“If he was as sick as that,” I muttered, “why did he leave Santa Fe? He must have known what it would mean to be sick here.”
“I don’t think he did. This is his first visit to the mine. He evidently knew nothing of the difficulties of the road. But he would not stop. He was determined to reach the camp, even after he had been given a sight of it from the opposite mountain. He told them that he had once crossed the Sierras in midwinter. But he wasn’t a sick man then.”
“Doctor, they don’t know who killed his wife.”
“He didn’t.”
“I know, but under such circumstances every fact bearing on the event is of immense importance. There is one which Mr. Fairbrother only can make clear. It can be said in a word—”
The grim doctor’s eye flashed angrily and I stopped.
“Were you a detective from the district attorney’s office in New York, sent on with special powers to examine him, I should still say what I am going to say now. While Mr. Fairbrother’s temperature and pulse remain where they now are, no one shall see him and no one shall talk to him save myself and his nurse.”
I turned with a sick look of disappointment toward the road up which I had so lately come. “Have I panted, sweltered, trembled, for three mortal hours on the worst trail a man ever traversed to go back with nothing for my journey? That seems to me hard lines. Where is the manager of this mine?”
The doctor pointed toward a man bending over the edge of the great hole from which, at that moment, a line of Mexicans was issuing, each with a sack on his back which he flung down before what looked like a furnace built of clay.
“That’s he. Mr. Haines, of Philadelphia. What do you want of him?”