CHAPTER V“AIN’T SHE THE GAMEST LITTLE THOROUGHBRED?”
Kate galloped into the ranch plaza around which the buildings were set, slipped from her pony, and ran at once to the telephone. Bob was on a side porch mending a bridle.
“Have you heard anything from dad?” she cried through the open door.
“Nope,” he answered, hammering down a rivet.
Kate called up the hotel where Maloney was staying at Saguache, but could not get him. She tried the Del Mar, where her father and his friends always put up when in town. She asked in turn for Mackenzie, for Yesler, for Alec Flandrau.
While she waited for an answer, the girl moved nervously about the room. She could not sit down or settle herself at anything. For some instinct told her that Fendrick’s taunt was not a lie cut out of whole cloth.
The bell rang. Instantly she was at the telephone. Mackenzie was at the other end of the line.
“Oh, Uncle Mac.” She had called him uncle ever since she could remember. “What is it theyare saying about dad? Tell me it isn’t true,” she begged.
“A pack of lees, lassie.” His Scotch idiom and accent had succumbed to thirty years on the plains, but when he became excited it rose triumphant through the acquired speech of the Southwest.
“Then is he there—in Saguache, I mean.”
“No-o. He’s not in town.”
“Where is he?”
“Hoots! He’ll just have gone somewhere on business.”
He did not bluff well. Through the hearty assurance she pierced to the note of trouble in his voice.
“You’re hiding something from me, Uncle Mac. I won’t have it. You tell me the truth—the whole truth.”
In three sentences he sketched it for her, and when he had finished he knew by the sound of her voice that she was greatly frightened.
“Something has happened to him. I’m coming to town.”
“If you feel you’d rather. Take the stage in to-morrow.”
“No. I’m coming to-night. I’ll bring Bob. Save us two rooms at the hotel.”
“Better wait till to-morrow. Forty miles is a long ride, lass.”
“No, I can’t wait. Have Curly Flandrau come to the Del Mar if he’s in town—and Dick Maloney, too. That’s all. Good-by.”
She turned to her cousin, who was standing big-eyed at her elbow.
“What is it, Kate? Has anything happened to Uncle Luck?”
She swallowed a lump in her throat. “Dad’s gone, Bob. Nobody knows where. They say—the liars—that he robbed the W. & S. Express Company.”
Suddenly her face went down into her forearm on the table and sobs began to rack her body. The boy, staggered at this preposterous charge, could only lay his hand on her shoulder and beg her not to cry.
“It’ll be all right, Kate. Wait till Uncle Luck comes back. He’ll make ’em sick for talking about him.”
“But suppose he—suppose he——” She dared not complete what was in her mind, that perhaps he had been ambushed by some of his enemies and killed.
“You bet they’ll drop into a hole and pull it in after them when Uncle Luck shows up,” the boy bragged with supreme confidence.
His cousin nodded, choking down her sobs. “Of course. It—it’ll come out all right—as soon as hefinds out what they’re saying. Saddle two horses right away, Bob.”
“Sure. We’ll soon find where he is, I bet you.”
The setting sun found their journey less than half done. The brilliant rainbow afterglow of sunset faded to colder tints, and then disappeared. The purple saw-toothed range softened to a violet hue. With the coming of the moon the hard, dry desert lost detail, took on a loveliness of tone and outline that made it an idealized painting of itself. Myriads of stars were out, so that the heavens seemed sown with them as an Arizona hillside is in spring with yellow poppies.
Kate was tortured with anxiety, but the surpassing beauty that encompassed them was somehow a comfort to her. Deep within her something denied that her father could be gone out of a world so good. And if he were alive, Curly Flandrau would find him—Curly and Dick between them. Luck Cullison had plenty of good friends who would not stand by and see him wronged.
Any theory of his disappearance that accepted his guilt did not occur to her mind for an instant. The two had been very close to each other. Luck had been in the habit of saying smilingly that she was his majordomo, his right bower. Some share of his lawless temperament she inherited, enough to feel sure that this particular kind of wrongdoingwas impossible for him. He was reckless, sometimes passionate, but she did not need to reassure herself that he was scrupulously honest.
This brought her back to the only other tenable hypothesis—foul play. And from this she shrank with a quaking heart. For surely if his enemies wished to harm him they would destroy him, and this was a conclusion against which she fought desperately.
The plaza clock boomed ten strokes as they rode into Saguache. Mackenzie was waiting for them on the steps of the hotel.
