SLEUTHING
Scot was called back to Carson on official business, so that it was Hugh who entrained for Austin to join Browning on his search for evidence. In the old days of the pony express the boy rider had seen Austin a score of times. It was in the heart of a desert that stretched six hundred miles from east to west, a desert walled in by the Rockies on one side and the Sierras on the other. The town lay huddled between the sides of a cañon which ran sharply up from the Reese River valley. Houses were built everywhere and anywhere, on ground so steep that one side of a house often had a story more than the other. It was a place of dirty sprawling shacks surrounded by dry dusty plains upon which no birds or wild beasts could be seen. The note of the place was its raw crudeness. For here, half a thousand miles from San Francisco, the first wave of Pacific Coast migration had spent itself.
Yet even Austin had its social amenities—its churches, its schools, its first-class French restaurant, its theatre, and its daily paper. When Samuel Bowles of Springfield, Massachusetts, passed through the town in the middle ’sixties he found its barber shops as well equipped as those of New York and its baths as luxurious as continental ones.
Over a Chateaubriand with mushrooms, following a soup that could have been inspired only by a Gallic brain, Browning and McClintock sat at a small table in the famous French restaurant and discussed the problem before them. The lawyer had made small headway. He knew the date of William Thornton’s death. The man had fallen down a shaft while drunk two weeks after the date of the contract which the Dodsons held. He had found no evidence of any irregularity. Nobody he had met recalled a visit made by the Dodsons to town, but in the ebb and flow of the camp’s busy life they might have been here. For in the boom days hundreds of men drifted in and out each week.
Browning had worked at the court house. Hugh mixed with people at the post office and in saloons. A dozen times that day he turned the conversation upon Singlefoot Bill. He picked up a good deal of information about the habits of that eccentric character, but none of it seemed very much to the point. The first lead he struck was at the Mammoth Lager Beer Saloon, a big resort on the corner of Main and Virginia.
An old-timer had been telling a story about Thornton. After he had finished he pulled himself up and ruminated. “Doggone it, that wasn’t Singlefoot, either. It was his brother Chug.”
This was news to Hugh. “Had he a brother?”
“Sure had.” The old-timer chuckled. “Lived in cabins side by side an’ didn’t speak to each other for years. I reckon the good Lord never made two more contrary humans than Chug an’ Singlefoot.”
“Where’s Chug now?”
“He’s been daid two years.” He referred the matter to another tobacco-stained relic. “When was it Chug died, Bill?”
Bill made a stab at the date. His friend promptly and indignantly disagreed with him. They argued the matter with acrimony, but Hugh learned nothing definite from the quarrel.
He remembered that newspaper editors are encyclopædias of information and departed from the saloon, even though he had read in an advertisement that “Votaries of Bacchus, Gambrinus, Venus, or Cupid can spend an evening agreeably at the Mammoth.”
The editor made Hugh free of his files. He was not sure about the dates of the two old fellows’ deaths. One had died about three months before the other, but he could not even tell which one had passed away first.
“They were alike as two peas from the same pod,” he explained. “Both cranky, gnarled, and tough old birds. Even their names were almost identical. One was Willis Thornton and the other William Thornton.”
Hugh’s eye quickened. He had an intuition that he was on the edge of an important discovery, though he could not guess what it was. He looked through the back files till he came to the issue of August 14th of two years earlier. A short story on the back page was the one he wanted. The last sentence of it sent a pulse of excitement beating through his blood. The story read:
OBITUARY
We regret to record the death of our esteemed fellow citizen William Thornton, due to an accident which occurred Thursday night while on his way home after an evening spent down town. It appears that Mr. Thornton must have strayed from the path in the darkness of the gulch and fallen down a deserted prospect hole. His head struck the rocks below and death was probably instantaneous. His body was discovered there next morning by Jim Simpkins who works a claim near by.
Thornton was one of the first settlers at Austin and has lived here ever since. He was an eccentric character and had become an institution of the town. His brother Willis Thornton, the well-known prospector called Singlefoot Bill, died last June, it will be recalled.
Hugh read the last sentence a second and a third time.
“His brother Willis Thornton, the well-known prospector called Singlefoot Bill, died last June . . .”
Either the reporter was in error or Hugh had stumbled on a fact of prime importance, one that knocked the props out from under the whole Dodson case. For if Singlefoot Bill was Willis and not William, and if he had died in June and not in August, then he could not have relinquished his claim to the Dodsons on July 29th of the same year. The claimants must either have bought from “Chug” Thornton instead of Singlefoot, or else the paper was a forgery pure and simple. One phrase of the document stuck in Hugh’s memory. The conveyor of the property had been referred to as “William Thornton, known as Singlefoot Bill.” But surely “Chug” Thornton, before signing so important a paper, would have corrected an error so flagrant as a reference to himself as Singlefoot Bill. The fact that this mistake in identity had been allowed to stand pointed to forgery. Probably the Dodsons had learned the date of William Thornton’s death, had never heard of his brother, and had jumped to the conclusion, just as Browning and Hugh had done, that he was the old prospector who had worked Bald Knob.
All of which reasoning was based on the hypothesis that the story he had just read was true as to facts. Hugh proceeded to run it down. He looked over the June files of the paper and found the obit of Willis Thornton. At least three times in the story he was referred to as Singlefoot. It even mentioned the fact that he had prospected for years at Piodie.
From the newspaper office Hugh went to the undertaker. That gentleman was drowning his sorrows at the Mammoth, but he was one of that class of drinkers whose mind is clear only when he has had a few drinks.
“Don’t remember which was Willis and which William,” he told Hugh, “but I know I buried Singlefoot in June and Chug in August. Whyn’t you go out to the graveyard an’ look up the tombstones?”
“That’s good advice. I’ll take it.”
Hugh wandered through the bleak graveyard perched on the side of a hill across which the wind always seemed to sweep. He found the graves of the brothers, and above each a clapboard upon which had been lettered their names, cognomens, and the dates of their deaths. These, too, confirmed what he had learned from the paper and from the undertaker.
When Browning found out what Hugh had discovered he thumped the table in his room with an excited fist.
“We’ve got ’em right. We’ll spring our surprise on Dodson, trap him out of his own mouth, and throw the case out of court before it ever goes to a jury,” he cried.