So he told her concisely why Elmer Duffy might think a feud with Rock Holloway a sacred duty to a dead brother. Nona looked at him with wondering eyes and an expression on her face that troubled Rock, and finally moved him to protest.
“Hang it,” he said irritably. “You needn’t look as if I’d confessed to some diabolical murder. Mark Duffy was as hard as they make ’em. He was running it rough on an inoffensive little man who happens to be my friend. Ihadto interfere. And Mark knew I’d interfere. He brought it on himself. If I hadn’t killed him he would have killed me. That’s what he was looking for.”
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking that at all,” she said earnestly. “Of course, you were quite justified. I was just thinking that this explains why Elmer always hated Doc. Doc told me so. He felt it. I suppose it was the resemblance. I don’t see, now, so far as trouble with Elmer is concerned, that it matters much whether you pass as yourself or Doc Martin. You’d have to watch out for Elmer Duffy in either case. I couldn’t trust that man as far as I could throw a bull by the tail.”
“Nice estimate of a man that’s in love with you,” Rock chuckled. “You’re a little bit afraid of Elmer, aren’t you?”
“No,” she declared. “But he’s brutal at heart. He’s the kind that broods on little things till they get big in his own mind. He would do anything he wanted if he was sure he could get away with it. And he would like to run both me and my ranch.”
“Powerful description,” Rock commented. “Still it sort of fits Elmer—all the Duffys, more or less. They’re inclined to be more aggressive than they ought. Well, I guess it doesn’t make much difference if I do pass as Doc. I’m not trying to put anything over on anybody doing that. Now——”
He went on to tell her about meeting the girl at the Maltese Cross. He described the man who had glared at him and puzzled him by his attitude, but he didn’t tell Nona this latter detail. He merely wanted to know who was who.
“That was Buck Walters, range foreman of the Maltese Cross,” she confirmed Rock’s guess.
“Did Doc Martin ever have any sort of run-in with him?” he asked.
“Heavens, no! I would certainly have heard of it if he had. Why?”
“Oh, he seemed rather stand-offish, that’s all,” Rock answered indifferently.
“Buck thinks rather highly of himself,” Nona told him. “He’s in charge of a big outfit. The Maltese Cross is an estate, and he is one of the administrators. He’s pretty high-handed. There are men in this country who don’t like him much. But I don’t think Doc cared two whoops, one way or the other. Probably Buck was thinking about something.”
“Very likely. And who is the yellow-haireddulce?”
“Alice Snell. She and a brother inherit the whole Maltese Cross outfit when the boy comes of age.”
“She told me to tell you to ride down to see her—that she’d be at the ranch all summer.” Thus Rock delivered the message. “I didn’t hardly know what she was talking about.”
“Alice never does talk about anything much, although she talks a lot,” Nona said coolly. “Her long suit is getting lots of attention.”
“Well, I expect she gets it,” Rock ventured. “She’s good looking. Heiress to a fortune in cows. She ought to be popular.”
“She is,” Nona said—“especially with Buck Walters.”
“Oh! And is Buck popular with her?” Rock asked with more than mere curiosity. This was an item that might be useful in the task of sizing up Buck Walters and his way with the Maltese Cross.
“She detests him, so she says,” Nona murmured.
“Then why does she stick around up here in this forsaken country, when she doesn’t have to?”
“You might ask her,” Nona replied.
Rock had squatted on his heels, picking pods off the vines and chucking them by handfuls into the pan.
“I might, at that,” he agreed, “when I have a chance.”
“Alice is very ornamental,” Nona Parke continued thoughtfully. “But quite useless, except to look at. She gives me a pain sometimes, although I like her well enough.”
“You’re not very hard to look at yourself, it happens,” Rock told her deliberately. “And I don’t suppose you object to being ornamental as well as very useful and practical.”
Nona looked at him critically.
“Don’t be silly,” she warned.
“Don’t intend to be.” Rock grinned. “I never did take life very seriously. I sure don’t aspire to begin the minute I find myself working for you. I’m a poor but honest youth, with my way to make in the world. Is it silly for a man to admire a woman—any woman?”
“I wish you’d pull those weeds out of that lettuce patch,” she said, changing the subject abruptly. “They grow so quickly. I’m always at these infernal weeds. After you get that done, roll up your bed and bring it to the house. There’s lots of room.”
Rock performed the weeding in half an hour. If another had asked him to do that, he would probably have told him to go hire a gardener, he reflected.
“She’ll have me baking bread and working the churn next,” he chuckled to himself. “Trust Miss Nona Parke to get her money’s worth out of the hired man.”
That was an exaggeration. Nona wasn’t a driver. Within a week Rock found himself doing various jobs about the ranch because he saw that they needed doing, not because she told him to do them. He rode more or less every day, and most of the time Nona rode with him. It was easier, if less exciting and glamorous, than round-up. He had a comfortable bed in a big room, with a huge stone fireplace, which had been the bunk room when the TL had a dozen riders and cattle by the thousand. Between Nona and the half-breed girl, the vegetable garden and the two milch cows, Rock ate better food than had fallen to his lot since he was at school on the Atlantic seaboard.
It was pleasant to live there, pleasant to ride range with this dark-haired, competent young person, who could be brusque and curt when she chose, and self-sufficient at all times. They went clattering away from the ranch in the cool of morning. They combed far coulee heads, hidden springs, river bottoms above and below the ranch. Rock was never quite sure what the girl looked for in these long rides. The only actual stock work they did was to throw back straggling bunches that grazed beyond certain limits. That, as Rock understood the range business, was not important. He concluded that Nona simply had a passion for looking over her possessions. He had seen men like that—men who owned longhorns by the tens of thousands.
But she seemed to be looking for something. Rock merely surmised that. For a week after he happened on the Maltese Cross, they covered the surrounding country, day by day. Nona talked very little. She rode like a man, easily, carelessly, a component part of her mount. She could handle a rope with fair skill. There was strength in her slender arms, an amazing endurance in her slim body. She knew her stock, bunch by bunch— leader cows and oddly marked bulls. She knew where to find certain little herds. It was as if she watched over them jealously, as a miser gloats over his hoard. There was something in that Rock couldn’t fathom. Branded cattle on a recognized range were safer than bonds in a steel safe, as a rule. Sometimes there were exceptions to that rule. If there was such an exception here, Nona never breathed it, and the riders of a cow outfit were usually the first to be warned if there was any suspicion of rustling in the air. And Rock would not ask. But he wondered. He began to grow a little uneasy, too. He had accepted pay from Uncle Bill Sayre to secure certain information. He was on the ground, but he was not learning much about the Maltese Cross and Buck Walters. He had grown personally curious about Buck Walters, too, since meeting him. He didn’t like the man. Rock wasn’t given to sudden likes and dislikes. Nevertheless, on that one eye-to-eye clash he disliked Buck Walters—a much more active feeling than he could muster up either for or against Elmer Duffy, for instance.
