Chapter XI
“I will advertise thee what this people shall do.”
—Balaam.
“JEFF tells us that too,” said George. “In both letters he speaks of the El Paso papers. In the letter to ‘the kids’ he says that he read every line of one of them. Knowing what we do, it is easy to see that they are brought in to him and that he expects us to communicate with him by means of personals worded for his eye alone. He is looking for them now. As he is so certain of seeing personals, it seems sure that the papers are brought in regularly to him. You know he said his Chief had all the El Paso papers sent on. And since they allow him this indulgence, it is probable and consistent that they do not otherwise ill-treat him. I suppose they are trying to extort a promise of silence from him under threat of death. But what I don’t see is why they didn’t kill him right away.”
“I understand that well enough,” said Pringle. “Jeff has talked ’em out of it! And did he give any hint about what to do?”
“That is the thing I put off till the last,” George responded. “It is the most ambiguous of all the allusions. When he twice spoke of Cassius as ‘Yond Cassius,’ when he mentioned Cæsar’s superstitions, and afterward said some of his hunches were pretty good at that, he might have been referring me to either ‘Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look’ or to the line immediately above: ‘Let me have men about me that are fat.’ I am reasonably sure that he meant the last. Because he knew that we would get this far—to the big question of what we were going to do about it. We are clear as to Thorpe’s guilt; but that isn’t going to help Jeff—or Tillotson.
“Under the circumstances it would have been imprudent for him to give his street and number; they might not have liked it——”
“By Jove!” said Leo, “don’t you see? He tells us, in so many words: ‘That’s all I know.’ He didn’t know just where he was. It wasn’t likely that he would know.”
“So he does! I hadn’t seen through that at all,” said George. “Thank you. That makes it almost a certainty that he meant ‘the men about him,’ his jailers, were fat. We have to find his jail, and our best chance is to find his jailers. To tell us to look for ‘lean and hungry’ men in this country of hard-riding, thin, slim, slender, lean, lank, scrawny men, would serve no purpose. But fat men are scarce enough to be noticeable. Besides, Patterson is a mere mountain of flesh; Thorpe himself is not actually fat, but is dangerously near it. He laid so much stress on this, coming back to it four times, that he must have meant it for a big, plain signpost for our guidance. That settles it. He has men about him that are fat. And we’d better look for them. Mr. Pringle, will you take the lines?”
“The head of the table is wherever Wes’ sits down, anyway,” remarked Beebe loyally.