“It’s where you won’t get it—you n’r them make-believe crooks up at the Molly Baldwin!” he rasped.
“Oho!” Sprague laughed. “So you planned it to give your side partners in this little game the double-cross, did you? It’s like you. Take them away, Archer.”
“And—and hurry back!” whispered Calmaine hoarsely. “We’ve simply got to catch Number Six, I tell you!”
Thus urged, Tarbell expedited matters with the night jailer and came running back to take his place behind the steering-wheel.
“Where now?” he asked, dropping the clutch in; and it was Calmaine who gave the direction.
“The Reservation Road east; it’s the one we came in over.”
Tarbell easily broke all the speed records, to say nothing of speed limits, in the race to the eastward over the dry mesa country. Twenty-odd miles from town they met the sheriff’s party, and there was a momentary halt for explanations. “Camp down right where you are, and we’ll go back pretty soon and send a bunch of autos out after you,” was Maxwell’s word of encouragement; and then the big car sped on its way toward Cromarty Gulch.
Calmaine seemed to have preserved his sense of locality marvellously. A few hundred yards short of the spot at the gulch head where Follansbee’s dogs had begun their aimless circlings, he told Tarbell to pull up.
“They are right along here, somewhere,” he said, getting out to hobble painfully ahead of the others when Tarbell took off a side-lamp to serve for a lantern. “They had me blindfolded, at first, and I didn’t know what they were trying to do with me. When they chucked me into the auto, I tried to make a get-away. While they were knocking me silly again, I managed to get the papers out of my pocket and fire them into the sagebrush. It was right along here, somewhere.”
It was Sprague who discovered the thick packet upon which so much depended. It was lying cleverly chance-hidden under a clump of the greasewood bushes. “Found!” he announced. And then he gave the young chief clerk his due meed of commendation. “You’re a young man to bet on, Mr. Calmaine. What we’ve been able to do, thus far, wouldn’t amount to much if you hadn’t kept your head.” Then he turned quickly to the superintendent. “How do we stand for time, now, Maxwell?”