‘That happens to be lucky,’ Alan told him, turning away.  ’I’m going up there now to look at some calves in French Valley.  If I happen to miss him and you see him you can tell him for me that I’m ready to talk with him any time.’

He went out in dead silence.  Many eyes followed him, many eyes which when his tall form had passed through the door came back to other eyes narrowed and thoughtful.  For Alan Howard was well known here in San Juan, and never before had a man of them seen him wearing a gun at his hip.  There were bets offered and taken before he was half-way to the stable.  His own men, hearing, were thoughtful and said nothing.  All except Bandy O’Neil, who smashed his big fist on the bar and stared angrily into the florid face of Yates and cried out loudly that Jim Courtot was a card sharp and a crook and that Jim Courtot’s friends were as Jim Courtot.  Yates for the third time shrugged his thick shoulders.  But his look was like a knife clashing with the cowboy’s.

Though it was dusk when he resaddled and Las Palmas was twenty-five miles away, Howard’s impatience hastened him on.  It appeared that Courtot had made up his mind and, further, was publishing the fact across a wide sweep of country.  Then there was no going back for him and Courtot, and like a man borne along in a swift current which offered rapids ahead, he was afire to get them behind him.  If Courtot were still in Las Palmas he would find him to-night.

But again, at the end of a tedious ride, he learned that the man he sought had come and gone.  No one knew just where, but at the one lodging-house which the little settlement possessed, it was hinted that Courtot had headed still further north, perhaps to Los Robles.  Howard went to bed that night wondering what it was that impelled the gambler to this hurried travelling across the land.  Was it something that lured and beckoned?  Was it something that drove and harassed?  His last thoughts were of the tracks he had seen by a dead calf and of the tale Sandy Weaver had told.

Early the next morning he rode out to French Valley for a look at Tony Vaca’s calves.  They proved to be about what he had expected of them, close to a hundred, of mixed breeding, but for the most part good beef-making stock in fair condition and all under a year old.  Vaca was short of pasture this year, hence, he declared, forced to sell at a bargain.  Howard nodded gravely, considered briefly, and in ten minutes bought the herd, agreeing to take them at ten per cent. less than Tony’s bargain price provided they were delivered in Desert Valley within a week.