“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.”