“Have they—has anything been——?”
The owner of the Fiddleback shook his grizzled head. “Not yet. Didn’t you meet Curly?”
“No.”
“He rode out to come in with you, but if he didn’t meet you by ten he was to come back. You took the north road, I reckon?”
“Yes.”
His warm heart was wrung for the young woman whose fine eyes stared with dumb agony from a face that looked very white in the shining moonlight. He put an arm around her shoulders, and drew her into the hotel with cheerful talk.
“Come along, Bob. We’re going to tuck away a good supper first off. While you’re eating, I’ll tell you all there is to be told.”
Kate opened her lips to say that she was not hungry and could not possibly eat a bite, but she thought better of it. Bob had tasted nothing since noon, and of course he must be fed.
The lad fell to with an appetite grief had not dulled. His cousin could at first only pick at what was set before her. It seemed heartless to be sitting down in comfort to so good a supper while her father was in she knew not how great distress. Grief swelled in her throat, and forced back the food she was trying to eat.
Mackenzie broke off his story to remonstrate. “This won’t do at all, Kate. If you’re going to help find Luck, you’ve got to keep yourself fit. Now, you try this chicken, honey.”
“I—just can’t, Uncle Mac.”
“But you need it.”
“I know,” the girl confessed, and as she said it broke down again into soft weeping.
Mac let her have her cry out, petting her awkwardly. Presently she dried her eyes, set at her supper in a businesslike way, heard the story to an end quietly, and volunteered one heartbroken comment.
“As if fathercoulddo such a thing.”
The cattleman agreed eagerly. There were times when he was full of doubt on that point, but he was not going to let her know it.
Curly came into the room, and the girl rose to meet him. He took her little hand in his tanned, muscular one, and somehow from his grip she gathered strength. He would do all that could be done to find her father, just as he had done so much to save her brother.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said simply.
“I’m glad you’re glad,” he smiled cheerfully.
He knew she had been crying, that she was suffering cruelly, but he offered her courage rather than maudlin sympathy. Hope seemed to flow through her veins at the meeting of the eyes. Whatever a man could do for her would be done by Curly.
They talked the situation over together.
“As it looks to me, we’ve got to find out two things—first, what has become of your father, and, second, who did steal that money.”
“Now you’re talking,” Mackenzie agreed. “I always did say you had a good head, Curly.”
“I don’t see it yet, but there’s some link between the two things. I mean between the robbery and his disappearance.”
“How do you mean?” Kate asked.
“We’ll say the robbers were his enemies—some of the Soapy Stone outfit maybe. They have got him out of the way to satisfy their grudge and to make people think he did it. Unfortunately thereis evidence that makes it look as if he might have done it—what they call corroborating testimony.”
Billie Mackenzie scratched his gray poll. “Hold on, Curly. This notion of a link between the hold-up and Luck’s leaving is what the other side is tying to. Don’t we want to think different from them?”
“We do. They think he is guilty. We know he isn’t.”
“What does Sheriff Bolt think?”
Curly waved the sheriff aside. “It don’t matter what he thinks, Miss Kate. Hesayshe thinks Luck was mixed up in the hold-up. Maybe that’s what he thinks, but we don’t want to forget that Cass Fendrick made him sheriff and your father fought him to a fare-you-well.”
“Then we can’t expect any help from him.”
“Not much. He ain’t a bad fellow, Bolt ain’t. He’ll be square, but his notions are liable to be warped.”
“I’d like to talk with him,” the young woman announced.
“All right,” Mackenzie assented. “To-morrow mo’ning——”
“No, to-night, Uncle Mac.”
The cattleman looked at her in surprise. Her voice rang with decision. Her slight figure seemed compact of energy and resolution. Was this thegirl who had been in helpless tears not ten minutes before?
“I’ll see if he’s at his office. Maybe he’ll come up,” Curly said.
“No. I’ll go down to the courthouse if he’s there.”
Flandrau got Bolt on the telephone at his room. After a little grumbling he consented to meet Miss Cullison at his office.
“Bob, you must go to bed. You’re tired out,” his cousin told him.
“I ain’t, either,” he denied indignantly. “Tired nothing. I’m going with you.”
Curly caught Kate’s glance, and she left the boy to him.
“Look here, Bob. We’re at the beginning of a big job. Some of us have to keep fresh all the time. We’ll work in relays. To-night you sleep so as to be ready to-morrow.”
