"I always regretted we had to hand over the search just there to a
Division that knows little about ranch horses," murmured the Inspector.
"Still—perhaps—" He stopped and shifted the letter he held from one
hand to the other, as if weighing it.
"We'd have made short work of it, sir."
"Even if we'd implicated your halfbreed friend?" The older man was peering beneath his iron-grey brows.
"I'm afraid nothing more was needed to implicate Blue Pete," sighed
Mahon.
"For a halfbreed rustler he seems to have stamped himself on your imagination, Boy." They had called Mahon "Boy" almost since he joined the force seven years before as a young man, packed with youthful vitality, frankness and ambition, and the nickname was dear to him.
"But he wasn't always a rustler. I remember him only for the two years he spent unofficially in the Force, the best rustler-buster we ever had. That was the real Blue Pete. That he died a rustler was due to crooked 'justice.' Poor old Pete! If only he hadn't had the Indian strain!"
"He wouldn't have been so useful to us. His uncanny scent on the trail—By the way, Mahon, strange we never found trace of him—his grave or something—when you're so certain how and where he died. And where's that ugly pinto of his? Whiskers, he called her, wasn't it?"
"Mira found the body, sir—that last letter she sent us said as much. She'd hide him from us—it's exactly the thing she would do. She was a loyal wife—"
"Not quite a wife."
"A wife as truly as absence of formal ceremony can make one. He's lying out there somewhere in the heart of the Hills he loved. . . . They were a sentimental pair."