Rock had plenty of time for these mental conjectures. They were like mariners stranded on an island in midocean—himself, Nona Parke, the half-breed girl, and Baby Betty. No riders passed. Elmer Duffy did not come again. The sun rose, swung in a hot arc across a sapphire sky, and sank behind the far-off Rockies. They rode, rested, and slept, while the stars twinkled in a cool canopy, and the frogs along the Marias croaked antiphony to the soprano of a myriad of unseen crickets in the grass.
Then one day Rock rode alone on the benches to the North. When he splashed through the shallows and came to the corrals late in the afternoon, there was a bay horse in the stable, and Charlie Shaw sat talking to Nona in the shade of the porch.
Under his ready laugh and effervescent smile, Charlie Shaw gave the impression of entire competence. The downright self-reliance demanded by the range of all who would pass muster in its service, was quite apparent to Rock. In a cow camp a man was judged by the way he carried himself, and what he could do, rather than his years. Charlie had been giving Nona an account of things on round-up. Apparently he had just ridden in. He nodded to Rock and went on with his talk. Rock sat down beside them to roll a cigarette.
“I know within a dozen head how many unbranded calves are scattered around here,” Nona said finally. “We had an open winter. We should have at least seventy or eighty more calves than last year. Yet the tally is less.”
“The range is covered to the last fringe,” Charlie stated. “They’ll make a few more rides, but they won’t show much. I don’t savvy it either, Nona, but that’s the count.”
“How did the Cross come out on their calf crop?” she inquired.
“Nobody knows but Buck. I wouldn’t ask him.”
The girl stared at the porch floor for a second, frowning.
“I don’t understand it,” she said. “There ought to be more calves than that.”
Charlie didn’t comment. After a minute she got up and went inside. Shaw looked at Rock smoking in silence.
“Say, old-timer,” he remarked abruptly, but in a discreet undertone, “there’s some whisperin’ about you in the Maltese Cross outfit.”
“Yes?” Rock became alert. “What do they whisper? And who’s whispering?”
“I don’t know who started it,” Charlie said. “I heard it the first day you rode in with me and Alice Snell and Joe Bishop. I don’t like to repeat gabble, but seems to me you’d ought know.”
“Shoot!” Rock smiled.
“It’s just a whisper,” Charlie mumbled seriously. “Nobody said a word to me direct. I just overheard here and there. They say you’re rustlin’.”
“Me—rustling?” Rock perked up in astonishment. For the moment he forgot his assumed identity. The idea was so utterly ludicrous. He laughed. Recollection sobered him. This must be more Martin history.
“Ye’ah. Got you hooked up with them Burris boys over behind the Goosebill,” Charlie murmured. “Talkin’ about rawhide neckties. Some of them Texicans in Buck’s crew are bad hombres, Doc.”
Rock knitted his brows. He hadn’t heard before of the Burris boys. The Goosebill he had seen only as an oddshaped hill standing blue on the southwestern sky line, halfway between the Marias and Fort Benton.
“Well, you reckon I’ve been draggin’ the long rope in my spare time and should be a candidate for their kind attentions?” he asked.
Shaw snorted.
“I might ’a’ known you’d make a joke of it,” he complained.
“I wonder who wants to get me so bad as that?” Rock said under his breath.
“Buck Walters, of course,” Charlie returned promptly. “Who else? Just like his damn left-hand ways. Didn’t you never figure he’d shoot at you over somebody else’s shoulder? As a matter of fact, I’m satisfied Buck aims to get you.”
“Why?”
“Say, you know why well enough,” Charlie blurted irritably. “You been flirtin’ with the undertaker all spring. You ain’t a fool.”
“You mean Alice Snell?” Rock hazarded a guess.
“Sure.” Charlie looked at him out of narrowed eyes, the bright blue of which held a peculiar gleam, whether of friendship or disapproval Rock could not tell from the boy’s otherwise impassive face. No; not disapproval; merely the recollection of something unpleasant, either in the past or threatening in the future. This capable youngster was by no means an open book. “I wouldn’t yeep, only to give you a hint to step soft. Buck’s mean. He’ll make trouble. Nona’s had a hard enough row to hoe. Long as we draw wages from her, we got to do the best we can for her. The TL ain’t so popular as it used to be with the Maltese Cross.”
“Account of me?” Rock inquired.
“I don’t know,” Charlie said frankly. “I’ve told you all I know. That talk about rustlin’ an’ hangin’ parties wasmeantfor me to hear. Savvy?”
Rock didn’t, but he nodded. His brows wrinkled deeply. The solution finally came to him. To make a decision with him was to act.
“Do you recollect asking me where I got that riding rig?” he asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Meantime I want to show you something.” He rose. “Come on in!”
Charlie followed him into the kitchen.
“Will you open up that room?” Rock asked Nona. “The one where that stuff is we put away?”
“Why——” She stopped short. Something on the faces of the two men checked the question on her lips. Silently she took a key out of a drawer and walked into the hall, the narrow passage that divided the house. She opened a door—the only locked door in all those log-walled rooms.
“You better come in,” Rock said.
“Charlie’s got to know. You better tell him.”
A window from the south let sunlight into the room. A bed long unslept in stood against one wall. On the floor lay a saddle, bridle, a pair of black, Angora-faced chaps, and a pair of silver-inlaid spurs. Beside them a pair of worn riding boots, a brown calfskin belt full of .45 cartridges, and in the holster a plain, black-handled Colt. On a nail above hung a man’s felt hat. A canvas war bag lay across a chair, stuffed with the dead man’s belongings.
Rock pointed to the saddle. On the yellow leather a stain lay black like dried paint.
“Do you know that rig?” he asked. “Do you see that smear? That’s blood.”
“Well?” The boy looked at the dead man’s outfit in puzzled wonder. He looked at Nona Parke and back again at Rock. “Well?” he repeated. “I see it. What’s it all about?”
“Am I Doc Martin or not?” Rock asked softly.
“Are you crazy?” Charlie demanded. “What are you getting at? Who do you think you are? Have you gone loco?”
“Tell him,” Rock commanded the girl.
“Doc is dead,” she whispered. “He was shot from ambush a week ago yesterday.”
Nona Parke’s cowpuncher looked at her unbelievingly. She gave him details, chapter and verse, describing that tragic afternoon, Rock’s coming, and the burial at sunrise.
