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Updated: June 12, 2025
On the hillside half a dozen men were picking themselves up and struggling wildly to flee. Nearer, a few other forms lay in the moonlight mangled and still, or mangled, and writhing in pain. Of all the rest nothing. Almost completely Burkhardt's predatory band had been blotted out. Weir's thunderbolt had struck down into its very heart, and it had vanished.
I call it Thomas Weir's fall; for surely to behave in an unfatherly manner to both daughter and son the one sinful, and therefore needing the more tenderness the other innocent, and therefore claiming justification and to do so from pride, and hurt pride, was fall enough in one history, worse a great deal than many sins that go by harder names; for the world's judgment of wrong does not exactly correspond with the reality.
And Sorenson Sorenson there every day knowing his son lies a helpless cripple, without the money that has been piled up for him! I couldn't invent a worse hell for him. And that's the hell he's going to have!" Though a man not easy to move, Madden at Weir's cold implacable expression of hatred shivered slightly. Sorenson and his accomplices would be lucky indeed if they died by the rope.
Amazement and incredulity had been followed by an aroused feeling of anger, for to the Mexicans it appeared that the crushing blow dealt the leaders of the town was the arbitrary act of the man they believed a lawless gun-man. Were not Weir's foremen and engineers guarding the jail? Men who were strangers, not even citizens of the county?
Raymond uttered one deep, low, "O-o-o-o!" Then McCord begged to be let out; Weir's big head, with its shock of hair, resembled that of an angry lion; little Trace screamed, and Duncan yelled. "Peg, how're you?" asked Murray, walking up to Ken. "It's always pretty hot the first few times. But afterward it's fine. Look at Reddy." "Murray, give Peg a good stewin'," put in Arthurs.
"He always swore that no one should put him behind bars. He wouldn't have minded so much finishing in a gun-fight, but to serve a term in prison would surely go against the grain with Burk. Though I think with Sorenson " Weir's eyes had never left the speaker.
But the explanation of his attempt to put his unborn poem into words gave him less thought to-day than it had after its first occurrence; there were other phases of last night's experience weirder and more unexplainable still. Paramount, of course, was the vision or dream which would seem to have been induced by some magnetic property possessed and exerted by Weir. Such things do not occur without cause, and he was not the sort of man to yield himself, physically and mentally, his will and his perceptions, to the unconscious caprice of a somnambulist. And the scene had cut itself so deeply into the tablets of his memory that he found himself forgetting more than once that it was not an actual episode of his past. He wished he could see Weir, and hear her account of her mental experiences of those hours. If her dream should have been a companion to his, then the explanation would suggest itself that the scene might have been a vagary of her brain; that in some way which he did not pretend to explain, she had hypnotized him, and that his brain had received a photographic imprint of what had been in hers. It would then be merely a sort of telepathy. But why should she have dreamed a dream in which they both were so unhappily metamorphosed? and why should it have produced so powerful an impression upon his waking sense? And why, strangest of all, had he, without thought or self-surprise, gone to her, and with his soul stirred to its depths, called her "Sionèd"? True, she had almost disguised herself, and had been the living counterfeit of Sionèd Penrhyn; but that was no reason why he should have called a woman who had belonged to his grandmother's time by her first name. Could Weir, thoroughly imbued with the character she was unconsciously representing, have exercised her hypnotic power from the moment she entered the gallery, and left him without power to think or feel except through her own altered perceptions? He thrust out his foot against the fender, almost overturning it, and, throwing back his head, clasped his hands behind it and scowled at the black ceiling above him. He was a man who liked things explained, and he felt both sullen and angry that he should have had an experience which baffled his powers of analysis and reason. His partial solution gave him no satisfaction, and he had the uncomfortable sense of actual mystery, and a premonition of something more to come. This, however, he was willing to attribute to the depressed condition of his spirits, which threw its gloom over every object, abstract and concrete, and which induced the tendency to exaggerate any strange or unpleasant experience of which he had been the victim. It was useless to try to think of anything else; his brain felt as if it had resolved itself into a kaleidoscope, through which those three scenes shifted eternally. Finally, he fell asleep, and did not awaken until it was time to dress for dinner. Before he left his room, Weir's maid knocked at his door and handed him a note, in which the lady of Rhyd-Alwyn apologized for leaving him to himself for an entire day, and announced that she would not appear at dinner, but would meet him in the drawing-room immediately thereafter. Dartmouth read the note through with a puzzled expression: it was formal and stilted, even for Weir. She was gone when he came to his senses in the gallery the night before. Had she awakened and become conscious of the situation? It was not a pleasant reminiscense for a girl to have, and he felt honestly sorry for her. Then he groaned in spirit at the prospect of an hour's tête-
From the booth adjoining he had for some time been hearing scraps of conversation; now all at once the voices rose in protest and in answering explanation, in perplexed appeal and earnest assurance. Weir's own reflections ceased. His head turned and remained fixed to listen, while the cigar grew cold between his fingers.
And there was the opposite side of the affair Weir's side; so it looked as if there might be profit either way. The four men sitting in the railed-off space in the San Mateo Cattle Company's office constituted the cattle company. Moreover, they comprised the financial, political and general power of this remote section of New Mexico. In face, manner, garb, they were dissimilar.
"That suits," Madden responded, and set off alone. Weir's alert brain had been turning over the possibilities of Sorenson's course. Rather by pursuing what would be the man's line of reasoning than by depending on chance, he had come to the quick decision to turn back once again to the office. Sorenson would so act as would best serve his immediate escape and that of the future.
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