But in spite of the dinner bell, Hervey made for the corrals instead of the house, roped and saddled the fastest pony in his string, jogged out to the eastern trail, and then sent his mount at a run into the evening haze.  After a time he drew back to a more moderate gait, but still the narrow firs shot smoothly and swiftly past him for well over half an hour until the twilight settled into darkness and the treetops moved past the horseman against a sky alive with the brighter stars of the mountains.  He reached the hills.  The trail tangled into zigzag lines, tossing up and down, dodging here and there.  And in one of these elbow turns, a team of horses loomed huge and black above him, and against the stars behind the hilltop it seemed as though the team were stepping out into the thin air.  Behind them, Lew Hervey made out the low body of the buckboard and on the seat a squat, bunched figure with head dropped so low that the sombrero seemed to rest flat on the shoulders.

Hervey raised his hand with a shout of relief:  “Hey, Jordan!”

The brakes crashed home, but the impetus of the downgrade bore the wagon to the bottom of the little slope before it came to a stop and Hervey was choked by the cloud of dust.  He fanned a clear path for his voice.

“It’s me.  Hervey.”  And he came close to the wagon.

“Well, Lew?” queried the uninterested voice of the master.

Hervey leaned a little from the saddle and peered anxiously at the “big boss.”  He counted on creating a panic with his news.  But a man past hope might very well be a man past fear.  Hopeless Oliver Jordan certainly had been since his accident, hopeless and blind.  That blindness had enabled Hervey to reap tidy sums out of his management of the ranch, and now that the coming of the sharp-eyed girl had cut off his sources of revenue he was ready to fight hard to put himself back in the saddle as unquestioned master of the Valley of the Eagles.  But he could only work on Jordan through fear and what capacity for that emotion remained in the rancher.  He struck at once.

“Jordan, have you got a gun with you?”

“Gun?  Nope.  What do I need a gun for?”

“Take this, then.  It’s my old gat.  You know it pretty near as well as I do.”

A nerveless hand accepted the heavy weapon and allowed it to sink idly upon his knee.

“How come?” drawled Jordan, and the heart of Lew Hervey sank.  This was certainly not the voice of a man liable to panic.

“You and me got a bad time coming, Jordan, when we get to the ranch.  He’s there, and he’s a devil for a fight!”

“Who?”

“Him!  You remember that fight you got into in that saloon up in Wyoming?  That night you and me was at the cross-roads saloon and you got off your feed with red-eye?”

The figure on the seat of the buckboard grew taller.

“Do I remember?  Aye, and I’ll never forget!  The one downright bad thing I’ve ever done, Hervey.  It was the infernal red-eye that made me a crazy man.  You should of let me go back and see how bad he was hurt, Lew!”