Of Roderick Norton San Juan saw little through these weeks.  He came now and then, twice ate with Virginia and Elmer at Struve’s, talked seriously with John Engle, teased Florrie, and went away upon the business which called him elsewhere.  Upon one of these visits he told Virginia that Brocky Lane was “on the mend” and would be as good as new in a month; no other reference was made to her ride with him.

But through his visits to San Juan, brief and few though they were, Roderick Norton was enabled to assure himself with his own eyes that Kid Rickard was still to be found here if required, that Antone, as usual, was behind the Casa Blanca bar; that Jim Galloway was biding his time with no outward show of growing restless or impatient.  Tom Cutter, Norton’s San Juan deputy, was a man to keep both eyes open, and yet there were times when the sheriff was not content with another man’s vision.

Nor did the other towns of the county, scattered widely across the desert, beyond the mountains and throughout the little valleys, see much more of him.  If a man wished word with Rod Norton these days his best hope of finding him lay in going out to el Rancho de las Flores.

It was Norton’s ranch, having been Billy Norton’s before him, one of the choice spots of the county bordering Las Cruces Rancho where Brocky Lane was manager and foreman.  Beyond the San Juan mountains it lay across the head of one of the most fertile of the neighboring valleys, the Big Water Creek giving it its greenness, its value, and the basis for its name.  Here for days at a time the sheriff could in part lay aside the cares of his office, take the reins out of his hired foreman’s hands, ride among his cattle and horses, and dream such dreams as came to him.

“One of these days I’ll get you, Jim Galloway,” he had grown into the habit of musing.  “Then they can look for another sheriff and I can do what I want to do.”

And his desire had grown very clearly defined to him; it was the old longing of a man who comes into a wilderness such as this, the longing to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before his coming.  With his water rights a man might work modern magic; far back in the hills he had found the natural site for his storage dams; slightly lower in a nest of hills there would be some day a pygmy lake whose seductive beauty to him who dwells on desert lands calls like the soft beauty of a woman; upon a knoll where now was nothing there would come to be a comfortable, roomy, hospitable ranch-house to displace forever the shacks which housed the men now farther down the slopes; and everywhere, because there was water aplenty, would there be roses and grape-vines and orange-trees.  All this when he should get Jim Galloway.

From almost any knoll upon the Rancho de las Flores he could see the crests of Mt.  Temple lifted in clear-cut lines against the sky.  If he rode with Gaucho, his foreman, among the yearlings, he saw Mt.  Temple; if he rode the fifty miles to San Juan he saw the same peaks from the other side.  And a hundred times he looked up at them with eyes which were at once impatient and stern; he began to grow angry with Galloway for so long postponing the final issue.