"But this killing of the Las Palmas man in
broad daylight has come pretty close to filling my mind. Who's going
to be next?" His eyes went swiftly toward the patio, taking stock of
the two figures there. Then he shrugged, went to the table for a cigar
and returned smiling to inform Virginia of life on the desert and in
the valleys beyond the mountains, of scattering attempts at reclamation
and irrigation, of how one made towns of sun-dried mud, of where the
adobe soil itself was found, drifted over with sand in the shade of the
cottonwoods.
But Mrs. Engle's sigh, while her husband spoke of black mud and straw,
testified that her thoughts still clung about those events and
possibilities which she herself had asked him to avoid; her eyes
wandered to the tall, rudely garbed figure dimly seen in the patio.
Virginia, recalling Jim Galloway as she had seen him on the stage,
heavy-bodied, narrow-hipped, masterful alike in carriage and the look
of the prominent eyes, glanced with Mrs. Engle toward Rod Norton. He
was laughing at something passing between him and Florence, and for the
moment appeared utterly boyish. Were it not for the grim reminder of
the forty-five-caliber revolver which the nature of his sworn duties
did not allow of his laying aside even upon a night like this, it would
have been easy to forget that he was all that which the one word
sheriff connotes in a land like that about San Juan.
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