Murray motioned Thady Shea into the front seat, and took the battered little suitcase to shove it into the rear of the car. An ejaculation almost escaped his lips as he felt its weight. It was heavy, tremendously heavy!
“Ore, likely,” he muttered. “I bet he don’t walk thirty mile with that!”
Thady Shea and Fred Ross parted with a last handshake. Each of them had probed deep into the other man; each of them had found the other strangely dissimilar, yet strangely attuned in spirit to himself; each of them had found the other to be a man. Their handshake was firm and quick and strong.
Ross cranked the car. Bill Murray backed her from the garage, roared a last farewell, and headed out into the west and the night.
Fred Ross went back to the hotel after calling upon certain friends of his; for Ross had a fairly good idea of what was coming next. His theories were not altogether correct, but they attained pretty correct results.
So, after a short time, Fred Ross returned to the hotel and sat down in the lobby, just under the big map of New Mexico that hung upon the south wall. Immediately around him the comfortable oak rocking-chairs were vacant; but to right and left, three chairs away, sat red-faced men who read newspapers—two on either hand. These four men displayed an ostentatious lack of interest in each other and in Fred Ross. Over that section of the lobby hung an ill-defined air of crisis, of expectation, of foreboding.
Over opposite, in a corner of the big front window, sat a man, a stranger to Fred Ross. This man had come into town on the late afternoon train. He was palpably a city man, palpably not of this part of the country; he had registered at the desk as James Z. Premble of New York. Speculating idly as he waited, Fred Ross set him down as a high-class drummer.
Thus waited the six men, as though they were awaiting some event about to happen: Ross, seated under the big wall map; the four red-faced men who read newspapers with marked absorption; and, in the corner of the window, James Z. Premble of New York.
Suddenly and abruptly it happened. It happened just as Fred Ross had anticipated. The hotel door opened and into the lobby walked Sandy Mackintavers with Abel Dorales at his elbow. They had been to the livery stable, they had been to one place and another, and they had soon learned that Thady Shea, easily noted and remembered by all who saw him, had been in the company of Ross and Murray. Both Ross and Murray were known to Mackintavers and his field marshal.
Upon entering, Abel Dorales passed straight on to the cigar stand, where he stood idly gossiping with the proprietor. Mackintavers, with a wave of his hand and a grunt, halted in front of Fred Ross, and dropped into a chair beside the latter.