“Going back for what you forgot, Jim?” asked Norton.

For a moment Galloway, staring back at him, seemed utterly speechless in the grip of his wrath.  Norton did not remember ever having seen such blazing anger in the prominent eyes.

“Between you and me, Rod Norton,” muttered Galloway at last, “I have turned a trick or two in my time.  But this job is none of my doing and if I wise up as to who put it over he’ll go under the sand or into the pen, and I’ll put him there.”

Norton laughed.

“In other words, some free-lance has made a bid to break your corner on the crime market, eh?” he jeered.  “Put one over on you without your knowledge and consent?  And without splitting two ways?  That what you mean?”

“I mean that I’d pay five hundred dollars out of my own pocket right now for the dead-wood on the man who robbed Kemble.”

“Kid Rickard is around once more; sure he didn’t do it?”

“Yes, I am.  Kid Rickard didn’t do it.”

Norton eased himself in the saddle, thoughtfully regarding Galloway.  And then, very abruptly: 

“How about your friend, del Rio?”

It was the third time that he had mentioned del Rio’s name in this connection and to the third man.  And now, but slightly different in degree only, he saw the same look in Galloway’s eyes which he had brought into Cutter’s and Kemble’s.

“Del Rio?” repeated Galloway frowningly.  “What makes you say that?”

“I’ll collect your five hundred later,” was Norton’s laughing response.  Swerving out a little as he passed, he rode on.

CHAPTER XVII

A STACK OF GOLD PIECES

John Engle rapidly came to assume the nature and proportions of a stubborn bulwark standing sturdily between Roderick Norton and the fires of criticism, which, springing from little, scattered flames were now a wide-spread blaze amply fed with the dry fuel of many fields.  Again there had been a general excitement over a crime committed, much talk, various suspicions, and, in the end, no arrest made.  Men who had stood by the sheriff until now began to lose faith in him.  They recalled how, after the fight in the Casa Blanca, he had let Galloway go and with him Antone and the Kid; their memories trailed back to the killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas and the evidence of the boots.  They began to admit, at first reluctantly, then with angry eagerness, that Norton was not the man his father had been before him, not the man they had taken him to be.  And all of this hurt Norton’s stanch friend, John Engle.  All the more that he, too, saw signs of hesitancy which he found it hard to condone.

“Let him alone,” he said many a time.  “Give him his chance and a free hand.  He knows what he is doing.”

From that point he began to make excuses, first to himself and then to others.  People were forgetting that only a short time ago the sheriff had lain many days at the point of death; that his system had been overtaxed; that not yet had his superb strength come back to him.  Wait until once more he was physically fit.