“That’s all,” she said wearily. “You can see his grave beside dad and mamma.”
“Poor old Doc,” Shaw muttered. He looked at Rock with new interest. “I wouldn’t ’a’ believed it ifshehadn’t told me. You’re the dead spit of him. You talk like him. Only, you seemed a little different, some way, from what Doc used to be.”
“Come on into the bunk room,” Rock invited. “Let’s try to get down to cases.”
“Has anything happened?” Nona asked sharply.
“Gosh, no,” Rock equivocated. “Nothing at all. I wanted this kid to know how things stand, though. I couldn’t go on and not tip my hand, for fear he’d think there was something queer about me.”
“Probably it’s best,” Nona agreed. “Supper will be ready in a few minutes. Charlie has to ride back to the round-up. I’ll call you.”
“All right.”
They turned out of the hall into the huge room where Rock slept. Side by side, they sat on a bed that seemed lost in that empty space, where forgotten riders had clanked their spurs and joked and told stories through long winter nights, while the fireplace roared.
“Now you see where I stand,” Rock said. “I’m having a dead man’s troubles wished on me. Tell me just how Doc Martin stood with Alice Snell, and why Buck Walters had his knife out for Doc.”
“That’s simple,” the boy answered. “This blonddulcewas soft on Doc—crazy about him. I don’t blame you. Darn it, I keep thinkin’ of you as Doc Martin. I can’t get it that he’s cashed in.”
“You can see how hard it is for me to make any one believe I’mnotDoc,” Rock observed.
“Hell, yes. They’d have to have itproved. They’d laugh and think you were trying to put it over ’em.”
“Were you and Doc friends?” Rock asked. He wanted to know where this boy stood.
“I liked Doc,” the boy said simply. “He showed me lots of things. He was kinda high-handed with anybody he didn’t like. But he was darned good to me. Doc was a white man.”
“No chance of him being mixed up in anything underhanded?”
Charlie Shaw snorted disdainfully, which was explicit enough answer for Rock.
“Go on, tell me about Alice Snell and Doc—and Buck Walters,” he prompted.
“Buck’s the fly in the ointment.” Charlie frowned. “As I said, I don’t blame Doc for playin’ up to Alice. She’s a mighty sweet-lookin’ girl. Only——”
“I gathered somehow,” Rock filled in the pause, “that the late Doc was pretty sweet on Nona Parke. So much so, that he was jealous of any man that paid her much attention, and that he got himself in wrong with Elmer Duffy over that.”
“Yeah, that’s true. But Nona don’t want nothin’ of a man except that he be a good stock hand around her outfit. Sure, Doc thought a heap of her. So do I. But not the way he did. Even if he got to consolin’ hisself with Alice, I expect he still felt like protectin’ Nona from fellers like Duffy. Elmer ain’t such a much. I’d be inclined to horn off fellers like Duffy, myself. An’I’mnot stuck on Nona. Me ’n’ Doc worked for her two years, off ’n’ on. She’s been like a sister to me. She’s game as they make ’em. Darned few girls would have the nerve to run this one-horse show the way she’s done. I’d rather have her for a boss than anybody I know.”
There was a sincerity in this stumbling, embarrassed declaration that Rock admired. But he was still on the trail of the unknown, and he quizzed Shaw further.
“This Snell girl’s of age. She’s rich. I guess she’s been spoiled. Always had her own way about anythin’. She come up here last summer, first time. Come back again this spring. Took a dickens of a shine to Doc and didn’t hide it much. Everybody in the country knows it, except Nona. She ain’t got eyes nor ears for anything but her ranch and her cattle. An’ Buck Walters is crazy about this Snell girl, himself, though she has no use for him. She told Doc once that she’d can Buck off the Maltese Cross if her dad hadn’t made him an administrator of his will. I don’t know if there was anythin’ definite between Doc an’ Alice. I do know Buck has turned to hatin’ you—Doc I mean—like poison, lately. His eyes burn whenever your name comes up. That’s why I said he aims to get you—get Doc. Darn it, I keep gettin’ you all mixed up.”
“Better go on thinkin’ of me as Doc Martin,” Rock suggested, “until something breaks. I’m interested in this. Listen, now, Charlie: Do you remember where the Maltese Cross was a week ago yesterday—the day Doc was shot? Were they in easy reach of the Marias? Do you recollect if Buck Walters was missing that afternoon?”
“I know where we were,” Charlie said. “Couldn’t say for sure whether Buck was early or late off circle that afternoon. Anyhow, I’m here to tell you that he wouldn’t be likely to do his own bushwhackin’. Too foxy for that. He’s got at least half a dozen riders in his outfit that’d kill a man for two bits—especially if Buck told ’em to.”
“Got something on ’em, I suppose,” Rock suggested.
“Maybe; I don’t know. I know he’s got some hard citizens in his crew. None of ’em has made a crooked move since they come to Montana, but they got ‘Killer’ written all over ’em. There’s two fellers that never ride with the round-up. They hang around the home ranch all the time, foolin’ with horses. They got a name down South. A rider in Benton told me their history last fall.”
“I see. Buck Walters has a lot of hard pills on his pay roll.” Rock nodded. “Not because they’re such good range hands, eh? Most cowpunchers aren’t killers—not by choice or for money. Now, why do you reckon he keeps men like that around, Charlie?”
But all Shaw could answer was a shake of his head and a muttered, “Searchme.”
“It would sort of seem as if Buck kept a crowd around that would burn powder free and easy, if the play came up,” Rock mused. “Consequently, he must expect something to break. What would it likely be? A cow outfit don’t have to fight for nothin’ in this country.”
And again Charlie Shaw shook his blond, youthful head.
“He wouldn’t surround himself with bad men from Bitter Creek, waiting for their night to howl, just to deal with Doc Martin for shining up to a girl he has his mind on.”
“No; because he brought most of his crowd up from the South with him,” Charlie answered. “But he’ll put your light out, just the same, if he gets a good chance.”
“Doc Martin has already had his light put out,” Rock said.
“I keep forgettin’,” the boy muttered. “If I was you I’d advertise that fact pronto. It ain’t healthy to be in Doc Martin’s shoes around here.”
“I have a notion to fill ’em for a while, just to see what comes of it,” Rock said slowly. “You’re sure Buck Walters had it in for Doc over this girl—and nothing else?”
“Nothing else thatIknow of,” Shaw said.
Something in the boy’s tone made that denial unconvincing and warned Rock that there was more in Charlie Shaw’s mind than he would utter.
“Do you suppose there was something that Doc Martin knew or had found out or suspected, that would make Buck want him out of the way?”
