Again Danner shook his head.
Disconcerted, Andersen clamped his mouth shut for a moment then looked about the crowd and back to Danner. "You don't offer us much reason for trusting you."
"I didn't ask you to trust me."
"Ease up, boy," Brant whispered harshly. "Ease up."
Olie Swensen rushed up to the bottom of the steps then, his right fist upraised. "I promised Lona to stay out of this," he snarled. "But I'll put the rope around your neck myself if you don't change your tune."
"You can try," Danner said with ice in his tone. Andersen held up both hands then, heading off a new rise in tempers. "I say we wait three days. There shouldn't be any doubts by then. If Danner can't produce that train, or won't produce it, by then, we can still find him." He turned and faced the grangers. "Does anyone object?"
Nods of approval came slowly, reluctantly, but not from Olie Swensen.
"What if he decides to run out?"
Danner grinned at him without mirth. "You know better than that."
Olie flushed and turned away. The crowd began to disperse. Danner breathed easier then, for all of his unyielding talk.
"Jeff," Brant said tiredly, "if I hadn't come out when I did, would you have fired into that crowd?"
"Who knows?" Danner said. Then he pulled out a bandanna and wiped the sweat from his neck and forehead.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Time moved slowly while Danner stared at the unconscious McDaniel lying so still against the white sheets of the clinic bed. His face flushed with fever, McDaniel breathed so shallowly that Danner sometimes wondered if the strong Irish heart had stopped beating. He squirmed in the cane-bottomed chair, wanting to help his friend and knowing there was nothing he could do. Lona rocked gently in a chair on the other side of the bed, her face haggard from lack of sleep and worry. She'd said scarcely a dozen words since Danner had arrived.
"I heard how you've looked after him since they brought him in," Danner said softly. "I appreciate it, and so will Billy." At first he didn't think she had heard him, then her hand came up to her throat and her fingers touched the brooch.
"He's a good man," she said simply.
Danner could think of no suitable answer and he sat quietly as the morning sun crept farther into the room. It was time to be moving out, he thought, yet he felt a reluctance to leave with so much unsaid between Lona and himself. But she hadn't mentioned it and he didn't either.
"Does the doctor think Billy will make it?"
Lona shrugged tiredly. "We won't know until tomorrow, but it looks like he might be all right." Then she looked at him directly for the first time.
"Father told me what happened yesterday when you came back. I know you had nothing to do with—shooting Billy, and everything, but were you really in Topeka?"
"You, too?"
Color touched her cheeks briefly, then she shook her head. "I told you I knew you had nothing to do with the robbery. I'm just curious as to why you would go to Topeka."
Danner stared down at the blunt ends of his fingers.
"I remember," she probed, "some time ago you received a letter from Topeka offering you a job as special agent for a railroad there. That's why you went, wasn't it?"
Wordlessly, Danner nodded, then felt the need to say something.
"I'm thinking about it."
"But why?" she demanded. "You haven't even given the farm a fair try yet."
"Every man has to do what is right for him," Danner said.
"And working as a hired gunman is right for you?"
"There's more to it than that," he answered.
Her lips pinched in tightly, then she closed her eyes with a faint shake of her head. When she looked at him again there was a misery in her eyes that brought a feeling of shame to Danner.
"When the Colonel was alive I thought you stayed with a detestable job out of loyalty to him. But to go back to a job like that when you are free from it and have a chance at something so much better, is—" She shook her head again then looked away.
Sounds of the morning work train moving out of the yard warned Danner of the time slipping away from him, time he needed for a more vital purpose just now.
"I'll be busy for a few days," he said, rising and starting toward the door. "When I get this mess cleared up, we'll talk about it some more."
"No," she shook her head. "There's nothing more to say, unless you change your mind about the farm. I'm not leaving here, not ever."
Danner stared at her for a long moment, fighting against a rising turmoil that might make him say something he would regret. Then he nodded and turned away.
Jogging along the main street Danner was only dimly aware of the stares that sought him out. He turned north at the vacant lots separating Browder's granary from the nearest business establishments. A lean-to built along the trackside of the granary was used to protect loading of boxcars during bad weather. It wasn't long enough to hide a locomotive and thirty boxcars, even if Browder had been foolish enough to try it. Still, Danner rode up to the entrance for a look-see just the same. As he had expected, the long shed was empty.
As Danner reined away, he heard a low rumbling chuckle that could have come only from the mammoth Alec Browder. He whirled his horse and found Browder and Tuso standing just inside a loading doorway of the granary. It was difficult to tell what Browder was thinking behind the squinting eyes, but the taunting grin on the swarthy face of Tuso transmitted a clear message.
"Lose something, big man?"
Danner stared at them with an impassiveness he didn't feel.
"Oh," Tuso feigned a sudden realization, "come to think of it, I believe I did hear something about you misplacing some little old something or other. Train, wasn't it?" Then he cackled loudly, poking his elbow in the ribs of Browder. The vast belly of Browder shook with mirth as he shifted his bulk to his left leg, then back again.
Danner felt the heat spread across his face.
"If you don't find that little old choo-choo," Tuso taunted, "those sodbusters are going to make you guest of honor at a neck-stretching party."
"If I don't find it," Danner replied, "I'll tie the knot myself." Then he whirled his mount and galloped eastward along the track. He should have ignored Tuso, instead of shooting off his mouth like a schoolboy afraid of any other kind of fighting.
Gradually the humiliation subsided and he put the matter from his mind as he reached the dry creekbed where McDaniel and Gustafson had been dumped from the train after they were shot.
He examined the ground without results. Any sign that might have existed had been erased by the possemen who found the bodies. But it wasn't much of a loss, he thought. The two bodies had undoubtedly been tossed from the train. The sign couldn't have told him more than that.
It has to be somewhere between here and Spaulding, Danner told himself, gazing eastward along the tracks. In this flat country there just wasn't any place a train could be hidden, even if an improvised track could be constructed. Leading his horse, Danner moved slowly across the dry creekbed and along the tracks for about twenty feet. Then he stopped in mid-stride.
Wainright had mentioned the theft of some steel rails—and rails were useless except for tracks. Browder was cunning enough to have built a spur line for hiding the train. But that would have taken a lot more trackage than had been stolen. Wainright said two flatcars, but he didn't say how heavily loaded. It was a remote possibility, Danner knew.
Mounting, Danner rode eastward. He'd soon find out if a spur line had been built. By riding between the rails, he could scan the ground along both sides of the track. Even temporary tracks would have left some indentations in the ground.
By noon Danner reached the spur line to Crossville without spotting anything worth a second glance. He checked the rails leading south. The heavy coating of rust lay undisturbed; no train had been over the tracks for several years. In the scant shade of a few scrub trees, Danner unsaddled and let his mount roll in the dust. Then he nibbled on cold beef and biscuits. While eating, he noticed a small dust cloud far to the west. One or two riders seemed to be riding parallel to the tracks along the same course he had been following. Probably some ranchhands, he thought. The Flying Cross ranch was only a few miles to the north.