“I shall be glad to do whatever I can,” Justin declared.
“It’s your own father who is lying in that room, which he’ll never get out of I’m afraid, and I knew of course you’d be willing to help out now all you can. Clayton doesn’t speak very favorably of the case. There isn’t really anything the matter with Davison, so far as any one can see. It’s his mind, I reckon; it must have been an awful shock to him, perfectly terrible, and it has simply laid him out. He thought everything of Ben. Well, I’m not a man to talk about the dead; but Ben would have tried the soul of a saint, and if I must say it to you I never saw anything very saintly in the character of your father.”
“It’s a good thing Harkness didn’t move out of the valley when he left the ranch.”
“A great thing for us now. He’s dropped everything over on his farm and stays here almost night and day. I’ll see that he doesn’t lose by it.”
While they were talking, William Sanders came up, chewing like a ruminant.
“When I had my fortune told that time in Denver the fortune teller said there was goin’ to be a heap of trouble down here, and it’s come. I don’t reckon that Paradise Valley is any too lucky a place to live in, after all. But them that makes trouble must expect trouble.”
Fogg did not deign to notice this.
“How are your crops, Mr. Sanders?” he asked, with his habitual smile.
“They might be better, if the ditch company and the ditch rider done their duty. I ain’t scarcely had any water fer a week, and that field of millet in the northeast corner of my place is dry as a dust heap. I been wonderin’ when I’ll git water to it. That’s why I come over.”
Justin promised to see to it.