“Fifteen thousand they claim is what the fellers got. And one of your men that runs the camera was keeping up a bluff of taking a pitcher of it all the time—that's why they got away with it. Nobody suspicioned it was anything more'n moving-pitcher acting till they found the cashier and brought him toy along about one o'clock. It was that Chavez feller that you had working for yuh, and Luis Rojas that done it—them and a couple fellers stalling outside with the camera.”
“I wonder,” hazarded Pete Lowry, who had come down and joined the group, “if that wasn't Bill Holmes with the camera? He was a lot more friendly with Ramon than he tried to let on.”
“The point is,” Luck broke in, “that they took advantage of my holdup scene to pull off the robbery. I can see how the cashier would fall for a retake like that, especially since he don't know much about picture-making. Gather up the props, boys, and let's go home. I'm going to get the rights of this thing.”
“You've got it now,” the sheriff informed him huffily. “Think I been loading you up with hot air? I was sent out to round you up—”
“Forget all that!” snapped luck. “I don't know as I enjoy having you fellows jump at the notion I'm a bank-robber—or that if I had robbed a bank I would have come right back here and gone to work. What kind of a simp do you think I am, for gosh sake? Can you see where anyone but a lunatic would go like that in broad daylight and pull off a robbery as raw as that one must have been, and not even make an attempt at a gateway? I'll gamble Applehead, here, wouldn't have fallen for a play as coarse as that was if he was sheriff yet. He'd have seen right away that the camera part was just the coarsest kind of a blind.
“My Lord! Think of grown men—officers of the law at that—being simple-minded enough to come fogging out here to me, instead of getting on the trail of the men that were seen on the spot! You say they came in a machine to the bank and you never so much as tried to trace it, or to get the license number even, I'll bet a month's salary you didn't! It was a moving-picture stall, and so you come blundering out here to the only picture company in the country, thinking, by gravy, that it was all straight goods—oh, can you beat that for a boob?” He shook back his heavy mane of gray hair and turned to his boys disgustedly.
“Pete and Tommy, you can drive the wagon back all right, can't you? We'll go on ahead and see what there is at the bottom of this yarn.”
CHAPTER X. DEPUTIES ALL
At the ranch, whither they rode in haste, Luck meant to leave his boys and go on with the sheriff to town. But the Happy Family flatly refused to be left behind. Even old Aleck Douglas—whom years and trouble had enfeebled until his very presence here with Jean and Lite was a health-seeking mission in the wonderful air of New Mexico—even old Aleck Douglas stamped his foot at Jean and declared that he was going, along to see that “the boy” got a square deal. There wouldn't be any railroading Luck to the pew for something he didn't do, he asserted with a tragic meaning that wrung the heart of Jean. It took Lite's arguments and Luck's optimism and, finally, the assurance of the sheriff that Luck was not under arrest and was in no danger of it, to keep the old man at the ranch. Also, they promised to return with all speed and not to keep supper waiting, before the two women were satisfied to let them go.