"Say, Bat, do you think you'll make the morning train? It's going on nine now."
"Surest thing you know! That span of mine can stroll along mighty peart.
Once I get out on the flat, we'll burn the breeze."
"Come over here, then," said Zurich. "I want you to take some cash and send it down to the bank by express—about eight hundred; and some checks besides. I can't wait for the stage—it won't get there till to-morrow night. I've overdrawn my account, with my usual carelessness, and I want this money to get to the bank before the checks do."
Stanley went back to his little one-roomed house. He shaved, bathed, laid out his Sunday best, re-read his precious letters, and dropped off to dreamless sleep.
Between midnight and one o'clock Bat Wiley, wild-eyed and raging, burst into the barroom of the Admiral Dewey and startled with a tale of wrongs such part of wakeful Cobre as there made wassail. At the crossing of Largo Draw he had been held up at a gun's point by a single robber on horseback; Zurich's money had been taken from him, together with some seventy dollars of his own; his team had been turned loose; it had taken him nearly an hour to catch them again, so delaying the alarm by that much.
Boots and spurs; saddling of horses; Bob Holland, the deputy sheriff, was called from his bed; a swift posse galloped into the night, joined at the last moment by Mr. Dewing, who had retired early, but had been roused by the clamor.
They came to Largo Crossing at daybreak. The trail of the robber's horse led straight to Cobre, following bypaths through the mountains. The tracks showed plainly that his coming had been by these same short cuts, saving time while Bat Wiley had followed the tortuous stage road through the hills. Halfway back a heavy spur lay in the trail; some one recognized it as Stanley Mitchell's—a smith-wrought spur, painfully fashioned from a single piece of drill steel.
They came to Cobre before sunup; they found brown Awguan, dejected and sweat-streaked, standing in hip-shot weariness on the hill near his corral. In the corral Stanley's saddle lay in the sand, the blankets sweat-soaked.
Unwillingly enough, Holland woke Stan from a smiling sleep to arrest him. They searched the little room, finding the mate to the spur found on the trail, but nothing else to their purpose. But at last, bringing Stan's saddle in before locking the house, Bull Pepper noticed a bumpy appearance in the sheepskin lining, and found, between saddle skirt and saddle tree, the stolen money in full, and even the checks that Zurich had sent.
They haled Stan before the justice, who was also proprietor of the Mountain House. Waiving examination, Stanley Mitchell was held to meet the action of the Grand Jury; and in default of bond—his guilt being assured and manifest—he was committed to Tucson Jail.