fact that Lex held the important post of division superintendent of the road, he was not above meeting the rank and file of his departments on their own plane, mixing with them, addressing them by their given names, and conducting himself generally in business as well as social affairs very much like any red-blooded human.
Incidentally, it might be well to mention that, although only twenty-seven years old, he was already blossoming out into a prominent railroad figure, with the likelihood of making good future presidential timber for some transcontinental road.
The gold camp of Geerusalem was Lex’s first acquaintance with a desert bonanza settlement, that is, one in the high noon of its prosperity, its mines giving up great fortunes, its people drunk with success scattering their wealth prodigally, its night life unlicensed, violent with rashness and lust; yet Geerusalem with all its lawlessness gripped him with a compelling fascination, the fascination one feels who looks for the first time on something horribly real, incredible of human toleration, though tolerated and upheld by a civilized population that drops back to the primitive when the law is weak.