Shaw stared at Rock for a minute, as if trying to fathom his purpose—as if he were suspicious of subtleties beyond his understanding.
“I can’t answer for what Doc might have known. All I know is that I’m a Parke rider, and I don’t aim to horn into nothin’ that don’t concern me nor the outfit I ride for—nor my friends.”
“I’m a TL rider, too,” Rock said pointedly. “I aim to be as good a hand, if not better, to the outfit I work for as any rider that ever forked a cayuse. Even if you don’t know anything positive, Charlie, you could tell me what youthinkabout Buck Walters.”
“I might tell you when I know you better,” the boy said bluntly. “A man that wags his tongue too free is a fool. I’ve told you what I know. It ain’t important what Ithink.”
Rock gave him credit for a wisdom beyond his years and did not press the matter. He had taken a liking to this slender, smiling youth. Charlie was good stuff—that curious mixture of which all good range men were made—loyalty, courage and a rude dignity. And he was damnably efficient. The boy had an eye like an eagle and a discerning, practical mind. He knew or suspected far more than he would ever admit to any one he didn’t know inside out and could trust implicitly. He would have told things to Doc Martin that he would only reveal to Rock Holloway when Rock had demonstrated that he was all wool and a yard wide.
Nona called them presently to supper. They ate, then smoked a cigarette on the porch. Charlie Shaw strolled off to the stable, mounted and rode away to rejoin the Maltese Cross. While Rock sat on the edge of the porch, pondering on what he had learned, Nona joined him. She leaned against a log pillar, looking absently out across the river flats. Rock watched her. She was so young, so utterly free from self-consciousness, so intent upon her own purposes. Something about her warmed his heart. It wasn’t beauty, as Alice Snell was beautiful. It was an air, an atmosphere, something indefinable, subtle, but very powerful, like the invisible force in a bit of bent steel that draws other bits of steel to itself.
“I want you to take a wagon and go to Fort Benton to-morrow,” she said abruptly, “and see if you can hire a couple of men for haying. We’ve got to get up a couple of hundred tons of hay for next winter.”
Rock smiled. He had been brooding over life and death, treachery and broken faith, loyalty in unexpected phases, the mystery of passion that bred hatred and bloody clashes. Nona had been thinking of hay for her stock.
Each to his own thoughts. He envied her a little and admired her for that simplicity, the directness of her faith and works. His own mental groping and convolutions would have distressed her, no doubt.
By midforenoon Rock had the striking contour of the Goosebill breaking the sky line far on his right. As the team jogged with rattling wagon wheels on a trail that was no more than two shallow ruts in the grassy plateau, his mind dwelt on the Burris boys—two unsavory brothers, with a ranch in a tangle of ravines behind that strange hump on the flat face of Montana. Charlie had sketched them for his benefit. They were suspected and had been for some time. They had a few cattle, and their herd seemed to increase more rapidly than cows naturally breed. No mavericks—unbranded yearlings; hence the property of whosoever first got his irons on them—were ever found on their range. They were supposed to ride with a long rope, lifting the odd calf here and there. It was only a matter of time, Charlie declared, before some big outfit would deal with them, as the feudal barons dealt with miscreants within their demesnes.
And Doc Martin’s name was being coupled with these two in the Maltese Cross camp. Rock’s lip curled. When a man with power in his hands wanted another man out of the way, he would go to great lengths. Rock had observed the workings of such sinister intent in his native State. He kept thinking about Uncle Bill Sayre’s estimate of Buck Walters.
He was still more or less revolving this in his mind, when he came to the brow of the steep bank that slanted sharply down to Fort Benton. This one-time seat of the Northwest Fur Company was the oldest settlement in the Territory, a compact unit of adobe and log and frame dwellings, when the first gold was found at Bannack and Virginia City, and when the eager miners looted the treasure of Last Chance Gulch. Still the head of navigation on the Missouri River, it had become the pivotal point of the cow business in northern Montana, which had supplanted gold, as gold had supplanted furs, as a road to fortune.
A conglomeration of buildings stood by the bank of the wide, swift river. Away southward loomed a mountain range. The Bear Paws stood blue, fifty miles east. A ferry plied from shore to shore, for the convenience of horsemen, teams and three-wagon freight outfits hauling supplies to the Judith Basin. The Grand Union Hotel loomed big in the town, a great square building in a patch of green grass, set off from Main Street, the single street which formed the business heart of the town. A singularly attractive spot, it had had its historic day. Buffalo had swarmed in its dooryard not so long before. The Blackfeet and the Crows had fought each other there and joined forces to fight the white man. In the spring at high water the stern-wheel steamers from St. Louis laid their flat bows against the clay bank and unloaded enormous cargoes of goods. Otherwise, since furs and gold no longer dominated the Northwest, Fort Benton lived a placid, uneventful day-to-day existence, except when roundups came that way, and the cowboys took the town.
Yet there was life in it. The exciting scenes of a decade earlier arose on a small scale. And between these high lights business flourished. The fort was the hub of a great area, in which herds and settlers were taking root. It supported a permanent population of two hundred or more, stores, saloons and the Grand Union, which had housed miners, gamblers, military men, river pilots, rich and enterprising fur dealers, and was now headquarters for the cattle kings and their henchmen.
Rock put his team in a livery stable and registered at the Grand Union. He sought the bar, his parched throat craving St. Louis beer fresh off the ice.
In the doorway, between lobby and barroom, he halted to look. Anywhere between the Rockies and the Mississippi, between the Rio Grande and the Canada line, a range rider might meet a man whom he knew. They were rolling stones, gathering moss in transit, contrary to the proverb. And Rock was not disappointed, although it would be wrong to say that he was pleased.
For he saw two men whom he recognized. They leaned on the bar at one end, deep in talk, glasses before them. They did not see him. Their backs were toward the doorway in which he stood. Their eyes were on each other, not on the broad mirror over the back bar, which showed Rock their faces.
One was Buck Walters; the other was Dave Wells, the Texan boss of the Wagon Wheel on Old Man River, north of the Canada line.
Rock drew back, unseen, sought a chair in the lobby, and sat down, with some food for thought. Here were two men, each of whom knew him quite well—one as Doc Martin, a Parke cowpuncher; while the other had employed him for nine months in his real identity. Fort Benton was small. He could not remain in that town over the night without meeting both, face to face. Which identity should he choose?
It did not take Rock long to decide. He rose and made for the bar. This time he put his foot on the rail and made an inclusive sign to the bartender, after the custom of the country.
There were other men in the bar now. Walters and Wells looked up to see who was buying. A shadow, very faint, flitted across Buck Walters’ face. He nodded, with a grunt. Wells grinned recognition and stuck out his hand.
