"Meaning that Moran...."
"And Rexhill," Trowbridge snapped. "They are the men higher up, and the game we're really gunning for. They hired Bailey to shoot Jensen so that the crime might be fastened on to Gordon. I believe that as fully as I'm alive this minute; the point is to prove it."
"Then we've no time to waste," she said, touching her pony with the quirt. "We mustn't loiter here. Suppose Bailey has been sent away?"
The thought of this caused them to urge their tired horses along at speed. Many times during the ride which followed Trowbridge looked admiringly at his companion as she rode on, untiringly, side by side with him. A single man himself, he had come to feel very tenderly toward her, but he had no hope of winning her. She had never been more than good friends with him, and he realized her feeling for Wade, but this knowledge did not make him less keen in his admiration of her.
"Good luck to you, Lem," she said, giving him her hand, as they paused at the head of Crawling Water's main street. "Let me know what you do as soon as you can. I'll be anxious."
He nodded.
"I know about where to find him, if he's in town. Oh, we're slowly getting it on them, Dorothy. We'll be ready to 'call' them pretty soon. Good-by!"
Tug Bailey, however, was not in town, as the cattleman learned at Monte Joe's dance-hall, piled high with tables and chairs and reeking with the stench, left over from the previous night, of whiskey fumes and stale tobacco smoke. Monte Joe professed not to know where the puncher had gone, but as Trowbridge pressed him for information the voice of a woman, as shrill as the squawk of a parrot, floated down from the floor above.
"Wait a minute."
Trowbridge waited and the woman came down to him. He knew her by ill-repute, as did every man in the town, for she was Pansy Madder, one of the dance-hall habitués, good-looking enough by night to the inflamed fancy, but repulsive by day, with her sodden skin and hard eyes.