Page:The Trail Rider (1924).pdf/354

 look what he'd have come into! A hotel, and a good bed to stretch in, and meals at all hours and money coming in at doors and windows on every wind. It was a shame the way things ran in this world. What fatal prearrangement had fixed their conjunction in Cottonwood at that hour? That was what puzzled Smith and, because it puzzled him, threw him into a deep and dark resentfulness.

There he had come to Cottonwood to hold up Henry Stott at close range, and had found the tent boarding-house that Malvina had started with hardened into a regular hotel, like some kind of a bug that grows a shell in the summer sun. First, this Texas had beaten him out of the hotel, with the insignificant assistance of the despicable barber, and now he had beaten him out of Stott.

Fool enough in his own time, Zeb reflected, he had owned to Hartwell and that little Indian, that he had seen Stott murder McCoy and had been a pensioner of silence ever since. But that little Indian knew it all the time, and knew more, so much more that old Zeb grew cold in a sweat when he considered how much. But the little Indian was dead; he couldn't talk. If Hartwell was out of there also, Zeb believed he could run the barber out of town and take his place again with his feet under Malvina's table.

Zeb hadn't followed events very closely in Cot-