“H’m,” said De Launay, “that’s rather strange. But these old desert rats get strange attacks of nerves. They become very distrustful of all human beings. He was frightened.”
“He may have been—indeed—he was. Nevertheless, the man Banker is a violent man and very evil. When he is about, we go carefully, my brother and I. If Pierre d’Albret was shot for no reason, what 167 is to prevent us, who are also Basques, from being treated in the same way?”
“By Banker? Nonsense!”
“Nonsense it may be, monsieur. Yet I do not know why it may not have been some one like Banker who shot D’Albret. But I talk too much to you because you are French.”
He became reticent after that, and De Launay, who, whatever he may have thought of the man’s opinions, did not intend to make a confidant of him, allowed the subject to drop. He slept there that night, feeling reasonably safe from pursuit, and in the morning went on his way.
But again, as he rode steadily across the alkali and sage, the lightness of heart that had long been unfamiliar, came back to him. He found himself looking back at his vague sentiment for the little girl of the years gone by and the strange notion that he must come back to her as he had so lightly promised. He had had that notion in the full belief that she must have developed as she had bade fair to do. It had been a shock to find her as she was, but, after the shock, here was that incomprehensible feeling of relief. He had not wanted to find her, after all!
But why had he not? At this point he found his mind shifting to mademoiselle’s vivid and contrasting beauty and uttered a curse. He was getting as incorrigibly sentimental as a girl in her teens! This recurring interest in women was a symptom of the 168 disease he had not yet shaken off. The cure lay in the fresh air and the long trail.
He pushed on steadily and rapidly, shutting his mind to everything but the exigencies of the trail. In the course of time he rode into Willow Spring, and, cautiously pushing his way into the cottonwoods and willows that marked the place, found everything there as he had arranged with Sucatash Wallace. There were few tracks of visitors among the signs left by cattle and an antelope, except the prints of one mounted man who had led two horses. The two horses he found hobbled beside the spring, and with them were a tarpaulin-covered pile of provisions, bedding, and utensils, together with packsaddles. A paper impaled on a willow twig near by he pulled down, to find a message written on it.
“Two pack outfits according to inventory. Compliments of J. B. Wallace. Return or send the price to Lazy Y Ranch when convenient. Asking no questions but wishing you luck.”
He chuckled over this, with its pungent reminder of ancient days when unhesitating trust had been a factor in the life of the range. Old man Wallace, at the behest of his son, turning over to an unknown stranger property of value, seeking not to know why, and calmly confident of either getting it back or receiving payment for it, was a refreshing draft from his youth. De Launay inspected his new property, 169 found it all that he could wish and then set about his preparations for the night.