This way of putting it satisfied the boy. He reluctantly consented to go to bed, and was sound asleep almost as soon as his head struck the pillow.
At the office of the sheriff, Kate cut to essentials as soon as introductions were over.
“Do you think my father robbed the W. & S. Express Company, Mr. Bolt?” she asked.
Her plainness embarrassed the officer.
“Let’s took at the facts, Miss Cullison,” he beganamiably. “Then you tell me what you would think in my place. Your father needed money mighty bad. There’s no doubt at all about that. Here’s an envelope on which he had written a list of his debts. You’ll notice they run to just a little more than twenty thousand. I found this in his bedroom the day he disappeared.”
She took the paper, glanced at it mechanically, and looked at the sheriff again. “Well? Everybody wants money. Do they all steal it?”
“Turn that envelope over, Miss Cullison. Notice how he has written there half a dozen times in a row, ‘$20,000,’ and just below it twice, ‘W. & S. Ex. Co.’ Finally, the one word, ‘To-night.’”
She read it all, read it with a heart heavy as lead, and knew that there he had left in his own strong, bold handwriting convincing evidence against himself. Still, she did not doubt him in the least, but there could be no question now that he knew of the intended shipment, that absent-mindedly he had jotted down this data while he was thinking about it in connection with his own debts.
The sheriff went on tightening the chain of evidence in a voice that for all its kindness seemed to her remorseless as fate. “It turns out that Mr. Jordan of the Cattleman’s National Bank mentioned this shipment to your father that morning. Mr. Cullison was trying to raise money from him, buthe couldn’t let him have it. Every bank in the city refused him a loan. Yet next morning he paid off two thousand dollars he owed from a poker game.”
“He must have borrowed the money from some one,” she said weakly.
“That money he paid in twenty-dollar bills. The stolen express package was in twenties. You know yourself that this is a gold country. Bills ain’t so plentiful.”
The girl’s hand went to her heart. Faith in her father was a rock not to be washed away by any amount of evidence. What made her wince was the amount of circumstantial testimony falling into place so inexorably against him.
“Is that all?” she asked despairingly.
“I wish it were, Miss Cullison. But it’s not. A man came round the corner and shot at the robber as he was escaping. His hat fell off. Here it is.”
As Kate took the hat something seemed to tighten around her heart. It belonged to her father. His personality was stamped all over it. She even recognized a coffee stain on the under side of the brim. There was no need of the initials L. C. to tell her whose it had been. A wave of despair swept over her. Again she was on the verge of breaking down, but controlled herself as with a tight curb.
Bolt’s voice went on. “Next day your father disappeared,Miss Cullison. He was here in town all morning. His friends knew that suspicion was fastening on him. The inference is that he daren’t wait to have the truth come out. Mind, I don’t say he’s guilty. But it looks that way. Now, that’s my case. If you were sheriff in my place, what would you do?”
Her answer flashed back instantly. “If I knew Luck Cullison, I would be sure there was a mistake somewhere, and I would look for foul play. I would believe anything except that he was guilty—anything in the world. You know he has enemies.”
The sheriff liked her spirited defense no less because he could not agree with her. “Yes, I know that. The trouble is that these incriminating facts don’t come in the main from his enemies.”
“You say the robber had on his hat, and that somebody shot at him. Whoever it was must know the man wasn’t father.”
Gently Bolt took this last prop from her hope. “He is almost sure the man was your father.”
A spark of steel came into her dark eyes. “Who is the man?”
“His name is Fendrick.”
“Cass Fendrick?” She whipped the word at him, leaning forward in her chair rigidly with her hands clenched on the arms of it. One could haveguessed that the sound of the name had unleashed a dormant ferocity in her.
“Yes. I know he and your father aren’t friends. They have had some trouble. For that reason he was very reluctant to give your father’s name.”
The girl flamed. “Reluctant! Don’t you believe it? He hates Father like poison.” A flash of inspiration came to her. She rose, slim and tall and purposeful. “Cass Fendrick is the man you want, and he is the man I want. He robbed the express company, and he has killed my father or abducted him. I know now. Arrest him to-night.”
“I have to have evidence,” Bolt said quietly.
“I can give you a motive. Listen. Father expected to prove up yesterday on his Del Oro claim. If he had done so Cass Fendrick’s sheep would have been cut off from the water. Father had to be got out of the way not later than Wednesday, or that man would have been put out of business. He was very bitter about it. He had made threats.”
