and my answer is that there’s a man up there mebbe who has got to hide Struve if he shows up.  That’s only a guess, but it looks good to me.  This man was the brains of the whole outfit, and folks say that he’s got cached the whole haul the gang made from that S. P. hold-up.  What’s more, he scattered gold so liberal that his name wasn’t even mentioned at the trial.  He’s a big man now, a millionaire copper king and into gold-mines up to the hocks.  In the Southwest those things happen.  It doesn’t always do to look too closely at a man’s past.

“We’ll say Struve drops in on him and threatens to squeak.  Mebbe he has got evidence; mebbe he hasn’t.  Anyhow, our big duck wants to forget the time he was wearing a mask and bending a six-gun for a living.  Also and moreover, he’s right anxious to have other folks get a chance to forget.  From what I can hear he’s clean mashed on some girl at Amarillo, or maybe it’s Fort Lincoln.  See what a twist Strove’s got on him if he can slip into the Mal Pais country on the q. t.”

“And you’re going up there to look out for him?”

“I’m going in to take a casual look around.  There’s no telling what a man might happen onto accidentally if he travels with his ear to the ground.”

The other nodded.  He could now understand easily why Fraser was going into the Mal Pais country, but he could not make out why the ranger, naturally a man who lived under his own hat and kept his own counsel, had told him so much as he had.  The officer shortly relieved his mind on this point.

“I may need help while I’m there.  May I call on you if I do, seh?”

Neill felt his heart warm toward this hard-faced, genial frontiersman, who knew how to judge so well the timbre of a casual acquaintance.

“You sure may, lieutenant.”

“Good.  I’ll count on you then.”

So, in these few words, the compact of friendship and alliance was sealed between them.  Each of them was strangely taken with the other, but it is not the way of the Anglo-Saxon fighting man to voice his sentiment.  Though each of them admired the stark courage and the flawless fortitude he knew to dwell in the other, impassivity sat on their faces like an ice-mask.  For this is the hall-mark of the Southwest, that a man must love and hate with the same unchanging face of iron, save only when a woman is in consideration.

They were to camp that night by Cottonwood Spring, and darkness caught them still some miles from their camp.  They were on no road, but were travelling across country through washes and over countless hills.  The ranger led the way, true as an arrow, even after velvet night had enveloped them.

“It must be right over this mesa among the cottonwoods you see rising from that arroyo,” he announced at last.

He had scarcely spoken before they struck a trail that led them direct to the spring.  But as they were descending this in a circle Fraser’s horse shied.