“Why, you don’t even know his name, man! Didn’t him and that big-eared Jasper with the chop-suey face hold up the stage? And then spend the money fer mules an’ tools, and have the nerve to come right out here with ’em. Why——”
“Just a moment again, please. Doesn’t it strike you that both Falcon the Flunky and Halfaman Daisy are far too shrewd to do such a stupid thing as you have suggested?
“Put yourself in their shoes, Mr. Canby. If you had stolen fourteen thousand dollars’ worth of gold from the stage, and killed the driver, would you buy mules and harness and wheelers and return to your job on the desert? It strikes me as a bit ridiculous.”
“Shrewd! Yes! That’s jest the point. Them two knew they’d likely be caught on the inside. A man with saddle-pocket ears like that fella Daisy’s got couldn’t get away from the constable down to Opaco. And he can’t stop a dog fight! So they was jest clever enough to fog it right back here; and they says to themselves: ‘We’ll go back and go to work again, and nobody’ll ever suspicion us then.’”
“And the mules and equipment?”
“Well”—Squawtooth grew hesitant—“they’d think up some way to explain that. How did that boy Daisy explain it, anyway? I never heard.”
“He said that Falcon the Flunky had loaned him the money to buy them—six thousand seven hundred dollars—and that he drew the amount from a Los Angeles bank.”
“A likely yarn! A flunky drawin’ that amount from the bank! And how ’bout the pink necktie?”
“Daisy admitted it to be his. Said he’d used it as the finding of it indicated. Said he and The Falcon had been in the mountains looking for mules on pasture there, and had got lost and eventually given up the search for them.”
“Oh, say! And you swallowed that, Hunt!”