“Do you think he remembers?” Sorenson said, scornfully. “He may be dead. He may be on the other side of the world. Just some kid who happened to drift by 48 at the minute and look in, and there’s not one chance in a million he’s anywhere around these parts yet. He would have blabbed long ago to some one if he had been; don’t figure him in, he’s lost.”
“Saurez isn’t, though.”
At this Vorse put in a word.
“He saw more than one killing in those days when he was roustabout for me. It was only one more to him. Probably he has forgotten it. Anyway,” Vorse ended with deadly emphasis, “he knows what would happen to him even now if he remembered it and talked. Leave him out of the calculation too.”
“Then that just makes the four of us,” said Burkhardt. “Nobody else. So this fellow Weir doesn’t know a thing.”
“But we can’t be absolutely sure,” Judge Gordon replied.
“Well, he’d need proof, wouldn’t he?”
“Certainly, to bring legal action. But how do we know he hasn’t even that? Look all around the question as a lawyer does; let us assume the millionth chance, for instance. Suppose that he somewhere met and became acquainted with that boy. Suppose that he learned the latter had been here at the time and saw the shooting; and heard his story. Suppose that Weir knows this instant where he is and can produce him as a witness in court.”
“I reckon in this county his testimony wouldn’t count for much,” Burkhardt, who had been sheriff, stated, with a harsh laugh.
Sorenson, however, was impressed by the Judge’s reasoning, for he drummed with fingers on the desk and sat in brooding silence. So likewise sat Vorse, who had heard Weir’s utterance and beheld his face.