“It’s this!  Fust, I don’t say it means much to anybody but me.  I’ve heard of these warnings afore now, ez comin’ only to folks ez hear them for themselves alone, and I reckon I kin stand it, if it’s the will o’ God.  The idea is then—­that—­Spencer Tucker—­was drownded in that boat; the idea is”—­his voice was almost lost in a hoarse whisper—­“that it was no living man that kem to me that night, but a spirit that kem out of the darkness and went back into it!  No eye saw him but mine—­no ears heard him but mine.  I reckon it weren’t intended it should.”  He paused, and passed the flap of his hat across his eyes.  “The pie, you’ll say, is agin it,” he continued in the same tone of voice,—­“the whiskey is agin it—­a few cuss words that dropped from him, accidental like, may have been agin it.  All the same they mout have been only the little signs and tokens that it was him.”

But Mrs. Baxter’s ready laugh somewhat rudely dispelled the infection of Patterson’s gloom.  “I reckon the only spirit was that which you and Spencer consumed,” she said, cheerfully.  “I don’t wonder you’re a little mixed.  Like as not you’ve misunderstood his plans.”  Patterson shook his head.  “He’ll turn up yet, alive and kicking!  Like as not, then, Poindexter knows where he is all the time.”

“Impossible!  He would have told me,” said Mrs. Tucker, quickly.

Mrs. Baxter looked at Patterson without speaking.  Patterson replied by a long lugubrious whistle.

“I don’t understand you,” said Mrs. Tucker, drawing back with cold dignity.

“You don’t?” returned Mrs. Baxter.  “Bless your innocent heart!  Why was he so keen to hunt me up at first, shadowing my friends and all that, and why has he dropped it now he knows I’m here, if he didn’t know where Spencer was?”

“I can explain that,” interrupted Mrs. Tucker, hastily, with a blush of confusion.  “That is—­I—­”

“Then mebbe you kin explain too,” broke in Patterson with gloomy significance, “why he has bought up most of Spencer’s debts himself, and perhaps you’re satisfied it isn’t to hold the whip hand of him and keep him from coming back openly.  Pr’aps you know why he’s movin’ heaven and earth to make Don Jose Santierra sell the ranch, and why the Don don’t see it all.”

“Don Jose sell Los Cuervos!  Buy it, you mean?” said Mrs. Tucker.  “I offered to sell it to him.”

Patterson arose from the chair, looked despairingly around him, passed his hand sadly across his forehead, and said:  “It’s come!  I knew it would.  It’s the warning!  It’s suthing betwixt jim-jams and doddering idjiocy.  Here I’d hev been willin’ to swear that Mrs. Baxter here told me she had sold this yer ranch nearly two years ago to Don Jose, and now you—­”

“Stop!” said Mrs. Tucker, in a voice that chilled them.

She was standing upright and rigid, as if stricken to stone.  “I command you to tell me what this means!” she said, turning only her blazing eyes upon the woman.