“It would take more than threats to get rid of the best fighting man in Arizona, right in the middle of the day, in the heart of the town, without a soul knowing about it.” The officer added with a smile: “I’d hate to undertake the contract, give me all the help I wanted.”
“He was trapped somehow, of course,” Curlycut in. For he was sure that in no other way could Luck Cullison have been overcome.
“If you’ll only tell me how, Flandrau,” Bolt returned.
“I don’t know how, but we’ll find out.”
“I hope so.”
Kate felt his doubt, and it was like a spark to powder.
“Fendrick is your friend. You were elected by his influence. Perhaps you want to prove that Father did this.”
“The people elected me, Miss Cullison,” answered Bolt, with grave reproach. “I haven’t any friends or any enemies when it comes to doing what I’ve sworn to do.”
“Then you ought to know Father couldn’t have done this. There is such a thing as character. Luck Cullison simplycouldn’tbe a thief.”
Mackenzie’s faith had been strengthened by the insistent loyalty of the girl. “That’s right, Nick. Let me tell you something else. Fendrick knew Luck was going to prove up on Thursday. He heard him tell us at the Round-Up Club Tuesday morning.”
The sheriff summed up. “You’ve proved Cass had interests that would be helped if Mr. Cullison were removed. But you haven’t shaken the evidence against Luck.”
“We’ve proved Cass Fendrick had to get Father out of the way on the very day he disappeared. One day later would have been too late. We’ve shown his enmity. Any evidence that rests on his word is no good. The truth isn’t in the man.”
“Maybe not, but he didn’t make this evidence.”
Kate had another inspirational flash. “He did—some of it. Somehow he got hold of father’s hat, and he manufactured a story about shooting it from the robber’s head. But to make his story stick he must admit he was on the ground at the time of the hold-up. So he must have known the robbery was going to take place. It’s as plain as old Run-A-Mile’s wart that he knew of it because he planned it himself.”
Bolt’s shrewd eyes narrowed to a smile. “You prove to me that Cass had your father’s hatbefore the hold-up, and I’ll take some stock in the story.”
“And in the meantime,” suggested Curly.
“I’ll keep right on looking for Luck Cullison, but I’ll keep an eye on Cass Fendrick, too.”
Kate took up the challenge confidently. “I’ll prove he had the hat—at least I’ll try to pretty hard. It’s the truth, and it must come out somehow.”
After he had left her at the hotel, Curly walked the streets with a sharp excitement tingling his blood. He had lived his life among men, and heknew little about women and their ways. But his imagination seized avidly upon this slim, dark girl with the fine eyes that could be both tender and ferocious, with the look of combined delicacy and strength in every line of her.
“Ain’t she the gamest little thoroughbred ever?” he chuckled to himself. “Stands the acid every crack. Think of her standing pat so game—just like she did for me that night out at the ranch. She’s the best argument Luck has got.”
CHAPTER VITWO HATS ON A RACK
One casual remark of Mackenzie had given Kate a clew. Even before she had explained it, Curly caught the point and began to dig for the truth. For though he was almost a boy, the others leaned on him with the expectation that in the absence of Maloney he would take the lead. Before they separated for the night he made Mackenzie go over every detail he could remember of the meeting between Cullison and Fendrick at the Round-Up Club. This was the last time the two men had been seen together in public, and he felt it important that he should know just what had taken place.
In the morning he and Kate had a talk with his uncle on the same subject. Not content with this, he made the whole party adjourn to the club rooms so that he might see exactly where Luck had sat and the different places the sheepman had stood from the time he entered until the poker players left.
Together Billie Mackenzie and Alec Flandrau dramatized the scene for the young people. Mac personated the sheepman, came into the room, hungup his hat, lounged over to the poker table, said his little piece as well as he could remember it, and passed into the next room. Flandrau, Senior, taking the role of Cullison, presently got up, lifted his hat from the rack, and went to the door.
With excitement trembling in her voice, the girl asked an eager question. “Were their hats side by side like that on adjoining pegs?”
Billie turned a puzzled face to his friend. “How about that, Alec?”
“That’s how I remember it.”
“Same here, my notion is.”
“Both gray hats?” Curly cut in.
His uncle looked helplessly at the other man. “Can’t be sure of that. Luck’s was gray all right.”
“Cass wore a gray hat too, seems to me,” Mackenzie contributed, scratching his gray hair.
“Did Father hesitate at all about which one to take?”
