When his cigarette was going well he lazed over on his side, supporting his head on a crooked arm, and gazed abroad between half-shut lids.
The view from Linny's Hill was all that could be desired. At the base of the hill the Golden Bar-Hillsville trail, a yellow-gray ribbon across the green, led the eye across flats and gentle rises through shady groves of pine and cedar westward to where Golden Bar, a collection of toy houses, each one startlingly clear and distinct in that rarefied atmosphere, sprawled along the farther bank of Wagonjack River.
The stream itself, a roaring river in the spring of the year, was now but a poor thing. Shrunk to quarter-size, and fordable almost anywhere, it flowed in sedate and midsummer fashion between its cut-banks and miniature bluffs. Bordered throughout its length by willows and cottonwoods, Wagonjack River meandered and wound its way southward from the blue and hazy tumble of peaks that was the main range of the Medicine Mountains to where the wide and pleasant reaches of the Peace Pipe watered the southern section of the territory.
From Golden Bar to the Medicine Mountains was a long two hundred miles. From Golden Bar to the Peace Pipe was twice that distance.
Crocker County, four hundred miles long by three hundred miles wide, bounded on the east by the Wagonjack, ran well up into the Medicine Mountains before giving way to Storey County. Across the river from Crocker were two counties, of which Tom Read County was the northern and Piegan County the southern. Shaler County ran the whole length of the southern side of Crocker, whose western line was the boundary of the neighboring territory.
There you have Crocker, a county three hundred miles wide by four hundred miles long, and Golden Bar was its county seat.
Political pickings in Crocker, which pickings the neighbors called by a much worse name, were consistently good. A small Indian reservation lay partly in Crocker and partly in Shaler, but somehow the Crocker citizens always secured the beef contracts. Crocker laws, provided the suspected person or persons were friendly with the county officials, were not administered with undue severity. Coarse work was never tolerated, naturally; but if one were judicious and a good picker, one could travel far and profitably. Thus it may be seen that Crocker was, as counties go, fertile ground for easy consciences.
But, like Gallio, Bill Wingo cared for none of these things. He watched the moving pencil-end that was Miss Prescott and her mount descend to the trail and ride along it in the direction of Golden Bar.
Another pencil-end was riding the same trail,—away from Golden Bar. Traveling at their present rate of speed, the riders would meet not far from the scattering grove of cedars marking the entrance to the low-walled draw that led to the Prescott ranch house.
Bill Wingo intently scrutinized the way-farer from Golden Bar side.