"It was a tramp. He stopped late that afternoon at my father's ranch which gives on the road and asked for a drink of water. I gave it to him and watched him go off in the direction of the trail that leads to the tules. Of course it would have been an unusual thing for him to have tried to get across them, but he might have done it and stumbled on the cache."
"Could he have—isn't it all water?" Lorry asked.
"There's a good deal of solid land and here and there planks laid across the deeper streams. There is a sort of trail if you happen to know it and a tramp might. It's part of his business to be familiar with the short cuts and easiest ways round."
"What was he like?" said Chrystie.
"A miserable looking fellow—most of them are—all brown and dusty with a straggly beard. There was one thing about him that I noticed, his voice. It was like an educated man's—a sort of echo of better days."
Aunt Ellen found this very absorbing and she and Chrystie had questions to ask. Fong's entrance for the tray prevented Lorry from joining in. As the Chinaman leaned down to take it, she whispered to him to open a window, the room was hot. Her eye, touching Mr. Mayer, had noticed that he had drawn out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead which shone with a thin beading of perspiration. No one heard the order, and Fong, after opening the window, carried the tray into the dining room and left it on the table. When Lorry turned to the others, Mark had proved to Aunt Ellen that the gentleman tramp was a recognized variety of the species, and Chrystie had taken up the thread.
"Did your people up there know anything about him? Did they think he was the man?"
"None of them saw him. After Knapp's story came out I wrote up and asked them but no one round there remembered him."
"Would you know him again if you saw him?"
"If I saw him in the same clothes I would, but"—he smiled into Chrystie's eager face—"I'm not likely to do that. If it's he, he's got twelve thousand dollars and I guess he's spent some of it on a shave and a new suit."