She stood, indeed, with the same smile upon her lips,
but her eyes were fixed and looked straight past him.
And presently he saw a tear pass slowly down her face.
Her hand remained without moving, with the watch in
it exactly as he had placed it there.
She had not stirred when he slipped without a noise
through the window and was instantly swallowed in
the rushing of the wind and rain.
There was, as Andrew had understood for a long time,
a sort of underground world of criminals even here
on the mountain desert. Otherwise the criminals
could not have existed for even a moment in the face
of the organized strength of lawful society. Several
times in the course of his wanderings Andrew had come
in contact with links of the underground chain, and
he learned what every fugitive learns—the
safe stopping points in the great circuit of his flight.
Three elements went into the making of that hidden
society. There was first of all the circulating
and active part, and this was composed of men actually
known to be under the ban of the law and openly defying
it. Beneath this active group lay a stratum much
larger which served as a base for the operating criminals.
This stratum was built entirely of men who had at
one time been incriminated in shady dealings of one
sort and another. It included lawbreakers from
every part of the world, men who had fled first of
all to the shelter of the mountain desert and who had
lived there until their past was even forgotten in
the lands from which they came. But they had
never lost the inevitable sympathy for their more
active fellows, and in this class there was included
a meaner element—men who had in the past
committed crimes in the mountain desert itself and
who, from time to time, when they saw an absolutely
safe opportunity, were perfectly ready and willing
to sin again.
The third and largest of all the elements in the criminal
world of the desert was a shifting and changing class
of men who might be called the paid adherents of the
active order. The “long riders,” acting
in groups or singly, fled after the commission of
a crime and were forced to find places of rest and
concealment along their journey. Under this grave
necessity they quickly learned what people on their
way could be hired as hosts and whose silence and
passive aid could be bought. Such men were secured
in the first place by handsome bribes. And very
often they joined the ranks unwillingly. But
when some peaceful householder was confronted by a
desperate man, armed, on a weary horse—perhaps
stained from a wound—the householder was
by no means ready to challenge the man’s right
to hospitality. He never knew when the stranger
would take by force what was refused to him freely,
and, if the lawbreaker took by force, he was apt to
cover his trail by a fresh killing.
