"At present I'd say nothing about this matter to any one. Later on you may be able to use it in squaring accounts," the engineer advised.

"I hope so," was the answer, with a bitter note. "But talking would only hurt Mary, not Ed Sorenson. Whatever the Sorensons do is all right, you know, because they're rich. The daughter of a poor man like me would get all the black end of the gossip; and I can't lift a finger, that's what grinds me, unless I go out and shoot him, then hang for it. For the bank's got a mortgage on my little bunch of stock, and on my ranch here, and Sorenson, of course, is the bank.

Gordon and Vorse and a few others are in it too, but he's the bull of the herd. If I opened my mouth about his son, I'd be kicked off of Terry Creek, lock, stock and barrel. That's the way Sorenson keeps all of us poor devils, white and Mexican, eating out of his hand. I've just been poor since I came here a boy; the gang in San Mateo won't let anybody but themselves have a chance. And I reckon old man Sorenson wouldn't care much if his boy had ruined my girl. Cuss him a little, maybe; that would be all. But I won't forget the whelp. Some day my chance will come to play even." "Sure; if one just keeps quiet and waits," Steele agreed. "Well, I must hit the trail. If you want work any time, come over to the dam; we can always use a man with a team." Johnson nodded. "After haying is done, maybe. And remember, I'm much obliged to you for looking after my little girl. I won't forget that, either." He reached up diffidently and shook hands with the engineer. Weir's grip was sympathetic and sincere.

CHAPTER IV

A SECRET CONFERENCE

On a certain afternoon Felipe Martinez, the lean and restless attorney who had acted as the Mexican workmen's mouthpiece, observed through the broad plate-gla.s.s window of the San Mateo Cattle Company's office an incident that greatly interested him. For the moment he forgot the resentment kindled by Sorenson's abrupt refusal and brutal words when he asked for the nomination for county attorney. The election was in the autumn; the nomination was equivalent to election; and Felipe considered that he had too long been kept apart from that particular spoil.

Martinez had once had a slight difference with the banker, and now outrageously Sorenson had recalled it. He had stated that Martinez should hold no political office; he gave offices only to men who did exactly as he advised; his exact words were that the Mexican was "tricky and no good." And picking up his hat Sorenson who had that day returned home from the east went out of the bank, leaving Martinez to stare out of the window and meditatively twist a point of his silky black mustache.

It was before the window that there occurred the meeting between Sorenson and the manager of the dam. Martinez perceived the two men glance at each other and pa.s.s, but after a step or two both men halted. As if worked by a single wire, they slowly swung about for a second look. The Mexican's nimble brain calculated that they could not have previously met and in consequence their behavior bespoke something out of the ordinary.

The pair stood exactly where they had turned, three or four paces apart, he noted. The Mexican's mind palpitated with a slight thrill of excitement. The manner of each of the men was that of a fighting animal looking over another animal of the same sort: neither uttering a word, nor stirring a finger, nor yielding a particle in his fixed unwinking gaze. Martinez could almost feel the exchanged challenge, the cold antagonism, the hostile curiosity, the matching of wills, the instant hate, between the men.

Though they had not met before, to be sure, nevertheless they were enemies. Was it because of the discharge of the workmen? Then Martinez' mind flashed back to the scene in Vorse's saloon when Gordon had showed such sudden emotion at the engineer's name and his enigmatical reference to some event in the past. That was it!

Something which had occurred thirty years ago, probably something crooked. Men committed deeds in those early days that they would now like to forget. He, Martinez, would look into the matter.

Sorenson pa.s.sed out of sight, and Weir likewise proceeded on his way.

Thereupon the lawyer sauntered over to the court house, where presently he became engrossed in a pile of tomes in the register's office. As examining records is a part of a lawyer's regular work, it never excites curiosity or arouses suspicion.

That same evening Martinez perceived Vorse enter Sorenson's office.

Vorse, he recalled, had been included in the engineer's threatening remarks to Gordon. Shortly thereafter Gordon himself ambled along the street and pa.s.sed through the door. Last of all, Burkhardt, a short, fleshy, bearded man, went into the building. The vultures of San Mateo, as he secretly called them, had flocked together for conference. Presently Martinez strolled by the office, outwardly displaying no interest in the structure but furtively seeking to catch a glimpse of the interior through a crack of the drawn shade. But in this he was unsuccessful.

Of one thing he was certain, however. His prolonged examination of the county records had revealed an old bill of sale of a ranch and several herds of cattle from one Joseph Weir to Sorenson, Vorse, Gordon and Burkhardt. He had placed his finger on the link connecting the engineer with these men, the entire four, as this old bill of sale thus recorded showed the intimate though unexpressed partnership of the men, which was common knowledge over the country; and intuition told him also that this private a.s.sembly of the quartette quickly on Sorenson's return home had its inspiration in the new manager of the dam.

Martinez determined to continue his investigations. Events might yet prove that it would have been much better for the cattleman to have given him the political nomination. Truly, it was possible. In any case, it would do no harm to have "something on" Sorenson and the others, these rulers of San Mateo. And there was the opposite side of the affair--Weir's side; so it looked as if there might be profit either way.

The four men sitting in the railed-off s.p.a.ce in the San Mateo Cattle Company's office const.i.tuted the cattle company. Moreover, they comprised the financial, political and general power of this remote section of New Mexico. In face, manner, garb, they were dissimilar.

Vorse, clothed in gray, was hawk-nosed and impa.s.sive; and though now, like his companions, wealthy beyond simple needs he nevertheless continued the operation of his saloon that had been a landmark in San Mateo for forty years. Burkhardt was rough-featured, rough-tongued, choleric, and coatless: typically the burly, uncurried, uncouth stock man, whose commonest words were oaths or curses and whose way with obstinate cattle or men was the way of the club or the fist.

