“He was thar this mornin’.”
Power was frankly puzzled by MacGonigal’s excess of reticence. He knew the man so well that he wondered what sinister revelation lay behind this twice-repeated refusal to give a direct reply to his questions. By this time the appetizing drink was ready, and he swallowed it with the gusto of one who had found the sun hot and the trail dusty, though he had ridden only three miles from the railroad station in the valley, where he was supplied with a lame horse by the blunder of a negro attendant at the hotel.
It was his way to solve a difficulty by taking the shortest possible cut; but, being quite in the dark as to the cause of his friend’s perceptible shirking of some unknown trouble, he decided to adopt what logicians term a process of exhaustion.
“All well at Dolores?” he asked, looking straight into the storekeeper’s prominent eyes.
“Bully!” came the unblinking answer.
Ah! The worry, whatsoever it might be, evidently did not concern John Darien Power in any overwhelming degree.
“Then what have you got on your chest, Mac?” he said, while voice and manner softened from an unmistakably stiffening.
MacGonigal seemed to regard this personal inquiry anent his well-being as affording a safe means of escape from a dilemma. “I’m scairt about you, Derry,” he said at once, and there was no doubting the sincerity of the words.
“About me?”
“Yep. Guess you’d better hike back to Sacramento.”