“You got the best of me,” Rock drawled. “But shake, anyway.”
“I’d know your hide on a fence in hell,” Wells declared. He was jovial, and his eyes were bright. He had been hoisting quite a few, Rock decided. Walters seemed coldly sober.
“Gosh, who do you think I am?” Rock asked. “Your long-lost brother or something?”
“Why, you’re Rock Holloway, darn you!” Wells said bluntly. “I’d ought to know you. I paid you off less’n a month ago. Course, if you’re layin’ low for somethin’——” He paused significantly. Over his shoulder Rock marked the surprised attention of Buck Walters.
“If that is so, I sure must have a double,” Rock said. “I been drawin’ wages from the TL on the Marias River for goin’ on two years, without a break. Does this Holloway fellow you speak of look so much like me, stranger?”
Wells looked him up and down in silence.
“If you ain’t Rock Holloway, I’ll eat my hat,” he said deliberately.
“Let’s see a man eat a Stetson for once,” Rock said to the manager of the Maltese Cross. “Tell him who I am.”
“Eat the hat, Dave,” Walters said. “This feller never rode for you—not in this country. His name is Doc Martin. He rides for a lady rancher on my range. I know him as well as I know you.”
Wells scratched his head.
“I need my sky piece to shed the rain,” he said mildly. “Maybe the drinks are on me. If you ain’t the feller I think you are, you certainly got a twin.”
“I never had no brothers,” Rock declared lightly and reached for his glass. “Never heard of anybody that looked like me. Well, here’s luck.”
That was that. He got away from the barroom in a few minutes.
Wells kept eying him. So did Walters. He felt that they were discussing him in discreet undertones. They did not include him in their conversation after that drink. Once out of there, Rock set about his business. He had no desire to paint the town. He went seeking casual labor. Luck rode with him. Within an hour he had located and hired two men—the only two souls in Fort Benton, he discovered, who needed jobs. He went back to the Grand Union for supper. In the dining room he saw Wells and Walters still together, seated at a table by themselves. He observed them later in the lobby, deep in cushioned chairs, cigars jutting rakishly from their lips.
Early in the evening Rock went up to his room. He had left the Marias at sunrise, and had jolted forty miles in a dead-axle wagon. He would hit the trail early in the morning, with the hay diggers, before they changed their mind and hired themselves to some one else. He needed sleep.
But he couldn’t sleep. The imps of unrest propped his eyelids open. An hour of wakefulness made him fretful. His mind questioned ceaselessly. Could a man like Buck Walters deliberately set out to destroy another man merely because he was a rival for a girl’s capricious affection? It didn’t seem incentive enough. A man with as much on his hands as Walters, could scarcely afford petty feuds like that. Still——
Rock dressed again, drew on his boots, and tucked his gun inside the waistband of his trousers. He would stroll around Fort Benton for an hour or so. By that time he would be able to sleep.
A battery of lighted windows faced the Missouri. Saloons with quaint names, “Last Chance,” “The Eldorado,” “Cowboy’s Retreat,” the “Bucket of Blood.” They never closed. They were the day-and-night clubs of frontier citizens. Business did not thrive in all at once. It ebbed and flowed, as the tides of convivial fancy dictated. In one or two the bartender polished glasses industriously, while house dealers sat patiently playing solitaire on their idle gambling layouts. But in others there were happy gatherings, with faro and poker and crap games in full swing. Rock visited them all and chanced a dollar or two here and there. Eventually he retraced his steps toward the hotel.
In the glow of lamplight from the last saloon on the western end of the row, just where he had to cross the street to the Grand Union, sitting in its patch of grass and flanked by a few gnarly cottonwoods, Rock met Buck Walters and Dave Wells.
He nodded and passed them. A little prickly sensation troubled the back of his neck. It startled Rock, that involuntary sensation. Nervous about showing his back to a potential enemy? Nothing less. The realization almost amused Rock. Absurd! Nobody would shoot him down on a lighted street. Yet it was a curious feeling. Expectancy, a sense of danger, a conscious irritation at these psychological absurdities. He was not surprised when a voice behind him peremptorily called:
“Hey, Martin!”
He turned to see Buck Walters stalking toward him. Wells’ long, thin figure showed plain in the glimmer of light. He stood on the edge of the plank walk, staring at the river.
“Got somethin’ to say to you,” Walters announced curtly.
“Shoot,” Rock answered in the same tone.
Walters faced him, six feet away. His face, so far as Rock could see, told nothing. It was cold and impassive, like the face of a gambler who has learned how to make his feature a serviceable mask to hide what is in his mind. Buck’s face was unreadable, but his words were plain.
“This country ain’t healthy for you no more, Martin.”
“Why?”
“Because I tell you it ain’t.”
“You’re telling me doesn’t make it so, does it?”
“I know. Talk’s cheap. But this talk will be made good. You need a change of scenery. I’d go South if I was you—quick. You’ve been on the Marias too long.”
“Why should I go South, if I don’t happen to want to?” Rock asked.
“Because I tell you to.”
Rock laughed. For the moment he was himself, Doc Martin forgotten, and he had never stepped aside an inch for any man in his life.
“You go plumb to hell,” he said. “I’ll be on the Marias when you are going down the road talking to yourself.”
“All right,” Buck told him very slowly. “This is the second time I’ve warned you. You know what I mean. You’re huntin’ trouble. You’ll get it.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Rock retorted. “Say it in plain English. What’s eating you?”
“I’ve said all I aimed to say,” Walters declared. “You know what I mean, well enough.”
“If I had never laid eyes on you before,” Rock answered quietly, “you have said enough right now to justify me in going after you. Is that what you want? Do you want to lock horns with me? The light’s good. Pop your whip, you skunk!”
Rock spat the epithet at him in a cold, collected fury. He meant precisely what he said. There was such an arrogant note in that cool intimidation. It filled him with a contemptuous anger for Buck Walters and all his ways and works and his veiled threats.
“You are just a little faster with a gun than I am,” Walters replied, unruffled, the tempo of his voice unchanged. “I take no chances with you. I am not afraid of you, but I have too much at stake to risk it on gun play—by myself. If you do not leave this country, I will have you put away. You can gamble on that.”
Rock took a single step toward him. Walters held both hands away from his sides. He smiled.
“If you so much as make a motion for that gun in your pants,” he said in an undertone, “my friend Dave Wells will kill you before you get it out.”
