“There’s mystery here; the kind you can’t put your finger on. The kind the movies can’t feature on the screen. Until James Blaine Hawkins drove into the scene, I’d have sworn a man could live here for forty years in the wilderness like the children of Israel--or maybe it was Noah and the ark--and never meet a villain who’s out to make you either the goat or a corpse--both, maybe, if the story runs that way. “But I’ve learned something I never knew before. I’ve learned there are things a man can fight that’s worse than crooks. Dad was kind of religious, and he used to quote Bible at me. One of his favorite lines was about ‘He that is master of himself is greater than he that taketh a city.’ It sounded like the bunk to me when I was a kid. Now I kind of see what the old man was driving at. This country puts it right up to you, Pat. “So, I’m going to find out something before I leave here, Pat. I want to know who’s going to lick: Gary Marshall, or Johnnywater Cañon. It sort of dawned on me gradually that if I leave here now, I’ll leave here licked. Licked by something that’s never laid a finger on me! Scared out--like Waddell. Pat, my dear, I never could go back and face you if I had that to remember. Every time you looked at me I’d feel that you were calling me flabby souled in your heart--and I’d know I had it coming. “Of course, I don’t need to be hit with an axe in order to take a hint. I got the slap you sent me, Pat--along with James Blaine Hawkins. _You_ know I’m over here. You know it as well as you know anything. Even if I didn’t say I was coming--even though I _did_ say I wasn’t coming--you knew I came. You’d call up the studio, and Mills would tell you I was out of town on business. So you’d know; there’s nothing else could take me out. “So I got the slam you handed me, when you let the place to Hawkins for five years. You couldn’t go into court, Pat, and swear that you didn’t offer me the management of Johnnywater. The very fact that I have all the documents pertaining to the deal, plus the Power of Attorney, will prove that anywhere. Then Monty Girard knows it--a valuable witness, Monty. So I can save you from your own foolishness, and I’ll do it, young lady, if I have to fight you in court. Hawkins is not going to get his two thirds and _found_! The two hundred he grafted off you I may not be able to save. But I’ll keep the rest out of his clutches, make no mistake.