The little man got to his feet in great excitement. "My dear young woman, you're the very person I've been wanting to see. He told me he was going calling, but I'm such a darned chump I didn't think to ask where. Is Dick a friend of your family?"
"No, hardly that. I met him when he came to our office in the State House to look up the land grant papers. We became friendly and I asked him to call because we own the old Valdés house, and I thought he would like to see it." She added, rather dryly: "You haven't answered my question."
"I'll say that so far as I know you are the last person who ever saw Dick alive except his murderers," Davis replied, a gleam of tears in his eyes.
"Oh, it can't be as bad as that," she cried. "They wouldn't go that far."
"Wouldn't they? He was shot at from ambush while we were out riding one day in the Chama Valley."
"By whom?"
"By a young Mexican—one of Miss Valdés servants."
"You don't mean that Valencia——?"
She stopped, unwilling to put her horrified thought into words. He answered her meaning.
"No, I reckon not. She wanted Dick to tell her who it was, so she could punish the man. But that doesn't alter the facts any. He was shot at. That time the murderer missed, but maybe this time——"