had visualized the table with its couple of bottles, a
withering rose, a scrap of note-paper, a fountain pen. The pen . . .
it was Patten's . . . had evidently leaked and had been wiped
carelessly upon the sheet of paper, left lying with the paper half
wrapped around it. She had noted carelessly a few scrawled words in
Patten's slovenly hand. And she knew that it had been removed while
she turned her back, removed by a hand which, in its haste, had slipped
the pen with it under the pillow.

She went to sleep incensed with herself that she gave the matter
another thought. But she kept asking herself what it was that Patten
had written that Roderick Norton did not want her to read.

CHAPTER XIV

A FREE MAN

"I am a free man, if you please." The sheriff stood in the hotel
doorway, looking down upon her as she sat in her favorite veranda
chair. "I have given my keeper his fee and sent him away. May I watch
you while you read?"

Virginia closed her book upon her knee and gave him a smile by way of
welcome. He looked unusually tall as he stood in the broad, low
entrance; his ten days of sickness and inactivity had made him gaunt
and haggard.

"I shouldn't be reading in this light, anyway," she said. "I hadn't
noticed that the sun was down. It is good to be what you call free
again, isn't it?"

He laughed softly, put back his head, filled his lungs. Then he came
on to her and stood leaning against the wall, his hat cocked to one
side to hide the bandage.

"The world is good," he announced with gay positiveness. "Especially
when you've been away from it for a spell and weren't quite sure what
was next. And especially, too, when you've had time to think. Did you
ever take off a week and just do nothing but think?"

"One doesn't have time for that sort of thing as a rule," she admitted.
"There's a chair standing empty if you care to let me in on your
deductions."

"I don't want to sit down or lie down until I'm ready to drop," he
grinned down at her. "A bed makes me sick at my stomach and a chair is
pretty nearly as bad. I'd like almighty well to get a horse between my
knees . . . and _ride_! Suppose I'd fall to pieces if I tried it
right now?"

"Sure of it. And not so sure that you haven't discharged your keeper
prematurely. You mustn't think of such things."

"There you go. Forbidding me to think again! . . . Believe I will sit
down; would you believe that a full-grown man like me coul