Sprague smiled again at the mention of the dogs.
“How far is it to Brewster?” he asked.
“About thirty miles, by the wagon road,” Maxwell guessed.
“Good; we’re safely rid of Mr. Harding and his people, and of Follansbee and his dogs, for some little time, I take it. Now we are free to do a little business on our own account. I want to know everything you can tell me about this man Murtrie; what he looked like, what he did, and all the rest.”
“It’s a sort of thankless job to backcap a dead man,” Maxwell demurred. “Just the same, Murtrie always looked to me like a hired assassin—the kind you see on the vaudeville stage, you know. He was a big, beefy fellow, with a puffy face and a bad eye.”
“Light or dark?”
“Dark; black eyes and a heavy, drooping mustache. To tell the truth, he looked as little like an expert mining engineer as anything you can imagine. Wouldn’t you say so, Tarbell?”
The sober-faced young man who had made his record running down cattle thieves in Montana nodded gravely.
“What time he put in up at the Molly Baldwin wouldn’t count for much,” was Tarbell’s comment. “Mighty near any hour o’ the day or night you could find him tryin’ out his ‘system’ at Bart Holladay’s faro game; leastways, when he wasn’t hangin’ round the railroad depot.”
“Yet you say, Maxwell, that he was sent out here by the New York mineowners to keep cases on the gold output?” questioned Sprague.