United States or Guatemala ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The sun was well upon its western course when he reined in at a low stout gateway. A peon, lazily hoeing in the ditch, straightened his bent back and eyed the stranger in mild curiosity. "This Hallock's ranch?" Thode asked, laconically. The peon nodded and waved a brown hand toward the house half hidden among the trees. "Señor Hallo', si, Señor."
"He was, and Flemister beat him out of it lock, stock, and barrel: just simply reached out an' took it. Then, when he'd done that, he reached out and took Hallock's wife just to make it a clean sweep, was the way he bragged about it." "Heavens and earth!" ejaculated the listener.
And it was Lidgerwood's wholly groundless prepossession for Hallock that was still keeping him from turning the matter over to the company's legal department this in spite of the growing accumulation of evidence all pointing to Hallock's treason.
Gridley was the man who put up the job with Bart Rufford to kill you, and Judson mistook his voice for Hallock's that time, too. Gridley was " "Hold on, Mac," interrupted the superintendent; "how did you learn all this?"
The unfamiliar pose and the rakish tilt of the soft hat were not among the chief clerk's remembered characteristics; but making due allowance for the distortion of the magnified facial outline, the profile was Hallock's. Having definitely settled for himself the question of identity, Judson renewed his search for some eavesdropping point of vantage.
The Prudential Committee, appreciating the new demands, authorized an expenditure of five thousand dollars for punches and types in the Armenian, Greek, and Hebrew languages, and for foundries of types and stereotype plates. After Mr. Hallock's departure, the mission succeeded in procuring two Armenian fonts of great beauty from Vienna.
The third man was tall, and he wore a soft hat drawn low over his face. "Well, I'll be jiggered!" muttered the trailer, pulling his cap down to his ears and quickening his pace. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear that was Hallock again or Hallock's shadder follerin' him at a good long range!" The chase was growing decidedly mysterious.
It was a bid for a renewal of the quarrel which was never more than half veiled between these two. But Gridley did not lift the challenge. "Let it go at that," he said placably. "But if you should decide to stay, I want you to let up on Flemister." The morose antagonism died out of Hallock's eyes, and in its place came craft.
"I know," confessed the trainmaster. "It doesn't look reasonable." "It isn't reasonable," Lidgerwood went on, arguing Hallock's case as if it were his own. "Bradford was 202's conductor; he'd know if Hallock failed to get off at Navajo. Gridley was a passenger on the same train, and he would have known. The agent at Navajo would be a third witness.
Jovial good-nature went with the master-mechanic's gray eyes twinkling easily to a genial smile, but it stopped rather abruptly at the straight-lined, sensual mouth, and found a second negation in the brutal jaw which was only thinly masked by the neatly trimmed beard. Hallock's smile was bitter, and if he had a social side no one in Angels had ever discovered it.
Word Of The Day