Beyond the mountain and around it was a wide land with no horizons, but only the shimmering heat waves that softened all lines to vagueness and left the desert an enchanted land without beginning and without end. As I rode, my mind studied the problem created by the situation around Cottonwood Wash. There were at least three, and possibly four sides to the question. Rud Maclaren with his Bar M, Jim Pinder with his CP, and myself with the Two Bar. The fourth possibility was Morgan Park. Olga’s account of Arnold D’Arcy’s disappearance had struck a chord of memory. During ten years of my life I had been fighting in foreign wars, and there had been a military observer named D’Arcy, a Major Leo D’Arcy, who had been in China during the fighting there. It stuck in my mind that he had a brother named Arnold. It was a remote chance, yet a possibility. Why did the name upset Park? What had become of Arnold? Where did Park come from? Pinder could be faced with violence and handled with violence.