Now Rock had made that step with the deliberate intention of slapping Walters’ face. No Texan would take a blow and not retaliate. He couldn’t live with himself if he did. But, “my friend, Dave Wells,” made him hesitate. Rock’s glance marked Wells, twenty feet away, a silent watchful figure. And it was more than a mere personal matter. Down in Fort Worth, Uncle Bill Sayre had joint responsibility with this man for the safeguarding of a fortune, and a medley of queer conclusions were leaping into Rock’s agile brain. Reason, logic, evidence—all are excellent tools. Sometimes instinct or intuition, something more subtle than conscious intellectual processes, short-circuits and illuminates the truth with a mysterious flash of light. This man before him was afraid of Doc Martin. He was afraid of Doc, over and above any desire for possession of a woman—any passion of jealousy. There was too much at stake, he had said. Rock would have given much to know just what Buck Walters meant by the phrase. Doc Martin would have known. Rock didn’t regret the surge of his own temper—the insult and challenge he had flung in this man’s teeth. But he fell back on craft.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d expect you to take no chance on an even break, with anybody or about anything. You’ll play safe. You’ll pass the word that I’m to be put away. You tried it already.”
“Next time there will be no slip-up,” Walters answered with cold determination. “You have said things you shouldn’t have said. You have shot off your mouth at me. You have made a play at a fool of a girl that I aim to have for myself. I have a cinch, Martin, and I am goin’ to play it for all it is worth.”
“A cinch on me—or on the Maltese Cross?” Rock taunted.
“Both,” Walters muttered, in a whisper like a hiss, the first emotion that had crept into his cold, malevolent voice.
“That’s a damaging admission to make,” Rock sneered.
“Not to you,” Walters said flatly. “You’ll never have a chance to use it. You are goin’ to be snuffed out, if you don’t pull out. I don’t like you, for one thing; you are interferin’ with my plans, for another.”
“Those are pretty strong words, Buck,” Rock told him soberly. “I’m not an easy man to get away with.” He tried a new tack. “If you are so dead anxious to get rid of me, why don’t you try making it worth my while to remove myself?”
Walters stared at him.
“I ain’t buyin’ you,” he said at last. “There’s a cheaper way.”
“All right, turn your wolf loose on me.” Rock laughed. “See what’ll happen. Now you run along, Mister Buck Walters, before I shoot an eye out of you for luck, you dirty scoundrel!”
Rock’s anger burned anew, but he did not on that account lose his head. He abused Walters in a penetrating undertone, with malice, with intent, with venom that was partly real, partly simulated. But he might as well have offered abuse and insult to a stone. He could not stir Walters to any declaration, any admission that would have been a key to what Rock sought.
“Talk is cheap. I don’t care what you say. It don’t hurt me,” the Maltese Cross boss told him stiffly. “I will shut your mouth for good, inside of forty-eight hours.”
And with that he turned his back squarely on Rock and walked to rejoin his friend, Dave Wells, who stood there, ready to shoot in the name of friendship.
Rock stood staring at their twin backs sauntering past lighted saloons. He wouldn’t have turnedhisback on Walters, after that. Which was a measure of his appraisal of the man’s intent. Buck would make that threat good!
Rock shrugged his shoulders and strolled across the dusty street into the Grand Union. He was little the wiser for that encounter, except that he could look for reprisal, swift and deadly. He wondered calmly what form it would take.
Certainly he had stepped into a hornet’s nest when he stepped into the dead cowpuncher’s boots. Rock lay down on his bed with his clothes still on and stared up at the dusky ceiling. He was trying to put one and one together, to make a logical sum. It made no difference now, whether he was Doc Martin or Rock Holloway. After to-night Buck Walters was an enemy. And Rock reflected contemptuously that he would rather have him as an enemy than a friend.
He recalled again Uncle Bill Sayre’s distrust of his fellow executor. Uncle Bill’s instinct was sound, Rock felt sure in his own soul, now.
“I expect I am in for some exciting times,” Rock murmured to himself. “Yes, sir, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Ten minutes later he was sound asleep.
He had been given forty-eight hours! When twenty-four of them had elapsed, Rock lay in his bunk at the TL, staring at roof beams dim above his head. The small noises of the night, insect voices, and the river’s eternal whisper drifted through an open window. In an opposite corner the two hired men snored. Perhaps to-morrow something would happen. Perhaps not. Yet Rock could not take easy refuge behind the idea that Buck Walters’ talk had been a bluff. Fire burned under that smoke. To-morrow would tell the tale.
Sunrise came and breakfast. Rock set the men at work in a meadow. The whir of the mower blades droned in the quiet valley. There were odds and ends of work that kept him busy until ten o’clock. While he attended to these jobs, he debated with himself whether to tell Nona Parke about his encounter with Buck. He concluded to keep it to himself. He wished that he had taken advantage of Dave Wells’ presence to establish his own identity. Yet who the devil, he asked himself fretfully, would have expected Buck Walters to declare open war?
At the next opportunity, he decided, he would be himself and be done with a dead man’s troubles. It had been altogether too easy to let people go on thinking he was Doc Martin. But there was no use worrying Nona Parke with that just now. She wasn’t concerned. If anything happened to him, she could get other riders. And she was quite helpless to prevent anything happening. Rock didn’t intend that anything should happen to him. He would be wary, watchful, his weapons always handy.
Something took him to the house.
Nona sat on the porch, darning stockings for Betty. She stopped Rock to mention the need of getting in more work horses, and while they talked, her eyes, looking past Rock, began to twinkle.
“Well,” she said, “we are about to have a distinguished visitor. There’s Alice Snell, and she’s certainly burning the earth.”
Rock turned. That range phrase for speed was apt. Alice came across the flat on a high gallop, her skirt flapping, bareheaded, and the gold of her hair like a halo in the sun. Her bay horse, when she jerked him to a stop, was lathered with sweat, his breast spotted with foam flecks. The girl’s face struck Rock as being stricken with a terrible fear. She swung down. To Nona Parke she gave no greeting whatever. Her eyes never left Rock, except for one furtive, backward glance. And she cried with a hysterical tremble in her voice:
“Buck Walters and Elmer Duffy, with all the boys, are coming to hang you! For God’s sake, Doc, get away from here before they come! I heard them talking it over, and I sneaked away from the ranch. They can’t be far behind me.”
So that was it. Rock’s lip curled. But a vigilance committee from two big outfits didn’t function without some excuse.
“What are they going to hang me for?” he asked.
Alice Snell put her hands on his arms, her white face turned up to his in a fever of anxiety.
“They say—they say,” she gulped, “you’re stealing cattle. They mean to hang you.”
Rock laughed.
“They won’t hang me,” he said lightly. “Thank you, just the same, for coming to tell me of their kind intentions.”
