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"That's what I'd call it, too, if I was Brad," assented the cattleman with a grin. "But if we could persuade Roy to put over about one more accident like that, I reckon Huerfano Park would let him alone." "While Jess Tighe is living?" Dingwell fell grave. "I'd forgotten Tighe. No, I expect the kid had better keep his weather eye peeled as long as that castor-oil smile of Jess is working."
Dingwell exposed the gamblers Blair and Smith, knocked one of them cold, made them dig up a lot of money, and drove them out of town. They left, swearing vengeance. He rides away, and he is never seen again. The natural assumption is that they lay in wait for him and killed him." "Then where is the body?" "Lying out in the cactus somewhere or buried in the sand."
Dingwell squinted over the bunch of cattle in the corral. "Twenty dollars on the hoof, f.o.b. at the siding," he said evenly. "You to take the run of the pen, no culls." "I heard you before," protested the buyer. "Learn a new song, Dingwell. I don't like the tune of that one. Make it eighteen and let me cull the bunch." Dave garnered a straw clinging to the fence and chewed it meditatively.
Once on the trail, it would not be easy to shake him off. By the count of years Dingwell might be in the early forties. Many little wrinkles radiated fanlike from the corners of his eyes. But whatever his age time had not tamed him. In the cock of those same steel-blue eyes was something jaunty, something almost debonair, that carried one back to a youth of care-free rioting in a land of sunshine.
"Was it while you was visiting up at Santa Fe you learnt that habit of seeing yore neighbors hanged, Dan?" drawled Dingwell in a voice of gentle irony. Furious at this cool reference to his penitentiary days, Meldrum kicked their captive in the ribs. Hal Rutherford, his eyes blazing, caught the former convict by the throat. "Do that again and I'll hang yore hide up to dry."
"I reckon neither one of us is liable to forget what you've done for us." She flamed. "I've nothing against you, Mr. Dingwell, but you might as well know that what I've done was for my people. I don't want them to get into trouble. If it hadn't been for that " "You'd 'a' done it just the same," the cattleman finished for her with a smile.
Dingwell, if the newspaper published the private sorrows of your wife or your daughter?" Rufus Dingwell answered with the straightforward sincerity of feeling which is one of the indisputable virtues of his nation. "I had not thought of it in that light, sir," he said. "You have been good enough to credit me with a wife or a daughter.
Not that Mr. Dingwell was given to futile dissipations. He had the reputation of a responsible ranchman. But it is not to be denied that little devils of mischief at times danced in those orbs. Into the hills the trail wound across gulches and along the shoulders of elephant humps.
There wouldn't be any object in their taking a prisoner away off to the Flats. If this man was Dave, Blair and Smith are eliminated from the list of suspects. That leaves the Rutherfords." "But you don't know that this was Dingwell." "That's where you come in, me brave Sherlock. Dave's friends can't move to help him. You see, they're all known men.
If you say so, I'll shake hands on that and we'll all face to the future. Just as you say." Dingwell grinned. "Hooray! Big Chief Dave will now make oration. You've got the right idea, son. I knew Jack Beaudry. There wasn't an atom of revenge in his game body. His advice would have been to shake hands. That's mine, too." The hillman and Roy followed it. Upon the porch a young woman appeared.
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