The sheriff nodded. “I’ve heard what Tarbell could tell me. He says the biggest part of the haul was a dead man. Is that right?”
“It seems to be. The dead man is Murtrie, who was supposed to be representing the New York owners of the Molly Baldwin mine. The report goes that he died last night, and his body was put on the train at Little Butte to be taken east to some little town in Kentucky. What’s your guess?”
“I’d guess that the whole blamed outfit was locoed—plumb locoed,” said Harding. “You couldn’t carve it out any other way, could you?”
It was Sprague who broke in with a quiet suggestion. “Try once more, Mr. Harding,” he said.
The big sheriff put his head in his hands and made the effort. When he looked up again there was the light of a new discovery in his eye.
“Say!” he exploded. “Murtrie’s the last of a string of five or six ‘watchers’ they’ve had up at that cussed hole-in-the-ground gold mine—and he’s dead. By gravy! I believe they killed him!”
Maxwell’s smile was grim.
“It seems to me we’re just about as far off as ever,” he commented; “unless you can carry it along to the body-snatching in some way. Why should they——”
“Hold on,” Harding cut in; “I wasn’t through. It’s one thing to kill a man, and another to get rid of the body so it won’t show up and get somebody hanged. Murtrie was sick; that much I know, because Doc Strader went out to the mine to see him day before yesterday. I was talking with Strader about it, and he said it looked like a case of ptomaine poisoning.”
“Well?” said Maxwell.