"Easy, now!" he admonished. "We're going, both of us, but we won't be put out. You've said just what I looked for you to say. You've denied knowledge of this thing. I think with Santry here that you're a liar, a God-forsaken liar." He drew closer to the Senator, who seemed about to burst with passion, and held him with a gaze his fury could not daunt. "May Heaven help you, Senator, when we're ready to prove all this against you. If you're in Crawling Water then, we'll ride you to hell on a rail."
"Now," Trowbridge said to Santry, when they were downstairs again, "you get out of town hot-foot. Ride to my place. Take this!" He scribbled a few lines on the back of an envelope. "Give it to my foreman. Tell him to meet me with the boys where the trail divides. We'll find Wade, if we have to trade our beds for lanterns and kill every horse in the valley."
The two men shook hands, and Santry's eyes were fired with a new hope. The old man was grateful for one thing, at least: the time for action had arrived. He had spent his youth on the plains in the days when every man was a law unto himself, and the years had not lessened his spirit.
"I'll be right after you, Bill," Trowbridge concluded. "I'm going first to break the news to Miss Purnell. She'd hear it anyway and be anxious. She'd better get it straight from me."
Lem Trowbridge had seen only one woman faint, but the recollection was indelibly impressed upon his mind. It had happened in his boyhood, at the ranch where he still lived, when a messenger had arrived with word of the death of the elder Trowbridge, whose horse had stepped into a prairie-dog hole and fallen with his rider. The picture of his mother's collapse he could never forget, or his own horrible thought that she, too, had passed away, leaving him parentless. For months afterwards he had awakened at night, crying out that she was dead.
The whole scene recurred to him when he told Dorothy of Wade's disappearance, and saw her face flush and then pale, as his mother's had done. The girl did not actually faint, for she was young and wonderfully strong, but she came so near to it that he was obliged to support her with his arm to keep her on her feet. That was cruel, too, for he loved her. But presently she recovered, and swept from his mind all thought of himself by her piteous appeal to him to go instantly in search of Wade.
"We'll find him, Dorothy, don't you worry," he declared, with an appearance of confidence he was far from feeling. "I came around to tell you myself because I wanted you to know that we are right on the job."
"But how can you find him in all those mountains, Lem? You don't even know which side of the range they've hidden him on."
He reminded her that he had been born in Crawling Water Valley, and that he knew every draw and canyon in the mountains; but in his heart he realized that to search all these places would take half a lifetime. He could only hope that chance, or good fortune, might lead them promptly to the spot they sought.
"Do you think that Senator Rexhill knows where Gordon is?" she asked. "Is he in this, too?"