He meant to take that Power of Attorney she had so naïvely placed in his hands, and work it for all there was in it. He meant to sell that gold brick of a “stock ranch” Waddell had worked off on her, and lick Waddell and the two men who had signed affidavits for him. He meant to go back, then, and give Pat her money, and tell her for the Lord’s sake to have a little sense, and put her five thousand dollars in a trust fund, where she couldn’t get hold of it for the first faker that came along and held out his hand. After that--Gary was not sure what he would do. He was still very angry with Patricia; but after he had asserted his masculine authority and proved to her that the female of our species is less intelligent than the male, it is barely possible that he might forgive the girl. CHAPTER FIVE GARY DOES A LITTLE SLEUTHING Tonopah as a mining town appealed strongly to Gary’s love of the picturesque. Tonopah is a hilly little town, with a mine in its very middle, and with narrow, crooked streets that slope steeply and take sharp turnings. Houses perched on knobs of barren, red earth, or clung precariously to steep hillsides. The courthouse, a modern, cement building with broad steps flanked by pillars, stood with aloof dignity upon a hill that made Gary puff a little in the climbing. On the courthouse steps he finished his cigarette before going inside, and stood gazing at the town below him and at the barren buttes beyond. As far as he could see, the world was a forbidding, sterile world; unfriendly, inhospitable--a miserly world guarding jealously the riches deep-hidden within its hills. When he tried to visualize range cattle roaming over those hills, Gary’s lips twisted contemptuously. He turned and went in, his footsteps clumping down the empty, echoing corridor to the office of the County Recorder. A wholesome-looking girl with hair almost the color of Patricia’s rose from before a typewriter and came forward to the counter. Her eyes widened a bit when she looked at Gary, and the color deepened a little in her cheeks. Perhaps she had seen Gary’s face on the screen and remembered it pleasantly; certainly a man like Gary Marshall walks but seldom into the Recorder’s office of any desert county seat. Gary told her very briefly what he wanted, and the County Recorder herself came forward to serve him. Very obligingly she looked up all the records pertaining to Johnnywater. Gary himself went in with her to lift the heavy record books down from their places in the vault behind the office. The County Recorder was thorough as well as obliging. Gary lifted approximately a quarter of a ton of books, and came out of the vault wiping perspiration from inside his collar and smoothing his plumage generally after the exercise. It was a warm day in Tonopah.