George frequented the real-estate section on legitimate, if trivial, pretexts connected with Hibler’s business; demanding vacation from that legal luminary on his arrival. Pringle waxed talkative with visiting and resident cowmen, among whom exists a curious freemasonry, informal but highly effective.
Moreover, Pringle disregarded his own explicit instructions. Such cowmen as he knew well—and trusted—began to infest Juarez. Their mere orders—for he gave them no reasons—were to watch either Thorpe or Patterson if they visited the Mexican city; also any obnoxiously fat men with whom they should hold conference; and to report progress.
The four friends between them watched Thorpe in all his doings, dogged his footsteps by night and by day—passed him from one to the other like the button in the game—with such vigilance that at the end of the week they had discovered no single thing to their help.
Thorpe loitered through life in sybaritic fashion; rose late, fared sumptuously; gave a little time to the real-estate office in which he was investing partner; more to political conferences. In the afternoons he rode or motored; sometimes he dropped in to the Fire Company’s bowling alley instead, combating a certain tendency to corpulence.
For the rest there was dinner at his club; bridge with a select coterie, or perhaps the theater; occasionally, a social function. And the day usually ended with a visit to the big Turkish Baths on Franklin Street, another precaution against fatness. Nothing could be more open and aboveboard than this respectable gentleman’s walk and auto.
Patterson’s doings were much the same, save that he shunned the little entertainments where the Judge shone with a warm and mellow splendor, and ventured often into that quarter of the town that was Leo’s particular care, breaking rather more than his full quota of windows. He made also a brief trip to Silver City, on which occasion Pringle again violated his own orders by sending red-headed Joe Cowan, cowboy, of Organ, as an observer for the G. M. A. T.—to no benefit to the society.
Patterson had gone to look over a mining proposition for a client.
This unavailing search had one curious and unexpected result. Noticing many people closely, perforce, they observed that a surprising number of these had done those things that they really ought not to have done. Also, they kept on doing them; confident that no man saw them: so cunning were they. So that Ballinger gloomily avowed his intention of turning blackmailer, rather than again to appeal to what he was pleased to term the “unremitting kindness” of his family.
Only one thing had occurred so far which the most besotted optimist could interpret as even a possible confirmation of their suspicions.
One night, the fourth of their surveillance, Judge Thorpe took a late street car for Juarez, foregoing the baths. When he alighted from it, at Calle San Rafael, John Wesley Pringle also left the car on the farther side and walked smartly away.