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Updated: June 21, 2025
Fendrick shrugged. "I've a notion to let it go to that. But what's the use? Understand this. I wasn't going to give Blackwell away, but since he has talked, I may tell what I know. It's true enough what he says. I did relieve him of the plunder." "Sorry to hear that, Cass," Bucky commented gravely. "What did you do with it?"
From the convict's revenge he had hitherto saved Luck. Blackwell was his tool rather than his confederate, but he was uneasily aware that if the man yielded to the elemental desire to kill his enemy the law, would hold him, Cass Fendrick, guilty of the crime. "Price of sheep good this week?" Cullison asked amiably. "I didn't come here to discuss the price of sheep with you."
He struck a match and held it for the sheepman before using it himself. Relaxed in his chair, Fendrick spoke with rather elaborate indolence. "What's your evidence, Bucky? You can't hold me without any. What have you got that ties me to the W. & S. robbery?" "Why, that hat play, Cass? You let on you had shot Cullison's hat off his head while he was making his getaway.
"What in Mexico is the good of a county road there, Luck? Can't run a wagon over them mountains and down to the river. Looks to me like it would be a road from nowhere to nowhere," Alec Flandrau protested, puzzled at his friend's request. "I done guessed it," Yesler announced with a grin. "Run a county road through, and Cass Fendrick can't fence the river off from Luck's cows.
According to the code of the frontier no man could let himself be driven from town by the knowledge that another man was looking for him with a gun. There are in the Southwest now many thousands who do not live by the old standard, who are anchored to law and civilization as a protection against primitive passions. But Fendrick was not one of these.
The moon was up before they came upon a tent shining in the cold silvery light. Beside it was a sheetiron stove, a box, the ashes of a camp fire, and a side of bacon hanging from the limb of a stunted pine. Cautiously they stole forward. The camp was for the time deserted. No doubt its owner, a Mexican sheepherder in the employ of Fendrick and Dominguez, was out somewhere with his flock.
"Miss Cullison would not want to leave as long as her father was here," Fendrick answered for her glibly with a smile that said more than the words. "I'm going to hold you responsible for bringing her here." Fendrick could not face steadily the eyes of his foe. They bored into him like gimlets.
Caught him on the mesa," explained the boy sulkily. Fendrick bowed rather extravagantly and flashed at the girl a smiling double-row of strong white teeth. "He's qualifying for a moving-picture show actor, Miss Cullison. I hadn't the heart to disappoint him when he got that cannon trained on me. So here I am." Kate looked at him and then let her gaze travel to her cousin.
"I've got no notion of lighting out." Bob put up his big blue gun reluctantly. Never before had it been trained on a human being, and it was a wrench to give up the thought of bringing in the enemy as a prisoner. But he saw he could not pull it off. Fendrick had declined to scare, had practically laughed him out of it.
When Fendrick heard that the commissioners had condemned a right of way for a road through his homestead he unloaded on the desert air a rich vocabulary. For here would have been a simple way out of his trouble if he had only thought of it. Instead of which he had melodramatically kidnapped his enemy and put himself within reach of the law and of Cullison's vengeance.
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