A FREE MAN
"I am a free man, if you please." The sheriff stood in the hotel
doorway, looking down upon her as she sat in her favorite veranda
chair. "I have given my keeper his fee and sent him away. May I watch
you while you read?"
Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of
welcome. He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low
entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt
and haggard.
"I shouldn't be reading in this light, anyway," she said. "I hadn't
noticed that the sun was down. It is good to be what you call free
again, isn't it?"
He laughed softly, put back his head, filled his lungs. Then he came
on to her and stood leaning against the wall, his hat cocked to one
side to hide the bandage.
"The world is good," he announced with gay positiveness. "Especially
when you've been away from it for a spell and weren't quite sure what
was next. And especially, too, when you've had time to think. Did you
ever take off a week and just do nothing but think?"
"One doesn't have time for that sort of thing as a rule," she admitted.
"There's a chair standing empty if you care to let me in on your
deductions."
"I don't want to sit down or lie down until I'm ready to drop," he
grinned down at her. "A bed makes me sick at my stomach and a chair is
pretty nearly as bad. I'd like almighty well to get a horse between my
knees . . . and _ride_! Suppose I'd fall to pieces if I tried it
right now?"
"Sure of it. And not so sure that you haven't discharged your keeper
prematurely. You mustn't think of such things."
"There you go. Forbidding me to think again! . . . Believe I will sit
down; would you believe that a full-grown man like me could get as weak
as a cat this quick?"
He took the chair just beyond her, tilted it back against the wall, his
booted heels caught under its elevated legs, and glanced away from her
to the colorful sky above San Juan's scattered houses in the west.
"Yes, sir," he continued his train of thought, "I'd like a horse
between my knees; I'd like to ride out yonder into the sunset, to meet
the night as it comes down; I'd like the feeling of nothing but the
stars over me instead of the smothery roof of a house. Doesn't it
appeal to you, too?"
"Yes," she said.
"You on Persis, with me on my big roan, riding not as we rode that
other night, but just for the fun of it. I'd like to ride like the
devil. . . . You don't mind my saying what I mean, do you? . . . to go
scooting across the sage-brush letting out a yell at every jump, boring
holes in the night with my gun, making all of the racket and dust that
one man can make. Ever feel that way? just like getting outside and
making a noise? Let me talk! I'm the one who has been shut up for so
long my tongue has started to grow fast to the roof of my mouth. At
first I could do nothing but lie flat on my back in a sort of fog,
seeing nothing clearly, thinking not at all. Then came the hours in
which I could do nothing but think, under orders to keep still. Think?
Why, I thought about everything that ever happened, most things that
might happen, and a whole lot that never will. Now comes the third
stage; I can talk better than I can walk. . . . Do you mind listening
while a man raves?"
"Not in the least." She found his mood contagious and, smiling in that
quick, bright way natural to her, showed for a moment the twin dimples
of which together with a host of other things he had had ample time to
think during his bedroom imprisonment. "Please rave on."
"In due course," he mused, "the fourth stage will arrive and I can be
doing something besides talk, can't I? Now let me tell you about the
King's Palace."
"You begin well."
"The King's Palace is where we are going on our first outing. That was
decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M. You and I and, if
you like, Florrie and your kid brother. We'll ride out there in the
very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone. We'll
lunch and loaf there all day. For lunch we will have bacon and coffee,
cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms. We will have some
trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest
mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about. We will have cheese,
perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert. We'll ride home in the
dusk and the dark."
"The King's Palace?" she asked curiously. "I never heard of such a
place. Are you making it all up?"
"Not a bit of it. It's all that's left of some of the old ruins of the
same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs. . . . Do you know
why I am bound to get Jim Galloway's tag soon or late?"
Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt
digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.
"Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other
words, because he opposes the law and you represent it."
"Because he plays the game wrong! Some more results of a long week of
nothing to do but think things out. There is just one way for a
law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it."
"You mean that a man can get away with it? Surely not for good?"
But he nodded thoughtfully at the slowly fading strata of shaded colors
splashed across the sky.
"A man can get away with it for keeps . . . if he plays the game right.
Jim Galloway isn't that man and so I'll get him. He has ignored the
first necessary principle, which is the lone hand."
"You mean he takes men into his confidence?"
"And he goes on and ignores the second necessary principle; a man must
stop short of murder. If he turns gangman and killer, he ties his own
rope around his neck. If a man like Galloway, a man with brains,
power, without fear, without scruple, should decide to loot this corner
of the world or any other corner, and set about it right, playing the
lone hand invariably, he would be a man I couldn't bring in in a
thousand years. But Galloway has slipped up; he has too many Moragas
and Antones and Vidals at his heels; he has been the cause, directly or
indirectly, of too many killings. . . . A theft will be forgotten in
time, the hue and cry die down; spilled blood cries to heaven after ten
years."
"Galloway is back in San Juan."
