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"Blood on his hands!" In the silence that followed, the eyes of the men turned curiously toward the old woman and then sought each other with speculative stares. Mrs. Brenner, tortured by those long significant glances, said roughly. "That's Mart's mother. She ain't right! What are you bothering us for?" Dick Roamer put out a hand to plead for her, and tapped Munn on the arm.
This ugly way of Mart's had isolated them from all village intercourse early in their life on Cedar Hill. Like a buzzard's nest, their home hung over the village on the unfriendly sides of the bleak slope. Visitors were few and always reluctant, even strangers, for the village told weird tales of Mart Brenner and his kin.
Now Mart was waiting for the fall to enter the last grade at Central, which was also to be his last year at school. Mart's parents were poor, and this lad, in another year, must join the army of toilers. "You must be having a lot of fun this vacation, Dick," remarked Mart rather wistfully. "Lot of fun in that war canoe, isn't there?" "Yes; there is, Mart.
Jeannette told him the proper way was to take ten if he could get it, and work his way up; but Mart disapproved of women's interference in his affairs. It ended in his finally getting a bottom-of-the-list berth in the freight dépôt of a big railway, and a wife forthwith. Jeannette said nothing. She had taken Mart's measure and saw this coming.
They were a hard, light, steely gray, and they looked out from lowered lids, oh, so steadily. Months of brooding in the prison had helped to harden Mart's eyes, that had needed no help in that way; brooding over imaginary wrongs, for he thought his arrest an injustice. Other men had stolen a few cows, and got away with them, but Mart was made to suffer, and came to think himself a victim.
And it was the misfortune of Donald Spellman to come under Mart's aim. Or perhaps it was his good fortune to be mortally wounded by a bullet, instead of ending his life as did the captives. But Spellman had something to say before he died, and he said it to Walt Lampson. "You got us," he gasped, "an' you got us right. An' I only got one thing to tell you, an' to tell you quick.
"Blood on his hands!" In the silence that followed, the eyes of the men turned curiously toward the old woman and then sought each other with speculative stares. Mrs. Brenner, tortured by those long significant glances, said roughly, "That's Mart's mother. She ain't right! What are you bothering us for?" Dick Roamer put out a hand to plead for her, and tapped Munn on the arm.
It hardly required a clairvoyant mother for any man who knew both Conway and Wayne Shandon to predict the haste with which Conway saddled and left the Bar L-M, nor the direction he went. "Old Mart's going to sleep restless to-night," mused Dart, to whom the adventures of a guy named Jupiter, and a skirt who shall be nameless, no longer appealed.
"We have eight rooms, four below and four above," leading the way to a narrow, steep steel stairway and down into a very narrow hall, from either side of which two doors opened. "This is my room, the adjoining one is Mart's. Shiro sleeps across the hall. The rest of the rooms are for our guests on future trips."
"You'll strain yourself, Captain," Bertha warningly cried out whenever he laid hold of a chair or brush. And so each time he went back to his library to smoke, and wait until his wife's duties were ended. At such hours his brother was a comfort. Slowly, day by day, Charles regained Mart's interest and a measure of his confidence.
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