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Do you mind if we stay out here in the cool?" He didn't, and his confident familiar planning took the place of Martin Eckles' more exciting narratives. The next day, past noon, the proprietor of the Greenstream hotel left an excited group of men to stop Calvin as he drove in from Sugarloaf Valley. He cried: "Eckles has been shot and killed.
"It's mighty strange who could have shot Eckles and got clear away. That's what he did, in spite of hell and the sheriff." Turning, after inevitable exclamations, toward home, Calvin found Lucy sitting moodily on the porch. "I've got a right ugly piece of news," he told her, masking the painful interest with which he followed her expression.
All that had been so long obscured in his mind and heart slowly cleared to understanding Lucy Braley, Richmond's wife; Phebe; Hannah; and again Lucy, Lucy Vibard had this common hunger for life, for brightness; they were as helpless in its grasp as he had been to hold Hannah. Phebe's return, Martin Eckles were only incidents in a great inner need.
It was Martin Eckles' gold ring, set with the insignia in rubies, suspended in a loop of ribbon. A cold angry certitude formed in his being. What a criminal fool he had been! What a blind booby! His only remark, however, brought a puzzled expression to Ettie's troubled countenance. Calvin Stammark exclaimed, "Phebe Braley."
In the extension of his commercial activity Martin Eckles kept his room at the Greenstream hotel and employed a horse and buggy for his excursions throughout the county. It had become his habit to sit through the evenings with the Stammarks where his flood of conversation never lessened. Lucy scarcely added a phrase to the sum of talk.
Before long she went in, but Calvin stayed facing the darkness, the menace of the lonely valley. Except for the lumbermen it would be worse in the Sugarloaf cutting. Damn the frogs! Martin Eckles appeared in the buggy the following evening and offered to carry Lucy for a short drive to a near-by farm; with an air of indifference she accepted.
The salesman was named Martin Eckles, and he was fashionably dressed in a suit of shepherd's check bound with braid, and had a flashing ring a broad gold band set with a mystic symbol in rubies and diamonds. After his supper at the hotel he walked, following Calvin's direction, the short distance to the latter's house, where Calvin and Ettie Stammark and Lucy were seated on the porch.
"Well, no, I must say I haven't; but I've heard some about it from a boy who visited Sim Eckles, and who used to live there. It's a big place, Thad." "Oh! size has nothing to do with this matter," remarked the other. "I was just wondering whether you might not have heard that name before." "You mean Malcolm Hotchkiss, don't you?" asked the other, eagerly.
"Yes, the name he mentioned to you, when he spoke about the marked shoe?" the patrol leader went on to say. "Hold on!" Davy exclaimed, hoarsely; "now, that's queer; I never once bothered my head to think about it till you asked. Sure I've heard the name before. The boy over at Sim Eckles' mentioned it more'n once." "Who is he, then, Davy?"
First they found the horse and buggy by the road, and then Martin Eckles. He had fallen out. One bullet did it." "That's too bad," Calvin replied evenly. "Lawlessness ought to be put down." He had known Solon Entreken all his life. The level gaze of two men encountered and held. Then: "I'll never say anything against that," the other pronounced.
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