Saddle & Ride (Musaicum Vintage Western). Ernest Haycox

      THE JURY RETURNS A VERDICT

       Table of Contents

      From the high edge of Mogul to the floor of Powder Desert was a sheer drop of fourteen hundred and sixty feet; and even on the quietest day a stream of warm air from the desert boiled up the face of the rim, so that if a man stood at the break-off and tossed his hat outward it invariably sailed back to him. Clay Morgan had shown this to his daughter Janet long ago. It was a part of their ritual on the trip to town, and as soon as they reached the rim this afternoon, she reminded him of it again; whereupon he sailed his hat across the rim, caught it on the rebound, and witnessed her delighted smile. Afterwards they turned downgrade on a steep road narrowly cut against the face of the mountain.

      As they descended she began to recite lines of "Hiawatha," in preparation for a school play. Riding slightly back of her, Clay Morgan watched, her small arms gesture and her naturally sober face lighten and grow faintly dramatic. To him, it was a matter of never-ending astonishment that one nine-year-old girl's head could hold so much. Now and then when she forgot a line she would turn quite still, her lips pressed straight while she tried to remember. Usually she remembered, but sometimes she had to reach for the small book in the pocket of her overalls. At those times she would say in a disgusted voice, "Oh, fuzz," and give him a small sweet smile. "It's a kind of a long old poem, Daddy. I think people in those days talked too much."

      She wasn't much for talking. Silence was a habit she had acquired from him, and from being so much alone on the ranch. There were no other children within ten miles of the Long Seven gate. All her games were played alone, made up from her own imaginative head. Sometimes, watching her from afar, he had seen her people the ranch yard with fictitious characters and act out their parts one by one in pantomime. She rode loose and straight in the deep saddle, unconscious of the horse yet balanced to anticipate any sudden swing. Since her first talking days he had taught her this—that trouble was something for which she must always be prepared. She wore a boy's shirt and a pair of tan overalls tucked into small boots; she had black hair braided between her shoulders and gray eyes shining from a tanned face which even now foreshadowed some of her mother's lively, graphic prettiness.

      The silence and the slow way she had of judging people came from him. The vivid imagination and the growing beauty came from her mother. It was something Clay Morgan had watched for, through the years—and yet, much as he had expected it, it still was strange to see in this girl the image of a woman nine years dead, to know that the tempestuous Lila who had been his wife now reached out of the grave to remind him of the one brief and violent and miserable and beautiful year of their marriage. In the beginning she had said she loved him; she had died hating him.

      Powder Desert began at the bottom of the grade. Sand and sagebrush hummocks, built by the east wind, lay before them; around these lumpy barriers, high as a man's shoulders, meandered the deep twin ruts of the road. This September day's sun was half-down in the west and heat lay heavy on the flat; and in the near distance, on the benchland at the head of the desert, the houses of War Pass made an irregular outline. Toward this cattle town they traveled, Janet dreaming her nine-year-old dreams in sober stillness, Clay Morgan holding his clear intimations of trouble ahead.

      War Pass lay on the first rise of the Cache Mountains, facing eastward toward the spectacular desert sunrise. Behind the town, westward, the hills rose away in irregular steps and broken contours of pine-timbered passes in the distance. On north and south, rocky defiles connected with little isolated valleys. All highways led to this crossroad town. Into it came the ranchers and cattle hands and homesteaders, and the shadowy drifters of the land, seeking supplies and cheerfulness after the long loneliness of the deep hills and the dun-gray desert.

      Turning at the corner of Gentry's corral, Clay Morgan faced the length of Main Street, with its double row of angular wooden buildings and its deep golden dust. Under the courthouse locusts at the corner of Main and Stage, a large group of men idly waited; and he knew then that the trial of the rustler, Ollie Jacks, was still unfinished.

      He dismounted by the stable and permitted both horses to nose into the water trough before tying them to the rack.

      Janet said: "I am going to Ann McGarrah's, Daddy."

      She always had a quick smile for him when she mentioned Ann McGarrah's name, as though there might be some secret involved. "I think," she added, "we will eat supper there."—and watched him a moment with her observant eyes.

      "You seem pretty sure of that."

      Janet said, with complete conviction, "She always invites us to supper," and walked on beneath the street's board awnings. Morgan's glance followed her small, resolute figure and he smiled at the precise way she bowed toward Jesse Rusey, the town marshal, when she passed him. At the door of McGarrah's store she turned, waved at Morgan, and passed inside.

      Morgan remained near the stable's hitching-rack to roll up a quick smoke. But he was never a man to let his eyes be idle; thus now, while his fingers tapered off the cigarette his glance ran down the street, past the courthouse and post office and the Long Grade saloon, past the Mountain