Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/133

Rh journals dealing with cattle breeding and irrigation, ultimately found their way to Ghost Mountain. Quong read many of these. The Literary Digest he perused from cover to cover, gravely and methodically, and Sheridan had a feeling that Quong got more out of the consensus of world's news than he did. But again and again the question he had asked himself on the platform at Metzal depot reverted: "What the devil was Quong doing in this valley?" He seemed contented, but one could never guess at what worked back of his smooth forehead, his gemlike eyes set in their unwrinkled, hoodlike lids. After a while Sheridan gave it up, sure that the riddle would unfold itself in time.

The cowboys of the Diamond W and his own outfit had gleefully herded Hollister's lynching party into cactus thickets and ridden through to Metzal, where they had spread an account of the night's doings that caused the limping Hollisterites to be greeted with jeers and the ridicule that emphasizes defeat. Hollister had taken himself and his tarred visage to his ranch, where he sulked while the pitch wore off.

The Pioche Plainsman had got hold of the incident and its star reporter had wallowed in headlines and facetious paragraphs that referred to "Tar and Tartars" in a manner that rubbed in the lesson. Sympathy had veered to Quong. Hollister had gone too far. The voice of Law and Order was sounded grandiloquently in a Plainsman editorial and copied by the Metzal Branding Iron.

It promised well for the time when the mesa