“You haven’t seen your little girl in fifteen years,” exclaimed Bucky.
“Haven’t seen or heard of her. So far as I know she may not be alive now. This locket is the first hint I have had since she was taken away, the very first news of her that has reached me, and I don’t know what to make of that. One of the robbers must have been wearing it, the way I figure it out. Where did he get it? That’s what I want to know.”
“Suppose you tell me the story, seh,” suggested the ranger gently.
The cattleman offered O’Connor a cigar and lit one himself. For a minute he puffed slowly at his Havana, leaning far back in his chair with eyes reminiscent and half shut. Then he shook himself back into the present and began his tale.
“I don’t reckon you ever heard tell of Dave Henderson. It was back in Texas I knew him, and he’s been missing sixteen years come the eleventh of next August. For fifteen years I haven’t mentioned his name, because Dave did me the dirtiest wrong that one man ever did another. Back in the old days he and I used to trail together. We was awful thick, and mostly hunted in couples. We began riding the same season back on the old Kittredge Ranch, and we went in together for all the kinds of spreeing that young fellows who are footloose are likely to do. Fact is, we suited each other from the ground up. We frolicked round a-plenty, like young colts will, and there was nothing on this green earth Dave could have asked from me that I wouldn’t have done for him. Nothing except one, I reckon, and Dave never asked that of me.”
Mackenzie puffed at his cigar a silent moment before resuming. “It happened we both fell in love with the same girl, little Frances Clark, of the Double T Ranch. Dave was a better looker than me and a more taking fellow, but somehow Frances favored me from the start. Dave stayed till the finish, and when he seen he had lost he stood up with me at the wedding. We had agreed, you see, that whoever won it wasn’t to break up our friendship.
“Well, Frankie and I were married, and in course of time we had two children. My boy, Tom, is the older. The other was a little girl, named after her mother.” The cattleman waited a moment to steady his voice, and spoke through teeth set deep in his Havana. “I haven’t seen her, as I said, since she was two years and ten months old—not since the night Dave disappeared.”
Bucky looked up quickly with a question on his lips, but he did not need to word it.
Mackenzie nodded. “Yes, Dave took her with him when he lit out across the line for Mexico.”
But I’ll have to go back to something that happened earlier. About three months before this time Dave and me were riding through a cut in the Sierra Diablo Mountains, when we came on a Mexican who had been wounded by the Apaches. I reckon we had come along just in time to scare them off before they finished him. We did our best for him, but he died in about two hours. Before dying, he made us a present of a map we found in his breast pocket. It showed the location of a very rich mine he had found, and as he had no near kin he turned it over to us to do with as we pleased.