Some nine or ten months after the inquest Young Pete disappeared.  No one knew where he had gone, and eventually he was more or less forgotten by the folk of Concho.  But two men never forgot him—­the storekeeper and the sheriff.  One of them hoped that the boy might come back some day.  He had grown fond of Pete.  The other hoped that he would not come back.

Meanwhile the T-Bar-T herds grazed over Annersley’s homestead.  The fence had been torn down, cattle wallowed in the mud of the water-hole, and drifted about the place until little remained as evidence of the old man’s patient toil save the cabin.  That Young Pete should again return to the cabin and there unexpectedly meet Gary was undreamed of as a possibility by either of them; yet fate had planned this very thing—­“otherwise,” argues the Fatalist, “how could it have happened?”

CHAPTER V

A CHANGE OF BASE

To say that Young Pete had any definite plan when he left Concho and took up with an old Mexican sheep-herder would be stretching the possibilities.  And Pete Annersley’s history will have to speak for itself as illustrative of a plan from which he could not have departed any more than he could have originated and followed to its final ultimatum.

Life with the storekeeper had been tame.  Pete had no horse; and the sheriff, taking him at his word, had refused to give up either one of the rifles unless Pete would declare which one he had used that fateful night of the raid.  And Pete would not do that.  He felt that somehow he had been cheated.  Even the storekeeper Roth discouraged him from using fire-arms, fearing that the boy might some day “cut loose” at somebody without word or warning.  Pete was well fed and did not have to work hard, yet his ideas of what constituted a living were far removed from the conventions of Concho.  He wanted to ride, to hunt, to drive team, to work in the open with lots of elbow-room and under a wide sky.  His one solace while in the store was the array of rifles and six-guns which he almost reverenced for their suggestive potency.  They represented power, and the only law that he believed in.

Some time after Pete had disappeared, the store-keeper, going over his stock, missed a heavy-caliber six-shooter.  He wondered if the boy had taken it.  Both did not care so much for the loss of the gun as for the fact that Pete might have stolen it.  Later Roth discovered a crudely printed slip of paper among the trinkets in the showcase.  “I took a gun and cartriges for my wagges.  You never giv me Wages.”  Which was true enough, the storekeeper figuring that Pete’s board and lodging were just about offset by his services.  In paying Pete a dollar a week, Annersley had established a precedent which involved Young Pete’s pride as a wage-earner.  In making Pete feel that he was really worth more than his board and lodging,