Clanahan confessed, I suppose because he knew he would have to, sooner or later.
"It was a hold-up," he growled. "Th' warrant's gone out av my pocket."
Hatch's comment on this was fairly blood-curdling in its profanity. And I could see, in imagination, just how he thrust that bad jaw of his out when he whirled upon the Irishman.
"Then it's up to you to get him some other way, you blundering son of a thief!" he raged. "I don't care what you do, but if you don't make this country too hot to hold him, it's going to get too hot to hold you!" And what more he was going to say, I don't know, for at that moment a belated police patrol began pounding at the gates on the town side and wanting to know what all the shooting was about.
It was after they had all gone away, leaving the big coal yard in silence and darkness, that I got mine, good and hard. Sitting all bunched up in the grab-bucket and waiting for my chance to climb out and make a get-away, the common sense reaction came and saw what I had done. With the best intentions in the world, in trying to kill off the chance offered to the enemy by the Oregon warrant and the trumped-up charge of murder, I had merely saved the boss an arrest and a possible legal tangle and had put him in peril of his life.
XVII
The Man at the Window
Of course, the first thing I did, the morning after that adventure in the coal yard, was to tell the boss all about it, and I was just foxy enough to do it when Mr. Ripley was present. Mr. Norcross didn't say much; and, for that matter, neither did the lawyer, though he did ask the boss a question or two about the real facts in the Midland right-of-way squabble.
But I noticed, after that, that our man Tarbell was continually turning up at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of odd places, so I took it that Ripley had given him his tip, and that he was sort of body-guarding Mr. Norcross on the quiet, though I am sure the boss didn't know anything about that part of it—he was such a square fighter himself that he probably wouldn't have stood for it if he had.