Why, it's the most pitiful thing in the world to see a man
like him lose his grip."
"He is not quite himself," she admitted slowly. "He is more nervous,
inclined to be short and irritable, than he used to be. You may be
right; or it may be simply that his continued failure to stop these
crimes is wearing him down. I'll be glad to watch him, to talk with
him if he will listen to me."
But first she forced herself to what seemed a casual chat with Patten,
finding him loitering upon the hotel veranda. She suggested to him
that Norton was beginning to show the strain, that he looked haggard
under it, and wondered if he had quite recovered from his recent
illness?
Patten, after his pompous way, leaned back in his chair, his thumbs in
his armholes, his manner that of a most high judge.
"He's as well as I am," he announced positively. "Thin, to be sure,
just from being laid up those ten days. And from a lot of hard riding
and worry. That's all."
Out of Patten's vest-pocket peeped a lead-pencil. Curiously enough, it
carried her mind back to Patten's incompetence. For it suggested the
fountain pen which of old occupied the pencil's place and which the
sheriff had taken in his haste to secrete a bit of paper with Patten's
scrawl upon it. She wondered again just what had been on that paper,
and if it were meant to help Norton prove that Patten had no right to
the M.
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