Just for the sake of peace and quietness I stayed that night in Grave City, and sat around next morning smoking long cigars while I made my poor brain think. There were points in Jim's letter, and facts I had picked up casual at Lordsburgh, and words of gossip dropped in the hotel; but to put them all together would have puzzled a large-sized judge. Still, by all the tracks, the signs, the signals, and the little smells, I reckoned that Mr. Ryan was mighty near reaching a crisis, and apt to break out sudden as dynamite. First, here was Sheriff Bryant with two deputies, his wife, and a medicine-man, camped down at Holy Cross. Now Bryant would scarcely take deputy-sheriffs down there to nurse a sick lady. Had Holy Cross been seized at last for Balshannon's debts? That smelt of Ryan.
Secondly, Jim had gone to heaps of trouble gathering all the breeding-stock of Holy Cross, for a party named Jabez Y. Stone to steal them convenient. Jabez Y. had once been a bar-tender in Ryan's hotel--so that smelt of Ryan, too.
Thirdly, here was poor Balshannon being held with a string round his leg at the Sepulchre saloon, by the two crookedest gamblers in Arizona, the same being Low-Lived Joe and Louisiana Pete. Once, Joe, being gaoled for killing a Mexican, Ryan had put up money for a lawyer to get him released. So if these two thugs were instructed to hold and skin the Dook, that likewise smelt strong of Ryan.
Fourthly, here was young Michael Ryan in his private car from New York, burning the rails to reach Grave City by ten o'clock this night. The smell of Ryan surely tainted the whole landscape. Now just throw back to the words of Ryan's letter which fourteen long years before he had nailed upon the door of Holy Cross:--
"The time will come when, driven from this your new home, without a roof to cover you or a crust to eat, your wife and son turned out to die in the desert, you will beg for even so much as a drink of water, and it will be thrown in your face. I shall not die until I have seen the end of your accursed house."
So this was Ryan's plan--the work of fourteen years; industrious a whole lot, and plenty treacherous, but coming surely true. He had waited until he knew the lady was mostly dead, then turned her out of Holy Cross to die in the desert. The cattle were stolen, Balshannon was tied down for slaughter, and Michael would come to see the finish at ten o'clock to-night.