Fifteen minutes later Curly knew that Mrs. Wylie was the divorced wife of Lute Blackwell. She had come to Saguache from the mountains several years before. Soon after there had been an inconspicuous notice in the Sentinel to the effect that Cora Blackwell was suing for divorce from Lute Blackwell, then a prisoner in the penitentiary at Yuma. Another news item followed a week later stating that the divorce had been granted together with the right to use her maiden name. Unobtrusively she had started her little store. Her former husband, paroled from the penitentiary a few months before the rustling episode, had at intervals made of her shop a loafing place since that time.
Curly returned to the Del Mar and sent his name up to Miss Cullison. With Kate and Bob there was also in the room Alec Flandrau.
The girl came forward lightly to meet him with the lance-straight poise that always seemed to him to express a brave spirit ardent and unafraid.
“Have you heard something?” she asked quickly.
“Yes. Tell me, when did your father last meet Lute Blackwell so far as you know?”
“I don’t know. Not for years, I think. Why?”
The owner of the Map of Texas answered the question of his nephew. “He met him the other day. Let’s see. It was right after the big poker game. We met him downstairs here. Luck had to straighten out some notions he had got.”
“How?”
Flandrau, Senior, told the story of what had occurred in the hotel lobby.
“And you say he swore to get even?”