“I reckon maybe yuh-all better find some woman to go on out, Miss Connolly,” Monty suggested while they breakfasted. “I can’t see why that should be necessary, Mr. Girard,” Patricia replied in her primmest office tone. “I am perfectly able to take care of myself, I should think.” “You’ll be the only woman in the country for about sixty-five or seventy miles,” Monty warned her diffidently. “Uh course there couldn’t anything happen to yuh-all--but I expect the sheriff and maybe one or two more will be down from Tonopah when we get there, and I thought maybe yuh-all might like to have some other woman along for company.” He dipped three spoons of sugar into his coffee and looked at Patricia with a sympathetic look in his eyes. “I was thinkin’ last night, Miss Connolly, that I dunno as there’s much use of your going out there at all. Yuh-all couldn’t do a thing, and it’s liable to be mighty unpleasant. When I sent that wire to yuh-all, I never thought a word about yuh-all comin’ to Johnnywater. What I wanted was to get a line on this man, Hawkins. I thought maybe yuh-all could tell me something about him.” Patricia glanced unseeingly around the insufferably hot little café. She was not conscious of the room at all. She was thinking of Gary and trying to force herself to a calmness that could speak of him without betraying her feelings. “I don’t know anything about Mr. Hawkins, other than that I arranged with him to run the ranch on shares,” she said, and the effort she was making made her voice sound very cold and impersonal. “I certainly did not know that Mr. Marshall was at Johnnywater, or I should not have sent Mr. Hawkins over. I had asked Mr. Marshall first to take charge of the ranch, and Mr. Marshall had refused, on the ground that he did not wish to give up his work in motion pictures. Are you sure that he came over here and was at Johnnywater when Mr. Hawkins arrived?” Patricia did not know it, but her voice sounded as coldly accusing as if she were a prosecuting attorney trying to make a prisoner give damaging testimony against himself. Her manner bred a slight resentment in Monty, so that he forgot his diffidence. “I hauled Gary Marshall out to Johnnywater myself, over six weeks ago,” he told her bluntly. “He hunted me up and acted like he wanted to scrap with me because he thought I’d helped to cheat yuh-all. He was going to sell the place for yuh-all if he could--and I sure approved of the idea. It ain’t any place for a lady to own. A man could go there and live like a hermit and make a bare living, but yuh-all couldn’t divide the profits and break even. I dunno as there’d _be_ any profits to divide, after a feller’d paid for his grub and clothes. “Gary saw it right away, and I was to bring him back to town in a couple of days; but I had an accident to my car so I couldn’t come in. I reckon Gary meant to write anyway and tell yuh-all where he was. But he never had a chance to send out a letter.”