“No-o. I don’t reckon he did. He had turned to ask me if I was coming—wasn’t looking at the hats at all.”
Curly looked at Kate and nodded. “I reckon we know how Cass got Mr. Cullison’s hat. It was left on the rack.”
“How do you mean?” his uncle asked.
“Don’t you see?” the girl explained, her eyes shining with excitement. “Father took the wronghat. You know how absent-minded he is sometimes.”
Mackenzie slapped his knee. “I’ll bet a stack of blues you’ve guessed it.”
“There’s a way to make sure,” Curly said.
“I don’t get you.”
“Fendrick couldn’t wear Mr. Cullison’s hat around without the risk of someone remembering it later. What would he do then?”
Kate beamed. “Buy another at the nearest store.”
“That would be my guess. And the nearest store is the New York Emporium. We’ve got to find out whether he did buy one there on Tuesday some time after nine o’clock in the morning.”
The girl’s eyes were sparkling. She bustled with businesslike energy. “I’ll go and ask right away.”
“Don’t you think we’d better let Uncle Alec find out? He’s not so likely to stir up curiosity,” Curly suggested.
“That’s right. Let me earn my board and keep,” the owner of the Map of Texas volunteered.
Within a quarter of an hour Alec Flandrau joined the others at the hotel. He was beaming like a schoolboy who has been given an unexpected holiday.
“You kids are right at the head of the class in the detective game. Cass bought a brown hat,about 9:30 in the mo’ning. Paid five dollars for it. Wouldn’t let them deliver the old one but took it with him in a paper sack.”
With her lieutenants flanking her Kate went straight to the office of the sheriff. Bolt heard the story out and considered it thoughtfully.
“You win, Miss Cullison. You haven’t proved Fendrick caused your father’s disappearance by foul play, and you haven’t proved he committed the robbery. Point of fact I don’t think he did either one. But it certainly looks like he may possibly have manufactured evidence.”
Curly snorted scornfully. “You’re letting your friend down easy, Mr. Bolt. By his own story he was on the ground a minute after the robbery took place. How do we know he wasn’t there a minute before? For if he didn’t know the hold-up was going to occur why did he bring Mr. Cullison’s hat with him punctured so neatly with bullet holes?”
“I’ll bet a thousand dollars he is at the bottom of this whole thing,” Mackenzie added angrily.
The sheriff flushed. “You gentlemen are entitled to your opinions just as I’m entitled to mine. You haven’t even proved he took Mr. Cullison’s hat; you’ve merely showed he may have done it.”
“We’ve given you a motive and some evidence. How much more do you want?” Curly demanded.
“Hold your hawses a while, Flandrau, and lookat this thing reasonable. You’re all prejudiced for Cullison and against Fendrick. Talk about evidence! There’s ten times as much against your friend as there is against Cass.”
“Then you’ll not arrest Fendrick?”
“When you give me good reason to do it,” Bolt returned doggedly.
“That’s all right, Mr. Sheriff. Now we know where you stand,” Flandrau, Senior, said stiffly.
The harassed official mopped his face with a bandanna. “Sho! You all make me tired. I’m not Fendrick’s friend while I’m in this office any more than I’m Luck’s, But I’ve got to use my judgment, ain’t I?”
The four adjourned to meet at the Del Mar for a discussion of ways and means.
“We’ll keep a watch on Fendrick—see where he goes, who he talks to, what he does. Maybe he’ll make a break and give himself away,” Curly said hopefully.
“But my father—we must rescue him first.”
“As soon as we find where he is. Me, I’m right hopeful all’s well with him. Killing him wouldn’t help Cass any, because you and Sam would prove up on the claim. But if he could hold your father a prisoner and get him to sign a relinquishment to him he would be in a fine position.”
“But Father wouldn’t sign. He ought to know that.”
“Not through fear your father wouldn’t. But if Fendrick could get at him some way he might put down his John Hancock. With this trouble of Sam still unsettled and the Tin Cup hold-up to be pulled off he might sign.”
“If we could only have Fendrick arrested—”
“What good would that do? If he’s guilty he wouldn’t talk. And if he is holding your father somewhere in the hills it would only be serving notice that we were getting warm. No, I’m for a still hunt. Let Cass ride around and meet his partners in this deal. We’ll keep an eye on him all right.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Kate admitted with a sigh.
