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Updated: May 13, 2025
Jack, returning from his room, where he had left the box of gold locked up, waited on the porch to see who this might be. The horseman proved to be the man Norris, or Boone, and in a thoroughly bad temper, as Jack soon found out. "Have you see anything of 'Lissie Lee?" he demanded immediately. "Miss Lee has just left me. She has gone to her room," answered Flatray quietly.
"What what do you reckon it was, Jeff?" Again Jack let his cry curdle the night. The outlaws took counsel of their terror. They were hardy, desperate men, afraid of nothing mortal under the sun. But the dormant superstition in them rose to their throats. Fearfully they wheeled and gave their horses the spur. Flatray could hear them crashing through the brush.
"Morse had a gold shipment aboard," he explained in a low voice, and added in bitter self-condemnation: "He sent me along to guard it, and I never even fired a shot to save it." "But do you mean that somebody held up the stage?" she gasped. "Yes. But whoever it was can't escape. I've 'phoned to Jack Flatray and to Morse. They'll be right out here.
Life in the open had made her a judge of such men as she had been accustomed to meet, but for days she had been telling herself she could no longer trust her judgment. Her best friend was a rustler. By a woman's logic it followed that since Jack Flatray was a thief this man might have committed all the crimes in the calendar. "I don't know."
He had been scanning the valley with his glasses, having given West instructions to keep a lookout in the rear. He swung his head round sharply, and with it his rifle. "You're covered, you fool," cried the man who was strutting toward them. "Stop there. Not another step," Flatray called sharply. The man stopped, his rifle half raised. "We've got you on every side, man." He lifted his voice.
Nobody but a darn fool makes a gun-play when the cards are stacked that-a-way. Yore bad play was in reaching for the gun at all." "Well, Jack Flatray will git him. I'll bet a stack of blues on that," contributed a fat ranchman wheezily. "Unless you mussed up the trail coming back," said Ellis to the stage-driver. "We didn't. I thought of that, and I had José drive clear round the place.
A little juice dripped from the can to the ground. Flatray needed no explanation. In Arizona men on the range often carry a can of tomatoes instead of a water canteen. Nothing alleviates thirst like the juice of this acid fruit. Some one had opened this can within two hours. Otherwise the sun would have dried the moisture.
She had heard for years of this lieutenant of rangers, who was the terror of all Arizona "bad men." Her father, Jack Flatray, the range riders whom she knew game men all hailed Bucky O'Connor as a wonder. For coolness under fire, for acumen, for sheer, unflawed nerve, and for his skill in that deadly game he played of hunting down desperadoes, they called him chief ungrudgingly.
"Picked up any clues yet?" asked the other carelessly, yet always with that hint of a sneer; and innocently Flatray answered, "They seem to be right seldom." "Didn't know but you'd happened on the fellow's trail." "I guess I'm as much at sea as you are," was the equivocal answer. Lee came over from the stable, still wearing spurs and gauntlets.
"What reasons?" briefly demanded Flatray. "We don't need to go into them. We had them, anyhow. Then I lit on a foot-print right on the edge of the ditch that no man ever made. We didn't know what to make of it, but we wiped it out and followed the ditch, one on each side. We'd figured that was the way he had gone.
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