“Doc, please! There’s a lot of them. Elmer Duffy and his crew as well as the Maltese Cross riders. You can’t fight that bunch. Get a horse and ride fast.”
Rock smiled and put Alice Snell’s trembling, clutching hands off his own. But there was no mirth in that smile, for a squad of horsemen, a long line of them abreast, had swung around the point of brush, a quarter of a mile away. Nona Parke stared at the two of them in blank amazement. Alice didn’t seem to know that she was there. She had no thought for anything but this man she took for Doc Martin. But out of one corner of her eye she marked the approaching riders and began to babble incoherently.
“Take her into the kitchen,” Rock commanded Nona. “Stay in there. If she’s right, there’ll be a fuss. I can’t run. And neither Buck Walters nor anybody else is going to hang me.”
He darted into the bunk room. His rifle hung above his bed, and he took it down. Out of his war bag he snatched two boxes of cartridges and stuffed them in his trousers pocket. He had on his belt gun. Both six-shooter and carbine were the same caliber. Then he went back to the door. The line of riders drew close, bobbing in unison, a long row. The sun made their silver ornaments gleam—white hats and black, red horses, blacks, bays, dun, and spotted—on they came, a brave sight. Thirty riders to confront a single miscreant. Rock wondered if Charlie Shaw rode with them, and if he would stand by, unprotesting. But he had brief time to speculate. The two girls were still on the porch. Nona had her arms about Alice, steadying her, encouraging her, and Alice was sobbing in a panic of grief and fear.
“For Heaven’s sake get her and yourself inside,” Rock snapped. “This is not going to be a Sunday-school picnic. Buck Walters warned me in Fort Benton that he’d get me inside of forty-eight hours. He’s going to make it good, if he can. This is nothing for you to be mixed up in.”
“This is as good a place as any for her and me,” Nona declared. “This is my ranch. They won’t dare!”
“Dare!” Rock grinned. “The man leading that bunch will dare anything. But I aim to fool him, if I get a chance to declare myself.”
“And if you don’t, they won’t stop to listen to anything,” she declared. Her eyes were full of questions.
“From the bunk room,” Rock said softly. “I will give them a good run for their money. The walls are thick, and I have plenty of ammunition.”
The eyeballs of horses and men were visible now, faces staring from under hat brims. Rock could see Seventy Seven riders he had worked with on trail. Charlie Shaw rode beside Buck Walters and Elmer Duffy. They slowed to a trot, then to a walk and drew up before the house. Rock moved back a little in the doorway, his rifle in the crook of his arm. He stood in plain sight; but if a hand moved toward a weapon he would be under cover before it could be drawn, or fired, at least.
Walters, Duffy and Charlie Shaw dismounted. Buck Walters looked at Alice Snell, her face hidden yet against Nona’s shoulder. His own face remained impassive, but his eyes burned. And Rock got in the first word.
“Miss Snell, not liking the idea of coldblooded murder to satisfy a personal grudge, rode up a little ahead of you-all to tell us you aimed to hang Doc Martin. If——”
“If that is true,” Nona Parke’s voice cut like a knife across his sentence, “you are a pack of dirty cowards—and you are too late.”
She thrust the weeping girl away from her and faced them, with her head up, her gray eyes wide with scorn.
“Is it true?” she demanded. “What do you want here, all of you with rifles, as if you were going to war?”
“We want him,” Buck Walters pointed at Rock. “And we will take him, dead or alive. He is a thief.”
“That,” said Nona without a moment’s hesitation, “is a lie.”
Duffy, Walters, and Charlie Shaw had stepped up on the porch. They stood within eight feet of Rock, apparently secure in the belief that under thirty pairs of watchful eyes he could neither escape nor menace them.
“You two girls better go inside,” Duffy said. “Leave us men handle this thing. They ain’t no room for argument, I guess.”
“Guess again, Elmer,” Rock said quietly. “There is lots of room for argument. In the first place, I am not Doc Martin. I can prove that by you, Duffy, and by Buck Walters himself.”
“What the hell are you givin’ us?” Walters growled.
“It is quite true,” Nona declared. “Doc Martin is dead. He was shot from ambush ten days ago. This man, no matter how much he may look like Doc, is not Doc.”
“I told you that, but you wouldn’t listen, you were so hell-bent to hang somebody,” declared Charlie Shaw, opening his mouth for the first time and addressing Buck Walters. “Now it can be proved right here, unless you got to hangsomebodyfor your own personal satisfaction.”
“Listen, all of you!” Rock put in. “I have told you, and Miss Parke has told you, I am not Doc Martin. Do you want to listen to proof, or do you want it proved to you after a bunch of men have gone to hell in a fog of powder smoke? Because, if you don’t want to listen to reason, there will be a lot of shooting before there is any hanging. And I will get you, Mr. Buck Walters, first crack, in spite of all your men. Just think that over.”
Charlie Shaw winked at Rock, then took two quick steps to the doorway and slid through. Walters’ right hand moved ever so little, suggestively and involuntarily, and the muzzle of Rock’s carbine pointed straight at his breast.
“Just one move,” said Rock, “one more little move like that, Buck, and the Maltese Cross will be shy your services for good. I will give you leave to hang me or shoot me, if you can, but this crowd is going to hear who I am before the ball opens. I am going to keep this gun right on your middle. If I feel anything or hear anything, I pull trigger. If one of your men should pot me, I can still kill you, even if I were dead on my feet. Now, I tell you again I am not Doc Martin. I came to this ranch the day he was killed—murdered, as a matter of fact. I helped to bury him. His riding gear and all his stuff is here in the house.”
The riders edged their horses nearer and craned their necks. At best, destroying a thief was an unpleasant task even for honest men who despised stock thieves with the contempt such a thief inspired on the range. Every word uttered on that porch carried distinctly to their ears. They were not fools. They knew, and Rock banked on that knowledge, that, whether the man in the doorway was Doc Martin or not, he had the drop on Buck Walters, and the chances were a hundred to one he would kill not only Walters but several of them before they got him. Perhaps too late they realized the tactical error of letting Charlie Shaw get inside. He was a TL man. Right or wrong, if there was a fight, Shaw would fight against them. They would have been confirmed in that supposition if they could have looked behind Rock. That young man’s heart warmed at the boy’s quick wit and unhesitating loyalty. A little behind him Charlie whispered:
“Stand pat. I’ll back any play you make. I got two guns on me.”
Elmer Duffy stared at Rock. He glanced sidewise at Buck Walters, then back to the man in the door.
“If you ain’t Doc Martin,” he said at last, “there’s only one other man youcouldbe.”
