When she began waving Shirttail Henry at once stepped from behind the hole of a large cottonwood and returned the signal. Hastily she scribbled a message on a piece of paper and, holding it up for her aide to see, slipped it under a batten on the side of the stable. Henry waved his understanding of the pantomime, and Mary hurried back in sight of the ranch house and started walking toward it.
She had written:
This old rooster is a crook. He says there is a fierce bull in the grove where you are. He lies. He wanted to keep me away from the other corral and the buildings near it. I’ll keep him busy in the house, while you look into all the buildings and see what you can find out. That bull story convinces me that there’s something wrong. Don’t be a blundering idiot, now, and make a splatchet of everything.
Five minutes after reading the note Shirttail Henry was clinging with his knees to a rail which he had leaned against the adobe wall under the ten-inch window of Dr. Shonto’s prison.
Mary Temple contrived to spend an hour and a half in the ranch house. She fried fresh eggs for herself and made baking-powder biscuits and a cup of tea. Gus Tanburt sat in a decrepit kitchen chair and talked with her while she worked, questioning her about anything and everything of which she knew nothing at all. But Mary’s was an inventive mind, and she told him about the new schoolhouse at Glenning and spoke feelingly of the last rites solemnized over the mortal remains of one Dan Stebbins, shoemaker, as mythical as Tanburt’s bull. Didn’t he know Dan? That was strange. But, then, of course he didn’t know a great deal about Glenning. Maybe he knew the Morgan girls? No? Mabel had married the young Baptist minister who had recently come from Ohio; and Ethel Morgan was—well, perhaps the least said about Ethel the better. She had bobbed her hair, though, and he could draw his own conclusions.
When the ordeal was over Mary laid a couple of dollars on a place in the oilcloth-covered table where the oilcloth had not worn off, and thanked the old profiteer in her sweetest manner. Tanburt did not know that Mary’s sweetness was inevitably a danger signal, so, refreshed with much fictitious news, he accompanied her to the door in a more agreeable frame of mind and invited her to drop in again if she ever rode through in the future. But he was too miserable to saddle her horse for her, and bade her good-by on the porch.
Tucked under the same batten on the east side of the stable Mary read, on the reverse side of her note:
Doctor is in that little dobe the othir side off the coral. Met me a mile down the rode to the west of tanberts. I left this note before I left.
“There,” murmured Mary, “is what you call American efficiency, which I always suspected was pretty much hot air. He left the note before he left. Henry! Henry! if all of our government officials were like you!”