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I shall be glad to have your support, gentlemen, at the polls. But I am for the State, not for your faction or any other faction. I know you are not used to hearing a candidate tell you the truth it has not been the style in this State. If the truth from me has shocked you, blame the truth, not me." He ushered Harlan before him and closed his door upon the delegation.
Harlan got down and ran a hand over Purgatory's neck, while trailing the reins over his head. "Man-killer," he warned. "Don't touch him. He ain't been rode by nobody but me, an' he won't stand for nobody foolin' around him."
The next morning, Harlan and Dorothy ate breakfast by themselves. There was suppressed excitement in the manner of Mrs. Smithers, who by this time had quite recovered from her fright, and, as they readily saw, not wholly of an unpleasant kind. From time to time she tittered audibly a thing which had never happened before. "It's just as if a tombstone should giggle," remarked Harlan.
And into Harlan's eyes came a gleam of that contempt which had always seized him when in the presence of men who feared him. And yet, had not Harlan possessed the faculty of reading character at a glance; had he not had that uncanny instinct of divining the thoughts of men who meditated violence, he could not have known that Haydon feared him. For Haydon's fear was not abject.
He frowned, convinced that for days a man had occupied the covert, watching the Rancho Seco; convinced also, that the mystery he had sensed some days ago had been man-made, as he had felt. The man who had been there had been a sentinel, a spy, sent by Deveny or Haydon to observe his movements, and to report them, of course, to one or the other of the two outlaws. Harlan remounted Purgatory.
Harlan Thornton was slow to realize what a tremendous power, as chamberlain, he really exercised in the State. He awoke to that fact more slowly than did the men who came to solicit. He did not try to use his power for his own ends. He promptly noted the deference that men paid him; as promptly he penetrated certain plans men made to corrupt him, if they could.
"I've been waitin' for this day waitin' for it, waitin' to get you alone waitin' for the boys to go so's I could tell you somethin'. "You know what it is. You ain't guessin', eh? Listen while I tell you somethin'. The day 'Drag' Harlan got in Lamo he brought news that Lane Morgan had been killed out in the desert. I heard the boys sayin' you had a hand in it. But I thought that was just talk.
Linton bowed, and went out of the room. "There is no half-heartedness here!" cried Harlan, passionately. "Is there anything I can do, General Waymouth?" "Go and bring Arba Spinney to this room at once. Understand the situation before you go: I have already sent men for him. He has refused to come.
It did not surprise Deveny when a Star man rode into the Cache one day and told him that Harlan had killed Latimer in a gunfight, and that Harlan was slowly but surely gaining a following among the men.
"My Prince, oh my Prince," she murmured, when at length he set her free; "my eyes could not see, but my heart knew!" So ended the Quest of the Lady Elaine. With a sigh, Harlan wrote the last words and pushed the paper from him, staring blankly at the wall and seeing nothing. His labour was at an end, all save the final copying, and the painstaking daily revision which would take weeks longer.
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