CHAPTER VIIANONYMOUS LETTERS
Sheriff Bolt, though a politician, was an honest man. It troubled him that Cullison’s friends believed him to be a partisan in a matter of this sort. For which reason he met more than half way Curly’s overtures. Young Flandrau was in the office of the sheriff a good deal, because he wanted to be kept informed of any new developments in the W. & S. robbery case.
It was on one of those occasions that Bolt tossed across to him a letter he had just opened.
“I’ve been getting letters from the village cut-up or from some crank, I don’t know which. Here’s a sample.”
The envelope, addressed evidently in a disguised hand, contained one sheet of paper. Upon this was lettered roughly,
“Play the Jack of Hearts.”
“Play the Jack of Hearts.”
Flandrau looked up with a suggestion of eagerness in his eyes.
“What do you reckon it means?” he asked.
“Search me. Like as not it don’t mean a thing. The others had just as much sense as that one.”
“Let’s see the others.”
“I chucked them into the waste paper basket. One came by the morning mail yesterday and one by the afternoon. I’m no mind reader, and I’ve got no time to guess fool puzzles.”
Curly observed that the waste paper basket was full. Evidently it had not been emptied for two or three days.
“Mind if I look for the others?” he asked.
Bolt waved permission. “Go to it.”
The young man emptied the basket on the floor and went over its contents carefully. He found three communications from the unknown writer. Each of them was printed by hand on a sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a scratch pad. He smoothed them out and put them side by side on the table. This was what he read:
HEARTS ARE TRUMPSWHEN IN DOUBT PLAY TRUMPSPLAY TRUMPSNOW
HEARTS ARE TRUMPS
WHEN IN DOUBT PLAY TRUMPS
PLAY TRUMPSNOW
There was only the one line to each message, and all of them were plainly in the same hand. He could make out only one thing, that someone wastrying to give the sheriff information in a guarded way.
He was still puzzling over the thing when a boy came with a special delivery letter for the sheriff. Bolt glanced at it and handed the note to Curly.
“Anotherbilly doofrom my anxious friend.”
This time the sender had been in too much of a hurry to print the words. They were written in a stiff hand by some uneducated person.
The Jack of Trumps, to-day
The Jack of Trumps, to-day
“Mind if I keep these?” Curly asked.
“Take ’em along.”
Flandrau walked out to the grandstand at the fair grounds and sat down by himself there to think out what connection, if any, these singular warnings might have with the vanishing of Cullison or the robbery of the W. & S. He wasted three precious hours without any result. Dusk was falling before he returned.
“Guess I’ll take them to my little partner and give her a whack at the puzzle,” he decided.
Curly strolled back to town along El Molino street and down Main. He had just crossed the old Spanish plaza when his absorbed gaze fell on a sign that brought him up short. In front of a cigar store stretched across the sidewalk a paintedpicture of a jack of hearts. The same name was on the window.
Fifty yards behind him was the Silver Dollar saloon, where Luck Cullison had last been seen on his way to the Del Mar one hundred and fifty yards in front of him. Somewhere within that distance of two hundred yards the owner of the Circle C had vanished from the sight of men. The evidence showed he had not reached the hotel, for a cattle buyer had been waiting there to talk with him. His testimony, as well as that of the hotel clerk, was positive.
Could this little store, the Jack of Hearts, be the central point of the mystery? In his search for information Curly had already been in it, had bought a cigar, and had stopped to talk with Mrs. Wylie, the proprietor. She was a washed-out little woman who had once been pretty. Habitually she wore a depressed, hopeless look, the air of pathetic timidity that comes to some women who have found life too hard for them. It had been easy to alarm her. His first question had evidently set her heart a-flutter, but Flandrau had reassured her cheerfully. She had protested with absurd earnestness that she had seen nothing of Mr. Cullison. A single glance had been enough to dismiss her from any possible suspicion.
Now Curly stepped in a second time. Thefrightened gaze of Mrs. Wylie fastened upon him instantly. He observed that her hand moved instinctively to her heart. Beyond question she was in fear. A flash of light clarified his mind. She was a conspirator, but an unwilling one. Possibly she might be the author of the anonymous warnings sent Bolt.
The youngvaquerosubscribed for a magazine and paid her the money. Tremblingly she filled out the receipt. He glanced at the slip and handed it back.
“Just write below the signature ‘of the Jack of Hearts,’ so that I’ll remember where I paid the money if the magazine doesn’t come,” he suggested.
