Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/110

 him the same dark disquietude that had troubled him almost without cessation since the tragedy, the whisper of some far-reaching warning that the incident was not yet closed.

This feeling had been with him, cold in his heart as a sickness that would not yield to change, sunshine nor medicaments, in spite of the fact that, on the outward appearance of things, the killing of the rustler was completely erased from the minds of men. The coroner never had come to make inquest into the matter, the men in camp seldom spoke of it, and when they did so it was only casually, as of a minor event to fix something else in dispute definitely.

The rustler's body had vanished like a spirit; no wagon had come to carry it away. Barrett had slept little that first night, but he had not heard even the trampling of horses in the direction of the cedar where the body lay.

"If I was a man with money tied up in the Diamond Tail," said Fred, breaking in upon this train of disturbing thought, his voice that of a wholly disinterested man, "I wouldn't monkey around wranglin' horses away back of the line of battle, as the feller said. I wouldn't hire out to Hal Nearing in no kind of a job and let him plant me off where I'd be the most seen and the littlest heard man on the range."

"Fred, if you were a man in that fix, what would you do?" Barrett inquired, his outward manner as disinterested as the poet's own.

"I'd go down to Bonita and make a stall like I was a feller hidin' out from the law, and I'd warm up like