Put out your hands, Lone. You look
good to me with bracelets on, when you talk so willing to go to jail for
murder."
He had slipped the rifle butt to the ground, and before Lone quite
realized what he was doing Swan had a short, wicked-looking automatic
pistol in one hand and a pair of handcuffs in the other. Lone flushed,
but there was nothing to do but hold out his hands.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE SAWTOOTH SHOWS ITS HAND
In her fictitious West Lorraine had long since come to look upon
violence as a synonym for picturesqueness; murder and mystery were
inevitably an accompaniment of chaps and spurs. But when a man she had
cooked breakfast for, had talked with just a few hours ago, lay dead in
the bunk-house, she forgot that it was merely an expected incident of
Western life. She lay in her bed shaking with nervous dread, and the
shrill rasping of the crickets and tree-toads was unendurable.
After the first shock had passed a deep, fighting rage filled her, made
her long for day so that she might fight back somehow. Who was the
Sawtooth Company, that they could sweep human beings from their path so
ruthlessly and never be called to account? Not once did she doubt that
this was the doing of the Sawtooth, another carefully planned
"accident" calculated to rid the country of another man who in some
fashion had become inimical to their interests.
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