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Updated: May 15, 2025
Waring saddled Dex, and, keeping close to the eastern wall, rode toward the arroyo. The morning sun traced clean, black shadows of the chaparral on the sand. The bloom of cacti burned in red and yellow blotches of flame against its own dull background of grayish-green. At the mouth of the arroyo, Waring dismounted and dropped the reins. Dex nosed him inquiringly.
He wiped his hands on the sand, and, rising, ran back to Dex. He returned with a whiskey flask. Pat was of tough fiber and tremendous vitality. If the spark were still unquenched, if it could be called back even for a breath, that which Waring knew, yet wanted to confirm beyond all doubt, might be given in a word. He raised Pat's head, and barely tilted the flask.
And then came a trample, a roll of many feet on the soft spongy peat, a low murmur which rose into wild shouts of "Dex Aie!" as a human tide poured along the causeway, and past the witch of Brandon Heath. "'Dex Aie?" quoth William, with a sneer. "'Debbles Aie! would fit better."
Waring sent a man to catch up the team. Ramon cooked supper. The men ate in silence. After supper Waring changed his clothes, saddled Dex, and packed some food in the saddle-pockets. "I am going out to look for Pat," he told one of his men. "If Waco shows up, keep him here till I get back. Those horses didn't get away from Pat. Here's a signed check. Get what you need and keep on with the work.
Glenister gazed out over the harbor, agleam with the lights of anchored ships, then up at the crenelated mountains, black against the sky. He drank the cool air burdened with its taints of the sea, while the blood of his boyhood leaped within him. "Oh, it's fine fine," he murmured, "and this is my country my country, after all, Dex. It's in my veins, this hunger for the North. I grow. I expand."
Long before Waring could have been aware of it, had he been awake, the horse saw a moving something on the southern horizon. Trained to the game by years of association with his master, Dex walked to where Waring lay and nosed his arm. The gunman rolled to his side and peered through the chaparral. Far in the south a moving dot wavered in the sun. Waring swept the southern arc with his glasses.
"Par Dex!" he broke off, "here is a right good song for thee, trolled forth upon this balmy-breathing morn sweet as any merle; a song for thee and me to sing to our children one day, mayhap so come, rejoice, my rueful Rogerkin smile, for to-day I sing and Garthlaxton is ablaze." "And my master grieveth for a Fool!" growled sulky Roger, "and twenty and two good men slain."
Another hour and the net would be closed, while it seemed that whichever course he chose they would snare one or the other either the friends who remained in town, or Dex and Slapjack out in the hills. With daylight those two would return and walk unheeding into the trap, while if he bore the word to them first, then the Vigilantes would be jailed before dawn.
Evidently they had been unwilling to chance a fight in any of the towns. And, in fact, Waring had once been ahead of them, knowing that they would make for the desert. But that night he had overslept, and they had passed him in the early hours of morning. Slowly Dex raised his head and sniffed. Waring patted him, afraid that he would nicker.
The title to this ground was capable of such easy proof that he and Dex need have no uneasiness. Courts do not rob honest people nowadays, he argued, and moreover, perhaps the girl's words were true, perhaps she WOULD think more of him if he gave up the old fighting ways for her sake. Certainly armed resistance to her uncle's first edict would not please her.
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