There was one listener, however, who said nothing and whose sharp eyes scanned each face in the room with painstaking thoroughness. This was Sud Provine, a rider from Sky Line who had come down for the mail.
The Sky Line men never stayed long at Cordova, except as they came now and again for a night at play.
When the talk had changed from the all-absorbing topic of the stolen cattle, this worthy rose, took his sack and departed.
Several pairs of eyes followed him, but no one spoke of him.
There was something about the Sky Line riders which seemed to preclude discussion in the open.
Price Selwood had told the truth.
There was not a night of the long warming weeks of spring which had not seen him, a shadow in the shadows, riding the slopes and flats of Nameless. Sometimes he sat for hours high on some shoulder of the hills watching the bowl beneath with the moonlight sifting down in a silver flood. Again, when the nights were dark, he rode up under the very lip of Rainbow Cliff and watched and listened, his every sense as acute as a panther’s. There were times when he sat for half a night within hailing distance of Kate Cathrew’s stronghold, and once her dogs, winding him, yammered excitedly. This brought out a stealthy listener, whose only betrayal was the different note in the dogs’ voices.
But someone was there in the darkness of the veranda, and Selwood outstayed him, whoever he was—outstayed the animals’ excitement, their curiosity, and left with the hint of coming dawn to drop back down the slants and sleep the day away at home.
Night again saw him travelling, and always his one obsession travelled with him—the hard-and-fast presentiment that Kate Cathrew was the tangible element in the smoke-screen of mystery which rode the country.
It was not long after the talk at the store, perhaps a week or such a matter, when he got the first faint inkling of a clue. It was scarcely more, yet it served to sharpen his wits to a razor edge. It was not moonlight, neither was it clear dark of the moon, but that vague time in between when a pale sickle sailed the vault and shed its half-light to make shadows ghostly and substance illusive.