He did not answer. What could he say, except that if it would help her he would cheerfully let red Indians torture him? And that somehow did not seem an appropriate reply.
CHAPTER XLIV
UNDER THE STARS
Robert Dodson, appalled at the horrible thing he had done, fled with his accomplice during the night. They reached Reno, were hidden on the outskirts of the town by a friend, and crossed the Sierras furtively to California. Here the trail was lost. Nobody was very anxious to find it, for Dodson carried with him his own punishment.
Years later a man from Virginia City met in a San Francisco dive a drunken wreck who reminded him of the fugitive. He called him by name, but the man shrank from him, slid to the door, and disappeared into the night. This was the last time Dodson was ever recognized. A rumour floated to Nevada that he died of yellow fever soon after this in Mexico, but no proof of this was ever given out.
The Dodson fortune collapsed with the death of Ralph. The firm had over-extended its operations and a tight money market closed it out. If Ralph had lived he might have been able to weather the storm, but without his guiding hand the Dodson properties became liabilities instead of assets. A sheriff’s sale of the mines paid creditors almost in full.
The death of Ralph was the nine-days talk of the town. From the evidence of red-headed Tommie it was clear that he had directly or indirectly approved of the plan to make away with Hugh McClintock. Most Christians felt it to be a judgment of Providence that he had stepped into the trap prepared for his enemy. The pagans of the community voted it a neat piece of luck for Hugh and buried Dodson complacently and without regrets.
Hugh had been summoned by business out of town the morning after the tragedy and did not return for nearly a week. He called on Vicky the evening of the same day.
Both of them were ill at ease and self-conscious. Vicky felt that she ought to be mistress of the situation, but she could not get out of her mind the memory of how she had clung to this man and sobbed in his arms.
The conventional parlour, with its plush album, its shell ornaments, and its enlarged photographs of Jim Budd and his wife, stifled all Hugh’s natural impulses. He had never learned how to make small talk.