“Not one of them, not one,” she declared, “was ever heard of again, and if you were to examine that old root cellar on the hill, you’d find out what I say is true.”
The incident of the morning flashed across my mind, and I felt as though a piece of ice were being drawn slowly along my spine.
“How perfectly horrible!” I managed to gasp, “but it can’t be true.”
ROPING A STEER TO INSPECT BRAND
“It’s true, all right.” There was no doubting Mrs. Morton’s conviction. “There’s facts there’s no getting ’round. Jim Bohm and old Happy Dick, that used to work for him, came up here over the trail from Texas with a band of horses that Bohm and another man owned. The other fellow was with them when they started, but Bohm said he died on the way, and that’s all anyone knows about it, except that old Bohm kept all the horses.”
“Then a few years later, a young fellow that was consumptive, came out to work for them. I know he had quite a bit of money, because he stopped here once to ask John what to do with it. He hadn’t been there very long before he dropped dead, according to Jim Bohm’s story. His folks back East tried to get the money, but Bohm said the fellow owed it to him, and they couldn’t do a thing about it.”
I sat as if petrified, unable to take my eyes from Mrs. Morton’s face, as she went on and on.
“He was in with all the rustlers in the country,” she continued, “and once when a posse was hunting a man who had stole a lot of horses, Bohm tried his best to keep them from searching the place, but the Sheriff told him they would arrest him if he made any more fuss about it, so he had to keep still. When they came to the haymow, they stuck a pitchfork right into a man hidden in the hay, and old Bohm swore he didn’t know a thing about his being there. The next us heard, old Bill Law had dropped dead in the corral. I tell you”—Mrs. Morton leaned forward and shook her finger in my face—“it’s mighty funny, the way men keeps dropping dead over there; they don’t do it anywhere else. Happy Dick was the last. About a year ago he told Morton he’d stole two men rich, and now he was going to steal himself rich. But two days after he was found dead in the willows, and Bohm said that when he came upon the body, Happy Dick had been dead for hours.”
Mrs. Morton showed signs of running down for a moment, so I hastened to ask why it was that, though suspicion always pointed toward him, old Bohm had never been arrested.