The man had made a tour of his grounds, keeping
rather close to the house, and now mounted the steps with no effort at
silence, slammed the door and dropped the bars into place. It was as
though he had flung them angrily into their sockets. Thornton went out
of the yard and to his waiting horse.
"She says to go away, to leave her there alone with Pollard," he
muttered dully. "And something's up. She said he'd kill her if he knew
that she was talking to me..."
He hesitated, his horse's tie rope in his hand, of half a mind to go
back, to force his way into Henry Pollard's house, to demand to know
what was wrong, to take the girl away if there were real danger to her.
But then the urgent pleading in her voice came back to him, her
insistence that he go, that with him gone there would no longer be any
danger for her. Slowly, regretfully, he swung into the saddle. He had
made up his mind. He would obey her at least in part, he would go where
he could read the paper she had given him, and then perhaps he would
understand.
"Any way," he said under his breath, "she's a real girl for you."
He rode swiftly the five hundred yards through the dark street which ran
as nearly parallel with the main street as two such crooked streets
could approximate parallelism, until he was behind the Here's How
Saloon.
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