CHAPTER XXIV
A little after daylight Bob was in El Centro. Jim Crill, always an early riser, was on the porch reading the morning paper.
"Come and have breakfast with me," Bob called from the machine. "Got some things to talk over."
He handed Crill the letter from the water company. Not a muscle in the old gentleman's face changed as he read, but two spots of red showed at the points of his sharp cheekbones.
"If it was your own money in that crop, what would you do?" asked Jim Crill, shortly.
"I'd fight him to hell and back." Bob's eyes smoldered.
"Then fight him to hell and back," said the old man, shortly. "And if you don't get back, I'll put up a tombstone for you.
"I've believed all along," said Jim Crill, "that Reedy Jenkins is a rascal. But," he lifted his left eyebrow significantly, "womenfolks don't always see things as we do. Anyway, my trust was in cotton—it is honest—and sooner or later I'll get his cotton. He's got to bring it across the line to sell it.
"I've taken up all the other liens on that cotton," Crill continued, "so there'll be no conflicting claims. I've got $215,000 against those eight thousand bales."
He took a bill book from his hip pocket, and removed some papers.
"I was coming over to see you this morning. Been called away. Trouble in our Texas oil field. Main gusher stopped. May be a pauper instead of a millionaire. Would have got out of this damned heat before now if I hadn't wanted to keep an eye on Jenkins.
"Now I'm going to turn these bills over to you for collection. Get $215,000 with 10 per cent. interest, and half his cotton seed."
Bob's eyes were straight ahead on the road as he drove back to Calexico; his hands held the wheel with a steady grip, but his mind was neither on the road nor on the machine.
"Well," he smiled to himself, grimly, "at any rate, I'm accumulating a good deal of business to transact with Reedy Jenkins. I suppose first move is a personal interview with him."
Bob stopped the machine in the side street and went up the outside stairway of the red brick building, with purpose in his steps. But the door of the office was closed, a notice tacked on it. Bob stepped forward and read it eagerly:
"Mr. Jenkins' office is temporarily removed to the main building of the Mexican Cotton Ginning Co."
"And so," said Bob as he went down the stairs, "Reedy has moved across the line." That was puzzling, and not at all reassuring.
Rogeen did not go to the cotton gin to see Reedy. He wanted first to find out what the move meant. For two days he was on the road eighteen hours a day, most of the time on the Mexican side, gathering up the threads of Jenkins' plot. The other ranchers by this time had all received their notices, and there was murder in some of their eyes. But most of them were Americans, the rest Chinamen, and neither wanted any trouble on that side.
"Jenkins has a stand-in, damn him," said Black Ben, one of the ranchers. "I'd like to plug him, but I don't want to get into a Mexican jail."
The second evening he met Noah Ezekiel at the entrance of the Red Owl. Bob had instructed Noah and Lou Wing to continue the work in the cotton fields exactly as though nothing impended.
"I was just lookin' for you," said Noah a little sheepishly.
"All right," responded Bob. "You've found me. What is on your mind?"
"Let us go a little apart from these sons of Belial," said Noah, sauntering past the Owl into the shadows.
"I picked up a fellow down by the Red Butte today," began Noah, "that had been on one of these here walkin' tours—the kind you take when your money gives out. After he'd stuffed himself with pottage and Chinese greens, and fried bacon, and a few other things round the camp, he got right talkative. He says they've broke a good road through the sand straight from Red Butte to the head of the Gulf of California. And that there is a little ship down there from Guaymas lying round waiting for something to happen."
"Noah"—Bob gripped Ezekiel's arm—"I've been working on that very theory. Your news clinches it. Reedy is never going to take that cotton across the American line. He is planning to shoot it down across that eighty-five miles of desert to the Gulf on motor trucks, ship it to Guaymas, and sell it there to an exporter. He is not even going to pay poor old Ah Sing for picking it; and as a final get-away stake he is trying to hold us up for $150,000 on the water. He has moved across the line for safety, and never intends to move back."
"He won't need to," said Noah Ezekiel. "He is due to get away with about half a million. But what do we care?" Noah shook his head solemnly. "As my dad used to say, 'Virtue is its own reward.' That ought to comfort you, Brother Rogeen, when you are working out that $78,000 of debts at forty dollars a month."