"I know. I wanted him back. I wanted him free and unhampered. He'll
be bolder than ever now, won't he, if this case is dropped? He's come
out a little into the open already, he'll be tempted out a little
farther. There'll be more of his work soon, a robbery here or there,
and he will grow so sure of himself that he'll get careless. Then I'll
get him."
"But have you the right?" she asked quickly. "Knowing him a
lawbreaker, have you the right to allow him to go farther and farther,
just because in the end you hope to get him?"
He met her look with a smile which puzzled her.
"I'll answer your question when you define right and wrong for me," he
said quietly.
They grew silent together, watching the gradual sinking of day into
twilight and early dusk. Norton, for all his vaunted ravings, had
grown thoughtful; Virginia turning her eyes toward him while his were
staring out beyond the house-tops saw in them a look of deep, frowning
speculation. And through this look, like a little fire gleaming
through a fog, was another look whose meaning baffled her.
"What do you think of Patten?" he asked.
Startled by his abruptness, characteristic of him though it was to-day,
she asked in puzzled fashion:
"What do you mean?"
"Not as a man," he said, withdrawing his gaze from the sunset and
bestowing it gravely upon her. "As a physician. Do you size him up as
capable or as something of a quack?"
She hesitated. But finally she made the only reply possible.
"Of course you don't expect any answer, knowing that you should not
come to one member of a profession for an estimate of another. And,
besides, you realize that I know nothing whatever of Dr. Patten, either
as a man or as a physician."
He laughed softly.
"Hedging, pure, unadulterated hedging! I didn't look for that from
you. Shall I tell you what we both think of him? He is a farce and a
fake, and I rather think that I am going to run him out of the State
pretty soon. . . . What would you say of a doctor who couldn't tell
the difference between a wound made by a man bumping his head when he
fell and by a smashing blow with a gun-barrel? Patten doesn't guess
yet that it was the blow Moraga gave me the other night which came so
close to ringing down the sable curtains for me."
"Moraga?" she asked with quickened interest. "Not the same Moraga who
shot Brocky Lane?"
"The same little old Moraga," he assured her lightly. "You needn't
mention it abroad, of course; I don't think Galloway got a chance to
talk with him and we are not sure yet that he even knows Moraga was
here. But I know somebody put me out in the dark by hammering me over
the head; and Tom Cutter found blood on Moraga's revolver. But we
wander far afield. Coming back to Patten, do we agree that he is
something of a dub?"
"I'd rather not discuss him."
"Exactly. And I, being in the talkative way, am going to tell you that
he has made blunders before now; that at least one man died under his
nice little fat hands who shouldn't have died outside of jail; that
long ago I had my suspicions and began instituting inquiries; that now
I am fully prepared to learn that Caleb Patten has no more right to an
M.D. after his name than I have."
"You must be mistaken. I hope you are. Men used to do that sort of
thing, but under existing laws . . ."
"Under existing laws men do a good many things in and about San Juan
which they shouldn't do. I have found out that there was a Caleb
Patten who was a young doctor; that there was a Charles Patten, his
brother, who was a young scamp; that they both lived in Baltimore a few
years ago; that from Baltimore they both went hastily no man knows
where. This gentleman whom we have with us might be either one of
them. . . . Here comes Ignacio. _Que hay_, Ignacio!"
"_Que hay_, Roderico?" responded Ignacio, coming to lean languidly
against the veranda post. He removed his hat elaborately, his liquid
eyes doing justice to Virginia's dainty charm. "_Buenos tardes,
señorita_," he greeted her.
"What is new, Ignacio?" queried Norton, "No bells for you to ring for
the last ten days! You grow fat in idleness, _amigo mio_."
Ignacio sighed and rolled his cigarette.
"What is new, you ask? No? _Bueno_, this is new!" He lifted his
eyes suddenly and they were sparkling as with suppressed excitement.
"The Devil himself has made a visit to San Juan. _Si, señor; si,
señorita_. It is so."
Virginia smiled; Norton gravely asked the explanation. Why should his
satanic majesty come to San Juan?
"Why? _Quien sabe_?" Ignacio shrugged all responsibility from his
lazy shoulders. "But he came and more bad will come from his visit,
more and more of evil things. One knows. _Seguro que si_; one knows.
But I will tell you and the señorita; no one else knows of it. It was
while in the Casa Blanca men are shooting, while Roderico Nortone will
make his arrest of poor Vidal who is dead now." He crossed himself and
drew a thoughtful puff from his cigarette. "I run fast to ring the
bells. I come into the garden and it is dark. I come under the bells.
And while my hand cannot find the rope . . . _Si, señor y
señorita_! . . . before I touch the rope the Captain begins to ring!
Just a little; not long; low and quiet and . . . angry! And then he
stop and I shiver. It is hard not to run out of the garden. But I
cross myself and find the ropes and make all the bells dance. But I
know; it was the Devil who was before me."