Shea gladly followed to the Hotel Aragon. He was to-night blissfully happy. For the first time in years he felt like a boy. It was as though the reparation made to Mackintavers, and the brief but emphatic expression of his own mind to Mackintavers, had wiped away all past things. Atonement was over and done with. He was free to go where he would.
From one of the rocking-chairs in the long, narrow lobby of the hotel arose a man of girth and twinkling of eye, who came to meet them. Him Ross briefly introduced as Bill Murray, and urged haste in reaching the dining room. Thady Shea left the battered little yellow suitcase on the hat rack beside the dining-room doors, which were just about to close, and the three men hastily entered the nearly empty room.
Fred Ross had known nothing definite about Thady Shea’s business with Mackintavers, but possibly he had conjectured a good deal. He was plainly much relieved to see his friend safely back.
“Bill’s running a newspaper over to St. Johns,” he confided, when the meal was under way. “He’d heard about you, Shea, and was kind o’ set on meeting you. Wants to get the straight o’ that yarn about you and Dorales. He got laid up here with a busted steering gear, and aimed to go home to-day, but waited over. Now he’s goin’ back to-night, so he says. It sure beats all how a fellow gets in a hell of a hurry just when other folks want him to loaf around a spell!”
Murray tipped Thady Shea a jovial wink.
“Fred ain’t lonesome, much,” he said, wheezily. “Got a girl here. Fred reckons that the more he talks about stayin’, the more I’ll be set on goin’—which is the same true. Human nature is ornery as the devil, ain’t it now? Well, I s’pose you ain’t picked up any news to-day, Shea?”
“I have, sir,” intoned Thady, “an item of importance. A striped Indian, of name unknown, was overcome by dire fatality this morn. Upon the road Death ambushed him, and maimed his faithful steed, and laid him low. An automobile—mark the irony!—became the instrument of darkling fate, and brought to this poor aborigine the end of all things, and the close of life.”
Bill Murray stared open-mouthed, as did most people who heard Thady’s sonorously rolling accents for the first time. Then he emitted a wheezy chuckle.
“Oh! You mean the Injun buck that got straddled by Doniphan’s flivver! Heard all about him to-day. He’s layin’ over to the funeral parlours now. Some of his tribe’s in town, and they made Doniphan give him a real burial. Joke on Doniphan, ain’t it?”
“And,” pursued Thady, “at Mackintavers’ ranch this afternoon I gathered there had been a robbery. What worldly pelf was taken, I know not, but dread confusion reigned upon the place.”