Pell smoothed out the paper and read, in cramped, printed letters.
They hain’t treated me square and I’m getting even. They’re fetching it in to-night. Truckloads. You can git evidence at the Lakeside. Eleven o’clock.
That was all, no signature, nothing to indicate the identity of the writer. Evan folded the paper and thrust it into his vest pocket. He looked through the door of the composing room and frowned. The line of his mouth was straight and narrow. Eleven o’clock, at the Lakeside Hotel!... Queerly enough, the thought flashed into his mind. What drew Sheriff Churchill out of his house on the night of his disappearance?... Evan passed through the swinging gate and sat down at his table just as Carmel re-entered the room.
“Who was in?” she asked.
“Nobody,” said Evan Pell. “Just a kid asking for blotters.”
She would go to the Lakeside Hotel. It was not in her character to do otherwise. She would go, she would place herself in peril. Had the note come into her hands, he had no doubt she would have concealed it and have gone alone.... Well, she did not receive it. She would not go. That much was sure.
Carmel spoke. “There goes Abner Fownes,” she said, and, turning, he saw the well-known equipage with the coachman on the front seat and Fownes, pompous, making a public spectacle for the benefit of an admiring public, bolt upright in the rear seat.
“He’s going some place,” said Carmel. “See. He has a bag.”
“Yes,” said Pell. He remembered that Fownes had been absent from Gibeon on the night Churchill had disappeared. “Yes, he’s going some place.”
They watched the equipage until it disappeared, making the turn toward the railroad station.