All sorts of speculations were rife, and it was small wonder that the name of the famous bandit, Don Manuel, came to be revived. This was just the sort of audacious work the White Wolf would have gloried in—breaking into a prison, defying the authorities, leaving behind him a trail of mystery and vague terror. But shrewd old-timers pointed out that Don Manuel had never in his whole career helped a gringo—that his hand had been against every American, and that in his earlier days at all events he had killed ruthlessly, out of sheer lust for vengeance against the race of newcomers who had despoiled him of his ancestral acres. What reason, therefore, could he have had to help Dick Willoughby to liberty? Even if it had been the outlaw’s hand that had pulled the trigger against the son of his hated enemy, Ben Thurston, little would he have cared if a score of gringos had come to their end, justly or unjustly, as an aftermath of the tragedy.
Old Ben Thurston had discussed this very question with himself. The slaying of his only son, the clever business deal that had called his own tricky and dishonest bluff and lost him his principality, the sight of his herds being driven away, the approaching eviction from his home—all these events crowding one upon the other had exasperated him beyond measure and completed the change of the already grouchy, disgruntled man into a veritable wild beast snapping and snarling at everyone. Yet his mind was completely obsessed by the idea that it was Dick Willoughby, and Dick Willoughby alone, who had shot his son, so there was no room in his small and obfuscated brain for any seriously renewed apprehension that his old enemy, the White Wolf, had come to life again.
Dick’s escape from jail almost gave Ben Thurston a fit of apoplexy. It was the sleuth, Leach Sharkey, who alone of those around him ventured to break the news. After his first paroxysm of wrath, Thurston paced the room like a caged animal. He had begun to make a confidant of this man, his constant attendant, the protector with the handy guns in his hip pockets on whom he had come to rely night and day, the one associate who phlegmatically endured his irritable moods and abusive language.
So, in Leach Sharkey’s presence, Thurston, as he walked to and fro, spoke his thoughts aloud.
“Damn all pretty faces, anyhow. First and last they have cost me a fine sum. And now it is a pretty face that has cost me my boy’s life. It’s hell, that’s what it is. But I will have my revenge. I’ll hang Dick Willoughby with my own hands if necessary—even if it is the last act of my life I’ll have his neck stretched for him.”
He was glaring down at the sleuth, and the pause seemed to call for some reply.
“Well, he’s given us the slip for the present,” Sharkey ventured. Then he caught the gathering fury in the other’s eyes, and hurriedly went on: “But there is no question in the world we’ll run the scoundrel down. I myself will shoot him like the dog he is the moment I lay my two eyes on him.”
“Well, don’t waste your breath telling me you are going to do it,” growled Thurston. “Hunt him down. Take all the money you need. Get all the men you can. Search every canyon. Guard every road out of the hill country. And don’t be misled by that damn fool talk about the White Wolf of which you’ve been telling me. That cursed outlaw is dead—dead as a herring. I ran the story of his death to earth—stood on his very grave in the potters’ field at Seattle. Dick Willoughby’s the outlaw now. Get him at any cost. Get him, or, by God, lose your own job, Leach Sharkey. Do you follow me?”
“Oh, I follow you,” replied the sleuth, a sardonic smile still further exposing the teeth that were the most prominent feature of his face and at all times gave him a hyena-like appearance. “I’ll get him, make no mistake, Mr. Thurston. Just draw me that check, and I’ll have twenty more men out on the range before morning.”
At the store, Dick Willoughby’s disappearance was for days the sole topic of conversation. One morning Tom Baker and Buck Ashley were gossiping together.