“You’ve surely got a nice posy garden here. Didn’t know there was one like it in all sunbaked Arizona.”
She stood rigid. Her unfaltering eyes, sloe-black in the pale face, never lifted from him.
“There’s only one thing you can talk to me about Where have you hidden my father?”
“I’ve heard folks say he did himself all the hiding that was done.”
“You know that isn’t true. That convict and you have hidden him somewhere. We have evidence enough to convict you both.”
“Imagination, most of it, I expect.” He was inspecting the roses and inhaling their bloom.
“Fact enough to send you to the penitentiary.”
“I ought to be scared. This is a La France, ain’t it?”
“I want you to tell me what you have done with my father.”
He laughed a little and looked at her with eyes that narrowed like those of a cat basking in the sun. He had something the look of the larger members of the cat family—the soft long tread, the compact rippling muscles of a tame panther, and with these the threat that always lies behind its sleepy wariness.