She did so, and Curly put the receipt in his pocket carelessly. He sauntered leisurely to the hotel, but as soon as he could get into a telephone booth his listlessness vanished. Maloney had returned to town and he telephoned him to get Mackenzie at once and watch the Jack of Hearts in front and rear. Before he left the booth Curly had compared the writing of Mrs. Wylie with that on the sheet that had come by special delivery. The loop of the J’s, the shape of the K’s, the formation of the capital H in both cases were alike. So too was the general lack of character common to both, the peculiar hesitating drag of the letters.Beyond question the same person had written both.
Certainly Mrs. Wylie was not warning the sheriff against herself. Then against whom? He must know her antecedents, and at once. There was no time for him to mole them out himself. Calling up a local detective agency, he asked the manager to let him know within an hour or two all that could be found out about the woman without alarming her.
“Wait a moment I think we have her on file. Hold the ’phone.” The detective presently returned. “Yes. We can give you the facts. Will you come to the office for them?”
Fifteen minutes later Curly knew that Mrs. Wylie was the divorced wife of Lute Blackwell. She had come to Saguache from the mountains several years before. Soon after there had been an inconspicuous notice in theSentinelto the effect that Cora Blackwell was suing for divorce from Lute Blackwell, then a prisoner in the penitentiary at Yuma. Another news item followed a week later stating that the divorce had been granted together with the right to use her maiden name. Unobtrusively she had started her little store. Her former husband, paroled from the penitentiary a few months before the rustling episode, had at intervals made of her shop a loafing place since that time.
Curly returned to the Del Mar and sent his nameup to Miss Cullison. With Kate and Bob there was also in the room Alec Flandrau.
The girl came forward lightly to meet him with the lance-straight poise that always seemed to him to express a brave spirit ardent and unafraid.
“Have you heard something?” she asked quickly.
“Yes. Tell me, when did your father last meet Lute Blackwell so far as you know?”
“I don’t know. Not for years, I think. Why?”
The owner of the Map of Texas answered the question of his nephew. “He met him the other day. Let’s see. It was right after the big poker game. We met him downstairs here. Luck had to straighten out some notions he had got.”
“How?”
Flandrau, Senior, told the story of what had occurred in the hotel lobby.
“And you say he swore to get even?”
“That’s what he said. And he looked like he meant it too.”
“What is it? What have you found out?” Kate implored.
The young man told about the letters and Mrs. Wylie.
“We’ve got to get a move on us,” he concluded. “For if Lute Blackwell did this thing to your father it’s mighty serious for him.”
Kate was white to the lips, but in no danger ofbreaking down. “Yes, if this man is in it he would not stop at less than murder. But I don’t believe it. I know Father is alive. Cass Fendrick is the man we want. I’m sure of it.”
Curly had before seen women hard as nails, gaunt strong mountaineers as tough as hickory withes. But he had never before seen that quality dwelling in a slim girlish figure of long soft curves, never seen it in a face of dewy freshness that could melt to the tenderest pity. She was like flint, and yet she could give herself with a passionate tenderness to those she loved. He had seen animals guard their young with that same alert eager abandon. His conviction was that she would gladly die for her father if it were necessary. As he looked at her with hard unchanging eyes, his blood quickened to a fierce joy in her it had known for no other woman.
“First thing is to search the Jack of Hearts and see what’s there. Are you with me, Uncle Alec?”
“I sure am, Curly;” and he reached for his hat.
Bob too was on his feet. “I’m going. You needn’t any of you say I ain’t, for I am.”
Curly nodded. “If you’ll do as you’re told, Bob.”
“I will. Cross my heart.”
“May I come too?” Kate pleaded.
She was a strongwilled impulsive young woman, and her deference to Curly flattered him; but he shook his head none the less.
“No. You may wait in the parlor downstairs and I’ll send Bob to you with any news. There’s just a chance this may be a man’s job and we want to go to it unhampered.” He turned at the door with his warm smile. “By the way, I’ve got some news I forgot. I know where your father got the money to pay his poker debts. Mr. Jordan of the Cattlemen’s National made him a personal loan. He figured it would not hurt the bank because the three men Luck paid it to would deposit it with the bank again.”
“By George, that’s what we did, too, every last one of us,” his uncle admitted.
“Every little helps,” Kate said; and her little double nod thanked Curly.
The young man stopped a moment after the others had gone. “I’m not going to let Bob get into danger,” he promised.
“I knew you wouldn’t,” was her confident answer.
