She was frightened. How it came about, by what process of mental cross-reference, she could not have said, but the one thing obtruding upon her consciousness was the story of the disappearance of Sheriff Churchill! Had he come upon such a hoard? Had his discovery become known to the malefactors? Did that, perhaps, explain his inexplicable absence?
Carmel’s impulse was to run, to absent herself from that spot with all possible celerity. She started, halted, returned. There could be no danger now, she argued with herself, and there might be some clew, something indicative of the identity of the men she saw in the car. If there were, it was her duty as proprietor of the Free Press to come into possession of that information.
Fortune was with her. In the interstices of the bottles her groping hand came upon something small and hard. She held it in the moonlight. It was a match box made from a brass shotgun shell.... Without pausing to examine it, she slipped it securely into her waist, then—and her reason for doing so was not plain to her—she helped herself to a bottle of liquor, wrapped it in the light sweater she carried, and turned her face toward Gibeon.
CHAPTER X
CARMEL went directly to the room in the hotel which she still occupied pending the discovery of a permanent boarding place. She locked the door carefully and closed the transom. Then with a queer feeling of mingled curiosity and the exultation of a newspaper woman, she placed side by side on her dresser the bottle of liquor she had abstracted from the cache and the match box made from a brass shotgun shell.
She sat down on the bed to regard them and to ask them questions, but found them singularly uncommunicative. Beyond the meagerest replies she could have nothing of them. The bottle seemed sullen, dour, as became a bottle of Scotch whisky. In the most ungracious manner it told Carmel its name and the name of its distillers and its age.... The match box refused to make any answers whatever, being, she judged, of New England descent, and therefore more closed mouth than even the Scotch. The bottle squatted and glowered dully. It wore an air of apprehension, and patently was on its guard. The brass match box, brought to a fine polish by long travel in an active trousers pocket, was more jaunty about it, having a dry, New England humor of its own, recognizable as such. The identifying quality of New England humor is that you are always a little in doubt as to whether it is intended to be humor.
The conversation was one-sided and not illuminating.
“Who brought you over the line?” Carmel asked.
The bottle hunched its shoulders and said nothing, but the match box answered in the dialect of the country, “I fetched him—for comp’ny. A feller gits dry sleepin’ out in the woods.”
“Who made you, anyhow?” Carmel asked of the match box.