by Brand, Max
"And this was what turned you loose as a criminal—you thought the girl had cut loose from you. Otherwise to this day you'd have been trying to get away across the mountains and be a good, quiet member of society. But you thought the girl had cut loose from you, and it hurt you. Man-killer? Bah! You're simply lovesick, my boy!"
"Talk slow," whispered Andrew. "My—my head's whirling."
"It'll whirl more, pretty soon. Andy, do you know that the girl never married Charles Merchant?"
There was a wild yell; Andrew was stopped in mid-air by a rifle thrust into his stomach.
"She broke off her engagement. She came to me because she knew I was running the manhunt. She begged me to let you have a chance. She tried to buy me. She told me everything that had gone between you. Andy, she put her head on my desk and cried while she was begging for you!"
"Stop!" whispered Andrew.
"But I wouldn't lay off your trail, Andy. Why? Because I'm as proud as a devil. I'd started to get you and I'd lost Gray Peter trying. And even after you saved me from Allister's men I was still figuring how I could get you. And then, little by little, I saw that the girl had seen the truth. You weren't really a crook. You weren't really a man-killer. You were simply a kid that turned into a man in a day—and turned into a free man! You were too strong for the law.
"Now, Andrew, here's my point: As long as you stay here in the mountain desert you've no chance. You'll be among men who know you. Even if the governor pardons you—as he might do if a certain deputy marshal were to start pulling strings—you'd run some day into a man who had an old grudge against you, and there'd be another explosion. Because there's nitroglycerin inside you, son!
"Well, the thing for you to do is to get where men don't wear guns. The thing for you to do is to find a girl you love a lot more than you do your freedom, even. If that's possible—"
"Where is she?" broke in Andy. "Hal, for pity's sake, tell me where she is!"
"I've got her address all written out. She forgot nothing. She left it with me, she said, so she could keep in touch with me."
"It's no good," said Andy suddenly. "I could never get through the mountains. People know me too well. They know Sally too well."
"Of course they do. So you're not going to go with Sally. You're not going to ride a horse. You're going in another way. Everybody's seen your picture. But who'd recognize the dashing young man-killer, the original wild Andrew Lanning, in the shape of a greasy, dirty tramp, with a ten-days-old beard on his face, with a dirty felt hat pulled over one eye, and riding the brake beams on the way East? And before you got off the beams, Andrew, the governor of this State will have signed a pardon for you. Well, lad, what do you say?"
But Andrew, walking like one dazed, had crossed the room slowly. The marshal saw him go across to the place where Sally stood; she met him halfway, and, in her impudent way, tipped his hat half off his head with a toss of her nose. He put his arm around her neck and they walked slowly off together.
"Well," said Hal Dozier faintly, "what can you do with a man who don't know how to choose between a horse and a girl?"
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