At the corner of the plaza Curly gave Bob instructions.
“You stay here and keep an eye on everyone that passes. Don’t try to stop anybody. Just size them up.”
“Ain’t I to go with you? I got a gun.”
“You’re to do as I say. What kind of a soldier would you make if you can’t obey orders? I’mrunning this. If you don’t like it trot along home.”
“Oh, I’ll stay,” agreed the crestfallen youth.
Maloney met them in front of the Jack of Hearts.
“Dick, you go with me inside. Uncle Alec, will you keep guard outside?”
“No, bub, I won’t. I knew Luck before you were walking bowlegged,” the old cattleman answered brusquely.
Curly grinned. “All right. Don’t blame me if you get shot up.”
Mrs. Wylie’s startled eyes told tales when she saw the three men. Her face was ashen.
“I’m here to play trumps, Mrs. Wylie. What secret has the Jack of Hearts got hidden from us?” young Flandrau demanded, his hard eyes fastened to her timorous ones.
“I—I—I don’t know what you mean.”
“No use. We’re here for business. Dick, you stay with her. Don’t let her leave or shout a warning.”
He passed into the back room, which was a kind of combination living room, kitchen and bedroom. A door led from the rear into a back yard littered with empty packing cases, garbage cans and waste paper. After taking a look around the yard he locked the back door noiselessly. There was no other apparent exit from the kitchen-bedroom except the one by which he and his uncle had enteredfrom the shop. But he knew the place must have a cellar, and his inspection of the yard had showed no entrance there. He drew back the Navajo rug that covered the floor and found one of the old-fashioned trap doors some cheap houses have. Into this was fitted an iron ring with which to lift it.
From the darkness below came no sound, but Curly’s imagination conceived the place as full of shining eyes glaring up at him. Any bad men down there already had the drop on them. Therefore neither Curly nor his uncle made the mistake of drawing a weapon.
“I’m coming down, boys,” young Flandrau announced in a quiet confident voice. “The place is surrounded by our friends and it won’t do you a whole lot of good to shoot me up. I’d advise you not to be too impulsive”
He descended the steps, his face like a stone wall for all the emotion it recorded. At his heels came the older man. Curly struck a match, found an electric bulb above his head, and turned the button. Instantly the darkness was driven from the cellar.
The two Flandraus were quite alone in the room. For furniture there was a table, a cot which had been slept in and not made up, and a couple of rough chairs. The place had no windows, no means of ventilation except through the trap door. Yet there were evidences to show that it had recentlybeen inhabited. Half smoked cigars littered the floor. A pack of cards lay in disorder on the table. TheSentinelwith date line of that day lay tossed in a corner.
The room told Curly this at least: There had been a prisoner here with a guard or guards. Judging by the newspaper they had been here within a few hours. The time of sending the special delivery letter made this the more probable. He had missed the men he wanted by a very little time. If he had had the gumption to understand the hints given by the letters Cullison might now be eating supper with his family at the hotel.
“Make anything out of it?” the older Flandrau asked.
“He’s been here, but they’ve taken him away. Will you cover the telephoning? Have all the ranches notified that Luck is being taken into the hills so they can picket the trails.”
“How do you know he is being taken there?”
“I don’t know. I guess. Blackwell is in it. He knows every nook of the hills. The party left here not two hours since, looks like.”
Curly put the newspaper in his pocket and led the Way back to the store.
“The birds have flown, Dick, Made their getaway through the alley late this afternoon, probably just after it got dark.” He turned to the woman.“Mrs. Wylie, murder is going to be done, I shouldn’t wonder. And you’re liable to be held guilty of it unless you tell us all you know.”
She began to weep, helplessly, but with a sort of stubbornness too. Frightened she certainly was, but some greater fear held her silent as to the secret. “I don’t know anything about it,” she repeated over and over.
“Won’t do. You’ve got to speak. A man’s life hangs on it.”
But his resolution could not break hers, incomparably stronger than she though he was. Her conscience had driven her to send veiled warnings to the sheriff. But for very fear of her life she dared not commit herself openly.
Maloney had an inspiration. He spoke in a low voice to Curly. “Let’s take her to the hotel. Miss Kate will know how to get it out of her better than we can.”
Mrs. Wylie went with them quietly enough. She was shaken with fears but still resolute not to speak. They might send her to prison. She would tell them nothing—nothing at all. For someone who had made terror the habit of her life had put the fear of death into her soul.