“Hell and damnation!” Walters burst out. “Who else could he be? Are we goin’ to be old women and let him bluff us out with a fairy story?”
“We got plenty of time, Buck,” Elmer Duffy reminded him. “He can’t get away. We don’t want to get off on the wrong foot. Young Shaw did tell us this before we started.”
“Rats!” Rock laughed. “You sure don’t want to be convinced, do you, Buck? You surely want to see Doc Martin dance on a rope end. Maybe you’d just as soon hang me, even if I’m not Doc. You recollect what Dave Wells named me in Fort Benton, night before last, don’t you? Well, you have Elmer Duffy say whohethinks I might be if I’m not Doc.”
“If Doc Martin is dead an’ buried,” Duffy said, “there’s only one man you can be.”
“You are right,” Rock said. “I will bet you a new hat, Walters, that Elmer Duffy names me what Dave Wells called me in Benton. I can see half a dozen riders in this crowd I worked on trail with, until we came to Clark’s Ford in Nebraska. If you want to be dead sure, Elmer, there is a sorrel horse with two white hind feet and a big star on his forehead, branded JB, and a black, branded a Bleeding Heart, grazing in the pasture back of the barn. And I could tell you more that only one man could know, Elmer. Tell Buck Walters who I am.”
“You’re Rock Holloway,” Duffy muttered.
“Bull’s-eye!” Rock said. “I have been in Montana less than three weeks. It seems a plumb exciting place. Are you satisfied, Buck? Are you still eager to hang me under the impression that I’m Doc Martin? Do you want to see his saddle, with bloodstains on it, where somebody—who also wanted to see him dead—shot him, while he rode along the river bottoms? Maybe you’d like to dig up his body, where he’s buried over by those poplars?”
“What is the use of carrying this on any longer?” Nona demanded. “I don’t believe Doc did what Alice says you claim he did. I don’t believe he was a thief. But, whether he was or was not, he is dead. This man is what he says he is. He came here the day Doc was killed. He told me his name was Rock Holloway. I hired him. That is all there is to it.”
“Isn’t that what Dave Wells called me?” Rock said to Walters. “Are you satisfied?”
“You denied it,” Walters said. “When he spoke to you, you used me to prove youwereDoc Martin.”
“A man can have a joke with his friends, if he likes. It isn’t against any law that I know of. He probably told you I joined his outfit on the Yellowstone last summer and worked for him all winter.”
“I don’t recollect him mentionin’ it,” Walters replied. “Why have you passed yourself off for Doc Martin, anyway?”
“Shucks!” Rock said. “Everybody just naturally insisted on taking me for Doc. Miss Parke knew my name. I explained myself to Charlie Shaw as soon as I had a chance. I didn’t care much, one way or the other. I didn’t know anybody in this neck of the woods, barring the Seventy Seven. I fooled Elmer Duffy purposely, the first time I saw him, because I was kinda interested in trying to find out who killed Doc Martin, seeing I looked so much like him and was taking his place as a TL rider. Are you satisfied, or is there still something you’d like to know about?”
“Yes, I can see there’s been a mistake,” Walters said in a different tone. “You can’t blame us. We got it straight that Martin was standing in with some pretty bald-faced stealing. We’ve cleaned out his partners. I guess this settles it as far as you’re concerned. I’ll have to take Elmer’s word for it. He ought to know you, seein’ you killed his brother.”
It seemed to Rock that Walters raised his voice a trifle, and that he managed to impart a sneer into those words. Every man could hear. It seemed to Rock like a deliberate taunt, a barb purposely planted to rankle in Duffy’s skin. For a second there was silence. Elmer Duffy’s Adam’s apple slid nervously up and down his lean throat. His face flushed. Rock read the signs for himself. A few spiteful reminders like that, and Duffy would feel that hehadto go gunning for his brother’s slayer. Buck Walters broke that strained hush. He lifted his hat to Nona.
“I’m sorry if this has been disagreeable,” he said politely. “But those Burris thieves incriminated your man Martin. He has been in with them on their rustling. We’ve lost a lot of stock. Maybe they didn’t overlook you. It’s as well Doc Martin has cashed in. We would certainly have hung him to the nearest cottonwood. We don’t reckon there’ll be any more trouble. I hope you don’t hold grudges,” he said, turning to Rock. “In our place you’d do the same. Nobody told us what happened to Martin. You passed for him. We got to protect our range. There’s only one way to deal with rustlers.”
He turned to his men with a wave of his hand.
“All right, boys,” he said. “You’ve heard the whole show, and we’re saved a nasty job. Ride on. We’ll catch up with you.”
Elmer Duffy muttered something, stepped down off the porch, and swung into his saddle, without a word or a look at Rock. Buck Walters stepped over beside Alice. She had listened, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Now she shrank away from Buck.
“Come on home with us, Al,” he said coaxingly.
“Go home withyou!” Alice Snell shrilled. “I’ll never go on that ranch again till you’re off it for good, you blackhearted beast! If Doc Martin was murdered, I know who did it and why. I hate you—Ihateyou!”
“You’re all worked up,” Walters said diffidently. “You’ll be sorry for saying such a thing about me when you cool off. I didn’t kill Doc Martin, although he had it coming. A man who steals can’t flourish on any range I have charge of.”
“Doc Martin never stole anything in his life,” the girl cried. “He was a better man than you, any day. You were afraid of him,” she raved. “I know. You hated him because I loved him, and he loved me. Get away from me, you—you toad!”
Walters’ face flamed. He shot a quick sidewise look at Nona and Rock Holloway. But he was cool and patient.
“Hysterics,” he said to Nona. “I guess I’ll have to leave her to you, Miss Parke. See she gets home, will you? Sorry about all this fuss. Couldn’t be helped, the way things stood.”
Rock said nothing. He had declared himself. This was a matter between these others, interesting, dramatic, and with hints of passionate conflict. Rock knew Nona Parke’s side of it. What she had told him about Doc Martin was fresh in his mind. And there was Martin’s attitude and actions toward Elmer Duffy. She, like himself, stood silent, while Alice leaned against the log wall and lashed at her foreman, her breast heaving, a fury blazing in her pansy-blue eyes.
Walters stepped off the porch and mounted his horse. The riders were crossing the flat at a walk. Buck lifted his hat to Nona, flung “So long, boys!” over his shoulder to Rock and Charlie Shaw, and loped away after his men.
A very cool hand, Rock reflected. Smooth and dangerous. He had denied that Dave Wells mentioned anything. Rock felt that to be a lie. It was simpler now that he had established his real identity. But he wasn’t done with Buck Walters yet. No! Rock couldn’t quite say why he had that conviction; but he had it very clear in his mind.