“Gosh!” Bill Murray started up from his chair. “Say—that’s red-hot news, Shea! Don’t tell any one else around here. I’ll run out and phone the ranch. Got to run off my paper to-morrow night; I’ll pull some o’ that plate off the front page and run this in a box. Whee! Back in a minute!”
Bill Murray departed like a genial cyclone.
Now Thady Shea told about that battered little suitcase. He was not sure what should be done with the thing, and asked the advice of Fred Ross. He had not opened the suitcase; ever since finding it, he had been on the go. Besides, the suitcase was locked, and Thady hesitated to smash it open.
“Likely it was bounced off some ranch car or buckboard,” deduced Ross. “Belong to that dead Injun? No chance. None whatever! You never seen an Injun with one o’ them things, and anyhow, no Injun riding hossback would tote a suitcase along. No, none whatever! And that grip wasn’t made to tie on a saddle, neither. Reckon you’d better look inside, and if there ain’t any indication of the owner, then read the papers for an ad. Well, what ye going to do? Will ye come back to the ranch with me?”
Thady Shea did not know what he wanted to do. He wondered if he had fulfilled his extremely vague ideas of wandering and making good in the world. In a sense, he had done so. He realized it now, just as he realized that it is very difficult to view one’s own immediate self and environment with any degree of cool detachment.
As to Mackintavers, as to any peril which he himself might bring upon Mrs. Crump, Thady Shea had long since abandoned that nebulous idea. He had met Mackintavers, and feared him no longer. Of Dorales he did not think particularly.
He had no great desire to return to the Ross ranch. Try as he would, he could see no purpose ahead of him save in the one place—Number Sixteen. All that held him back was that strange feeling in his soul, a feeling that had been there twenty years and more; a feeling as though something were knotted somewhere about his soul, stifling him. What use to return to Mrs. Crump? Still, there was the only purpose he could see.
He had conquered the old enemy; of this he felt certain. Temptations would come, of course. Temptations were bound to come; they came at odd intervals; they came here in this hotel dining room, where he could catch some vagrant odour of whiskey from an indefinable source. Yet they would not overcome him anew, he was confident.
“I think,” he said, slowly, staring at the tablecloth, “I think I’d better head for Mrs. Crump’s mine, Ross.”
There was that in his voice which admitted of no argument. Ross shoved back his chair.