We will have some
trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest
mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about. We will have cheese,
perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert. We'll ride home in the
dusk and the dark."
"The King's Palace?" she asked curiously. "I never heard of such a
place. Are you making it all up?"
"Not a bit of it. It's all that's left of some of the old ruins of the
same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs. . . . Do you know
why I am bound to get Jim Galloway's tag soon or late?"
Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt
digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.
"Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other
words, because he opposes the law and you represent it."
"Because he plays the game wrong! Some more results of a long week of
nothing to do but think things out. There is just one way for a
law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it."
"You mean that a man can get away with it? Surely not for good?"
But he nodded thoughtfully at the slowly fading strata of shaded colors
splashed across the sky.
"A man can get away with it for keeps . . . if he plays the game right.
Jim Galloway isn't that man and so I'll get him.
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