“In due course,” he mused, “the fourth stage will arrive and I can be doing something besides talk, can’t I?  Now let me tell you about the King’s Palace.”

“You begin well.”

“The King’s Palace is where we are going on our first outing.  That was decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M.  You and I and, if you like, Florrie and your kid brother.  We’ll ride out there in the very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone.  We’ll lunch and loaf there all day.  For lunch we will have bacon and coffee, cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms.  We will have some trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about.  We will have cheese, perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert.  We’ll ride home in the dusk and the dark.”

“The King’s Palace?” she asked curiously.  “I never heard of such a place.  Are you making it all up?”

“Not a bit of it.  It’s all that’s left of some of the old ruins of the same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs. . . .  Do you know why I am bound to get Jim Galloway’s tag soon or late?”

Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.

“Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other words, because he opposes the law and you represent it.”

“Because he plays the game wrong!  Some more results of a long week of nothing to do but think things out.  There is just one way for a law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it.”

“You mean that a man can get away with it?  Surely not for good?”

But he nodded thoughtfully at the slowly fading strata of shaded colors splashed across the sky.

“A man can get away with it for keeps . . . if he plays the game right.  Jim Galloway isn’t that man and so I’ll get him.  He has ignored the first necessary principle, which is the lone hand.”

“You mean he takes men into his confidence?”

“And he goes on and ignores the second necessary principle; a man must stop short of murder.  If he turns gangman and killer, he ties his own rope around his neck.  If a man like Galloway, a man with brains, power, without fear, without scruple, should decide to loot this corner of the world or any other corner, and set about it right, playing the lone hand invariably, he would be a man I couldn’t bring in in a thousand years.  But Galloway has slipped up; he has too many Moragas and Antones and Vidals at his heels; he has been the cause, directly or indirectly, of too many killings. . . .  A theft will be forgotten in time, the hue and cry die down; spilled blood cries to heaven after ten years.”

“Galloway is back in San Juan.”

“I know.  I wanted him back.  I wanted him free and unhampered.  He’ll be bolder than ever now, won’t he, if this case is dropped?  He’s come out a little into the open already, he’ll be tempted out a little farther.  There’ll be more of his work soon, a robbery here or there, and he will grow so sure of himself that he’ll get careless.  Then I’ll get him.”