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She saw that Rogers and Lawson were still below, and still talking. So keen was her sense of hearing every nerve straining in the effort to learn more that the voices of the men came in through the window with a resonance that, she felt, must be audible to every person in Lamo. "It ain't my style, that's all. I'd meet Harlan on the level, man to man, if he was lookin' for me.
Lamo, sprawling on a sun-baked plain perhaps a mile from the edge of the desert, was one of those towns which owed its existence to the instinct of men to foregather.
As time fled to the monotonous clink of coins over the bar he set up in the frame shack that faced the desert trail, Ladron's importance in Lamo was divided by six. The other dispensers had not come together; they had appeared as the needs of the population seemed to demand and all had flourished. Lamo's other buildings had appeared without ostentation. There were twenty of them.
But instead he's wastin' his time somewheres else when he ought to be here in Lamo where's there's plenty of the kind of guys he's lookin' for. "There's only one man in the country I trust. He's John Haydon, of the Star ranch about fifteen miles west of the Rancho Seco. Seems to me that Haydon's square. He's an upstandin' man of about thirty, an' he's dead stuck on Barbara.
For by going straight to Lamo he had been able to balk Deveny's evil intentions toward the girl who, in the house now, was so terribly afraid of him. He had told Morgan why he was headed toward the Rancho Seco section, but he had communicated to Morgan that information only because he had wanted to cheer the man in his last moments.
But mebbe I wouldn't put it just that way. Somebody's got to look out for you to see that you don't go to rushin' into trouble. There was trouble over in Lamo if you'll remember." And now he smiled gravely at her, and her face reddened over the memory of the incident. She had been eager enough, then, to seek his protection; she had trusted him. "That wasn't your fault," he went on gently.
His suave politeness was a velvet veil of character behind which he masked the slavering fangs of the beast he really was. At ten o'clock the following morning, in a rear room of "Balleau's First Chance" saloon which was directly across the street from the Lamo Eating-House Luke Deveny and two other men were sitting at a card-table with bottle and glasses between them.
He was handsome, and yet the suggestion of ruthlessness in the atmosphere of him lurking behind the genial, easy-going exterior that he wore for appearances or because it was his nature to conceal his passions until he desired to unleash them was felt by those who knew him intimately. It had been felt by Barbara Morgan. Deveny was king of the lawless element in the Lamo section.
It was because he was afraid of Harlan he feared him as a coward fears the death that confronts him. The sensation was premonitory. Nor was it that. It had been premonitory it was now a conviction. In the time, in Lamo, when he had faced Harlan some prescience had warned him that before him was the man whom the fates had selected to bring death to him.
There was no doubt that he was in earnest, and there was likewise no doubt that he was concerned for her safety. But why? It seemed absurd that Harlan, an outlaw himself, should protect her from other outlaws. Yet in Lamo he had done just that. Behind his actions, his expressed concern for her, must be a motive. What was it?
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