The general suspicion that Bill Atkins knew more about Brick Willock than he had revealed,was not without foundation;though the extent of his knowledge was more limited than the town supposed.Bill had carried to his friend--hidden in the crevice in the mountain-top--the news of Red Kimball's death;since then,they had not seen each other.
Skulking along wooded gullies by day,creeping down into the cove at night,Willock had unconsciously reverted to the habits of thought and action belonging to the time of his outlawry.He was again,in spirit,a highwayman,though his hostility was directed only against those seeking to bring him to justice.The softening influence of the years spent with Lahoma was no longer apparent in his shifting bloodshot eyes,his crouching shoulders,his furtive hand ever ready to snatch the weapon from concealment.This sinister aspect of wildness,intensified by straggling whiskers and uncombed locks,gave to his giant form a kinship to the huge grotesquely shaped rocks among which he had made his den.
He heard of Red Kimball's death with bitter disappointment.He had hoped to encounter his former chief,to grapple with him,to hurl him,perhaps,from the precipice overlooking Bill's former home.If in his fall,Kimball,with arms wound about his waist,had dragged him down to the same death,what matter?Though his enemy was now no more,the sheriff held the warrant for his arrest--as if the dead man could still strike a mortal blow.The sheriff might be overcome--he was but a man.That piece of paper calling for his arrest--an arrest that would mean,at best,years in.the penitentiary--had behind it the whole state of Texas.
To Willock's feverish imagination,the warrant became personified;a mysterious force,not to be destroyed by material means;it was not only paper,but spirit.And it had come between him and Lahoma,it had shut him off from the possibility of a peaceful old age.The cove was no longer home but a hiding-place.
He did not question the justice of this sequel to his earlier life.No doubt deeds of long ago,never punished,demanded a sacrifice.He hated the agents of this justice not so much because they threatened his liberty,his life,as because they stepped in between himself and Lahoma.Always a man of expedients,he now sought some way of frustrating justice,and naturally his plans took the color of violence.Denied the savage joy of killing Red Kimball--and he would have killed him with as little compunction as if he had been a wolf--his thoughts turned toward Gledware.
Gledware was the only witness of the deed for which the warrant demanded his arrest.Willock wished many of his other deeds had been prompted by impulses as generous as those which had led to Kansas Kimball's death.Perhaps it was the irony of justice that he should be threatened by the one act of bloodshed which had saved Lahoma's life.If he must be hanged or imprisoned because he had not,like the rest of the band,given himself up for official pardon,it was as well to suffer from one deed as from another.But it would be better still,as in the past,to escape all consequences.Without Gledware,they could prove nothing.
Would Gledware testify,now that Red Kimball,who had bought his testimony with the death of the Indian,no longer lived to exact payment?Willock felt sure he would.In the first place,Gledware had placed himself on record as a witness,hence could hardly retreat;in the second place,he would doubtless be anxious to rid himself of the danger of ever meeting Willock,whom his conscience must have caused him to hate with the hatred of the man who wrongs his benefactor.
Willock transferred all his rage against the dead enemy to the living.He reminded himself how Gledware had caused the death of Red Feather,not in the heat of fury or in blind terror,but in coldblooded bargaining.He meditated on Gledware's attitude toward Lahoma;he thought nothing good of him,he magnified the evil.That scene at the grave of his wife--and Red Feather's account of how he had dug up the body for a mere pin of pearl and onyx....Ought such a creature to live to condemn him,to bring sorrow on the stepdaughter he had basely refused to acknowledge?
To wait for the coming of the witness would be to lose an opportunity that might never recur.Willock would go to him.In doing so,he would not only take Gledware by surprise,but would leave the only neighborhood in which search would be made for himself.Thus it came about that while the environs of the cove were being minutely examined,Brick,riding his fastest pony,was on the way to Kansas City.
He reached Kansas City without unusual incident,where he was accepted naturally,as a product of the West.Had his appearance been twice as uncouth,twice as wild,it would have accorded all the better with western superstitions that prevailed in this city,fast forgetting that it had been a western outpost.At the hotel,whose situation he knew from Lahoma's letters,he learned that Gledware was neither there,nor at his home in the country.The country-house was closed up and,in fact,there was a rumor that it was sold,or was about to be sold.One of the porters happened to know that Gledware had gone for a week's diversion down in the Ozarks.There were a lake,a club-house,a dancing-hall,as yet unopened.The season was too early for the usual crowd at Ozark Lodge,but the warm wave that nearly always came at this time of year,had prompted a sudden outing party which might last no longer than the warm wave.
