Crooked Trails and Straight Part 37

"You know that isn't true. That convict and you have hidden him somewhere.

We have evidence enough to convict you both."

"Imagination, most of it, I expect." He was inspecting the roses and inhaling their bloom.

"Fact enough to send you to the penitentiary."

"I ought to be scared. This is a La France, ain't it?"

"I want you to tell me what you have done with my father."

He laughed a little and looked at her with eyes that narrowed like those of a cat basking in the sun. He had something the look of the larger members of the cat family--the soft long tread, the compact rippling muscles of a tame panther, and with these the threat that always lies behind its sleepy wariness.

"You're a young lady of one idea. No use arguing with you, I reckon."

"Not the least use. I've talked with Mrs. Wylie."

He raised his eyebrows. "Do I know the lady?"

"She will know you. That is more to the point."

"Did she say she knew me?" he purred.

"She will say it in court--if it ever comes to that."

"Just what will she say, if you please."

Kate told him in four sentences with a stinging directness that was the outstanding note of her, that and a fine self-forgetful courage.

"Is that all? Comes to this then, that she says I heard her scream, ran in, and saved your father's life. Is that a penitentiary offense? I don't say it oughtn't to be, but is it?"

"You helped the villain take his body into the cellar. You plotted with him to hold Father a prisoner there."

"Says that, does she--that she overheard us plotting?"

"Of course she did not overhear what you said. You took good care of that.

But she knew you were conspiring."

"Just naturally knew it without overhearing," he derided. "And of course if I was in a plot I must have been Johnny-on-the-spot a good deal of the time. Hung round there a-plenty, I expect?"

He had touched on the weak spot of Mrs. Wylie's testimony. The man who had saved Cullison's life, after a long talk with Blackwell, had gone out of the Jack of Hearts and had not returned so far as she knew. For her former husband had sent her on an errand just before the prisoner was taken away and she did not know who had helped him.

Kate was silent.

"How would this do for an explanation?" he suggested lazily. "We'll say just for the sake of argument that Mrs. Wylie's story is true, that I did save your father's life. We'll put it that I did help carry him downstairs where it was cooler and that I did have a long talk with the fellow Blackwell. What would I be talking to him about, if I wasn't reading the riot act to him? Ain't it likely too that he would be sorry for what he did while he was angry at your father for b.u.t.ting in as he was having trouble with his wife? And after he had said he was sorry why shouldn't I hit the road out of there? There's no love lost between me and Luck Cullison. I wasn't under any obligations to wrap him up in cotton and bring him back this side up with care to his anxious friends. If he chose later to take a hike out of town on p.d.q. hurry up business I ain't to blame. And I reckon you'll find a jury will agree with me."

She had to admit to herself that he made out a plausible case. Not that she believed it for a moment. But very likely a jury would. As for his subsequent silence that could be explained by his desire not to mix himself in the affairs of one with whom he was upon unfriendly terms. The irrefutable fact that he had saved the life of Cullison would go a long way as presumptive proof of his innocence.

"I see you are wearing your gray hat again? What have you done with the brown one?"

She had flashed the question at him so unexpectedly that he was startled, but the wary mask fell again over the sardonic face.

"You take a right friendly interest in my hats, seems to me."

"I know this much. Father took your hat by mistake from the club. You bought a brown one half an hour later. You used Father's to manufacture evidence against him. If it isn't true that he is your prisoner how does it come that you have your gray hat again? You must have taken it from him."

He laughed uneasily. She had guessed the exact truth.

"In Arizona there are about forty thousand gray hats like this. Do you figure you can identify this one, Miss Cullison? And suppose your fairy tale of the Jack of Hearts is true, couldn't I have swapped hats again while he lay there unconscious?"

She brushed his explanation aside with a woman's superb indifference to logic.

"You can talk of course. I don't care. It is all lies--lies. You have kidnapped Father and are holding him somewhere. Don't you dare to hurt him. If you should--Oh, if you should--you will wish you had never been born." The fierceness of her pa.s.sion beat upon him like sudden summer hail.

He laughed slowly, well pleased. A lazy smoldering admiration shone in his half shuttered eyes.

"So you're going to take it out of me, are you?"

A creature of moods, there came over her now a swift change. Every feature of her, the tense pose, the manner of defiant courage, softened indescribably. She was no longer an enemy bent on his destruction but a girl pleading for the father she loved.

"Why do you do it? You are a man. You want to fight fair. Tell me he is well. Tell me you will set him free."

He forgot for the moment that he was a man with the toils of the law closing upon him, forgot that his success and even his liberty were at stake. He saw only a girl with the hunger of love in her wistful eyes, and knew that it lay in his power to bring back the laughter and the light into them.

"Suppose I can't fight fair any longer. Suppose I've let myself get trapped and it isn't up to me but to somebody else."

"How do you mean?"

"Up to your father, say."

"My father?"

"Yes. How could I turn him loose when the first thing he did would be to swear out a warrant for my arrest?"

"But he wouldn't--not if you freed him."

He laughed harshly. "I thought you knew him. He's hard as nails."

She recognized the justice of this appraisal. "But he is generous too. He stands by his friends."

"I'm not his friend, not so you could notice it." He laughed again, bitterly. "Not that it matters. Of course I was just putting a case.

Nothing to it really."

He was hedging because he thought he had gone too far, but she appeared not to notice it. Her eyes had the faraway look of one who communes with herself.

"If I could only see him and have a talk with him."

"What good would that do?" he pretended to scoff.