MY thoughts, fears, and hopes went galloping ahead of me during
that ride back to the East. It’s all a blur of memory--wheat-fields,
prune-orchards, tunnels, peaks, and prairies--and the old judge sitting
beside me, twisting his withered hands and cracking his bony knuckles.
It was lucky for both of us that the slow part of the journey was at the
start and that we had the clang of mile-a-minute rails under us for the
last two days of that race.
Well, I thought the thing over. It was just as much of a nightmare then
as it seems now when I am setting it down.
How I ever undertook such a crack-brained, daredevil trip and hoped for
anything tangible to fall to me by such a hundred-to-one shot I do not
understand even now in clear fashion, in spite of the explanation I have
given. We talk about hunches in this world! If I had not obeyed some
sort of suggestion I certainly would not have chased those renegades.
Only by meeting with them did I stand a chance of recovering any money.
That thought and my hankering to use my knowledge about the Pratt-Dawlin
gang influenced me a great deal, I suppose. And the conviction that I
couldn’t spin a thread by seeking money in any other way pried me out of
Levant, of course.