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Updated: June 7, 2025
Below her, on the narrow board-walk that ran in front of the Eating-House, were four men. She recognized three of them Deveny, Strom Rogers, and Meeder Lawson, the Rancho Seco foreman. The other man was a stranger. Evidently it was the stranger to whom Deveny had spoken, for it was the stranger who answered. "He's in his office now." Deveny turned to Lawson and Rogers.
"Here I am, schon meeder da" he said, clicking his heels together when I came into the diningroom where he was waiting among the debris of the first spasms of Wanda's table-laying; and we both laughed.
Meeder Lawson's face was sullen and full of impotent rage, and he watched Deveny with a gaze of bitter accusation when he saw that the big man intended to obey Harlan's order. Barbara's pursuer, having felt Deveny's angry gaze upon him, and being uncomfortably conscious that Harlan had not forgotten him, was red of face and self-conscious.
Speech had broken the tension under which Barbara had been laboring; the flow of words through her lips stimulated her thoughts and sent them skittering back to the salient incidents of her enforced confinement; they brought into her consciousness a recollection of the conversation she had heard between Meeder Lawson and Strom Rogers, regarding her father.
The latter brought his horse to a halt when he reached the far corner of the ranchhouse, dismounted, and stole stealthily along the wall of the building. Harlan was not more than a hundred feet distant, and the glare of the moonlight shining full on the man as he paused before the door into which Barbara Morgan had gone, revealed him plainly to Harlan. The man was Meeder Lawson.
"You charged this man with murdering my father?" she demanded of Deveny as she walked to him and stood, her hands clenched, her face dead white and her eyes blazing hate. "You know better. I heard Strom Rogers tell Meeder Lawson that it was Dolver and Laskar and somebody he called the 'Chief, who did it. I want to know who those men are; I want to know where I can find them!
It was nugget gold only a pocket. I packed it home, lettin' nobody see me doin' it; an' I got it all hid in the house, except the last batch, before anybody knowed anything about it. Then, comin' home with the last of it, the damned bottom had to bust out of the bag right near the corral gate, where Meeder Lawson, my foreman, was standin' watchin' me.
He smiled and said, slowly and consolingly: "I reckon if you'd shot me I'd be knowin' it. Don't take it so hard, ma'am. Why, if a man goes to breakin' into a woman's room that way he sure ain't fit to go on livin' in a world where there is a woman." "It was Lawson you say? Meeder Lawson the Rancho Seco foreman? I thought why, I thought it was you!" "I'm thankin' you, ma'am," he said, ironically.
Other thoughts came, flickered like feeble lights, and went out thoughts of what had happened to her at Lamo; a dull wonder over Meeder Lawson's presence in town when he should have been with the men on the range; speculation as to the whereabouts of the men why none of them had remained at the ranchhouse; and a sort of dumb, vague wonder over what her future would be.
Some of them merely stepped into near-by doorways, others sauntered slowly down the street and halted at a little distance to look back. But no man made a hostile move, for they had seen the tragedy in which Laskar had figured, and they had no desire to provoke Harlan to express again the cold wrath that slumbered in his eyes. Meeder Lawson was the first of Deveny's intimates to leave the group.
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