Gordon was the wily, cautious, unscrupulous politician; he had represented San Mateo in the legislature for years, both during the Territorial period and since New Mexico had become a state, and was not unknown in other parts of the southwest; but he was "Judge"

only by courtesy, the t.i.tle most frequently given him, never having been admitted to the bar or having practiced, and engaged himself ostensibly in the insurance and real estate business. Like the others, his share of the large cattle, sheep and land holdings of the group made him independent. Sorenson, the last of the four and in reality the leader because of a greater breadth of vision and a natural capacity for business, was dressed in a tailored suit of greenish plaid--a man with bushy eyebrows, a long fleshy nose, predatory eyes, a heavy cat-fish mouth and a great, barrel-like body that reared two or three inches over six feet when he stood on his feet. But one thing they had in common, in addition to the gray hair of age, and that was a joint liability for the past. For years they had believed that liability extinguished through the operation of time. They had considered as closed and sealed the account of early secret, lawless acts by which they had acquired wealth and a grip on the community. They were now law-observing members of society; they controlled even if they sometimes failed to possess the goodwill of the county--and they were not men to measure position by friendships; their councils determined how much or how little other men should own and in local politics their fingers moved the puppets that served their will.

With the entrance here of the powerful group of financiers who were constructing the irrigation project they recognized the threat to their old-time supremacy. Cattle and sheep interests would succ.u.mb to farming; a swarm of new, independent settlers would arrive like locusts; and their leadership would eventually be challenged if not ended. New towns would spring up. New money would flow in to dispute their financial mastery. New leaders would arise to a.s.sail their political dominion. And against the prospect of all this they had initiated a secret warfare, endeavoring by stealth to ruin the irrigation company at the beginning and nip the danger in the bud.

Now it had been revealed all at once that they had not only a general and impersonal enemy in the form of the company, but a specific one in the form of a man, its manager. Out of nowhere he had emerged, out of thirty years' silence, a sinister figure who tapped with significant finger the book of their secret past while his eyes steadfastly demanded a reckoning. Did he know all, or nothing? Knowing, did he deliberately leave them in doubt in order to shatter their confidence?

At least one of the four had been badly shaken on learning Weir's ident.i.ty, and all now were uneasy. It was as if Fate after a long silence was about to open the sealed record.

"Perhaps you were just imagining things, Judge," Sorenson was saying.

Senator Gordon moistened his lips and tugged nervously at his gray mustache.

"No, no," he exclaimed. "Just ask Vorse. The man said his name was Weir and that he was the son of Joe Weir. Then--then----"

"Well?" Sorenson demanded, frowning at the other's visible trepidation.

"Weir added, 'And I know what happened thirty years ago in this selfsame room.' Those were his very words. Isn't that true, Vorse?"

"Yes."

"They could mean only one thing," said Gordon.

"When the Judge went out he said to me," Vorse stated, "'That was for you too.' I had my hand on my gun under the counter as he said it, ready if he made a move. He knew what I had there, but it didn't faze him. He's a better man than Joe Weir ever was, I want to remark, and different; he has nerve and a bad eye. He knows something, lay your bets on that."

"How much? How much? If we only knew how much!" Judge Gordon vouchsafed, testily.

"How would he know anything? Joe Weir didn't know, so how can this fellow know? Don't get scared at a shadow." It was the bearded, rough-tongued Burkhardt who spoke, concluding his words with a blasphemous oath.

"There's the Mexican who saw what happened--and that boy who looked in at the back door," Gordon a.s.serted. "We just caught sight of him and couldn't make out his face against the light. Then he had skipped when we ran there. We never did learn who he was."

"Do you think he remembers?" Sorenson said, scornfully. "He may be dead. He may be on the other side of the world. Just some kid who happened to drift by at the minute and look in, and there's not one chance in a million he's anywhere around these parts yet. He would have blabbed long ago to some one if he had been; don't figure him in, he's lost."

"Saurez isn't, though."

At this Vorse put in a word.

"He saw more than one killing in those days when he was roustabout for me. It was only one more to him. Probably he has forgotten it.

Anyway," Vorse ended with deadly emphasis, "he knows what would happen to him even now if he remembered it and talked. Leave him out of the calculation too."

"Then that just makes the four of us," said Burkhardt. "n.o.body else.

So this fellow Weir doesn't know a thing."

"But we can't be absolutely sure," Judge Gordon replied.

"Well, he'd need proof, wouldn't he?"

"Certainly, to bring legal action. But how do we know he hasn't even that? Look all around the question as a lawyer does; let us a.s.sume the millionth chance, for instance. Suppose that he somewhere met and became acquainted with that boy. Suppose that he learned the latter had been here at the time and saw the shooting; and heard his story.

Suppose that Weir knows this instant where he is and can produce him as a witness in court."

"I reckon in this county his testimony wouldn't count for much,"

Burkhardt, who had been sheriff, stated, with a harsh laugh.

Sorenson, however, was impressed by the Judge's reasoning, for he drummed with fingers on the desk and sat in brooding silence. So likewise sat Vorse, who had heard Weir's utterance and beheld his face.

"He knows something," he repeated, in a convinced tone. "Or he's a d.a.m.ned good bluffer."

"I pa.s.sed him here at the door this afternoon," the banker remarked.

"I turned to look at him, guessing who he was, and he had stopped and was looking at me. Cool about it too. We'll have to watch him."

"Perhaps if we just tip him off to keep his mouth shut tight, that will be enough," Burkhardt suggested. "If he knows the four of us are ready----"