It was a week after election. During that week Warburton received Dot’s telegram requesting him to come to San Francisco. On the day following its receipt, while he debated whether he should make the trip or wire her for particulars, he got an unexpected message from Lex Sangerly, stating in so many words that the M. & S. money had been recovered and urging that information be kept secret for the time being.
Warburton puzzled over the matter for hours. He began to ask himself if it were not just possible that there existed a clandestine love affair between Dot and Billy Gee. Because of his intimate knowledge of Lex’s movements in the case, Warburton was certain that Sangerly had gone to San Francisco to interview the girl and had found her in possession of the outlaw’s loot. This, he reasoned, would explain her telegram that she had something of importance to tell him. Love alone could have moved Billy Gee to part with twenty thousand dollars, was the sheriff’s firm conviction.
“’Twouldn’t be the first good woman fell for a scalawag,” he muttered grimly, as he holstered his six-shooters and picked up his rifle.
It was at that season of the year when the desert region of southern California was beginning to feel the atmospheric influences caused by the early sprinkle of rain descending on the timbered highlands to the north—the violent gustiness of the wind whipping the sand into great clouds, the strange sultriness of the nights, the blood-red sunsets.
Unknown to any member of his office, except his second in command, Undersheriff Hodgson, Warburton stole out of the county seat one evening on a still hunt of weeks, and there was in his heart the kind of determination that stops at nothing to achieve its purpose.
Aside from his desire to merit the faith of the people, there was a personal angle which made his meeting with the bandit a thing of vital moment. Any one familiar with the man-hunting game will tell you that if there is one thing an officer of the law never forgets, it is a bodily injury received at the hands of a prisoner; also, that he never quite forgives himself for losing a prisoner. Either is, loosely speaking, a professional disgrace, but it is more than that. An officer appreciates only too well that he is the custodian of the law, that his voice is the voice of the commonwealth, that his body is as sacred as it is possible for a human body to be sacred. Sheriff Warburton cherished this belief with pride. Had Billy Gee held him up at the point of a gun and stripped him of his valuables, the act would have been more or less forgivable alongside of striking the sheriff down, shackling the sheriff with the sheriff’s handcuffs, and making his escape.
The memory of that hurt had burned itself into Warburton’s brain like some corroding acid. It permeated his being with the deadliness of a vicious poison. His determination to capture Billy Gee came to be a mania with him, a mania similar in intensity to that which had gripped Lemuel Huntington to see Dot educated before he died.
To-day, Sheriff Warburton was out to “get” Billy Gee—not Billy Gee dead, but Billy Gee alive. He wanted to bring the outlaw into the county seat of San Buenaventura, so that the people might see that he had lived up to their expectations as a sheriff, to vindicate his honor, the pride he felt in himself and his position. Anybody could sneak up behind a desperado and shoot him down, but few had grit enough to confront that desperado and take him alive. Warburton was going to herd Billy Gee into the county seat alive or perish in the attempt. So he swore to himself at the time.
A-straddle of a mule, driving a pack burro before him, went the grim sheriff of San Buenaventura County, looking for all the world like a prospector in his patched-up overalls, old gray hat, and boots worn down at the heels. A rough mat of whiskers which he had let flourish untrimmed, disguised him against the possibility of recognition.
Setting out from the town of Burbank, he steered a little north of east and began a painstaking, systematic visit to every water hole, spring, and tank on his slow, lonely journey across the north rim of the Mohave Desert. There were few of these blessed oases—bright green patches in that universe of gaunt desolation—and many hopeless miles separated them. A man could never live in that near-hell without water, and Warburton knew it.