“Well, wait a minute, will you? I want to speak to Bill Murray. Order me some o’ that pie and another cup o’ coffee, Shea.”
Fred Ross opened the dining-room doors, which had been closed, and departed to the lobby of the hotel. He found genial Bill Murray just turning from the telephone, and wearing a look of puzzled excitement.
“Get the ranch?” asked Ross. The other nodded and glanced around cautiously.
“Yes. Talked to Old Man Durfee—he’s manager for Sandy. He said that Sandy and Abel Dorales had just left for Magdalena; he admitted there had been a robbery but would say nothing except that it didn’t amount to much. Injun relics, he said.”
“Huh!” Fred Ross gazed at his friend, narrow-eyed. “I bet if it was Injun relics, it was some partic’lar kind, then. That sounds damn’ fishy, Bill.”
“Sure does, but she’ll make a grand little story, played up. This here Shea just came from there, didn’t he? And everybody knows about him and Dorales and the bad blood.”
The two men looked at each other, surmise in their eyes. Ross thoughtfully rubbed his chin, remembering about that battered little suitcase on the hat rack. He did not entirely believe the tale told by Thady Shea, the tale about finding it in the road. That was too improbable, unless the dead Indian had been carrying the suitcase—which seemed, likewise, very improbable.
“I shouldn’t wonder, now,” said Ross, musingly. “Shea, he’s the calm, hell-nervy sort, he sure is. Likely Dorales or old Sandy tried to run a blazer on him, and he played merry hell with them. Likely they had something he thought belonged to someone else, and he just up and took it. H’m! But the robbery had happened before he got there, he said. Well, if he don’t want to tell all he knows, that’s his business. Eh?”
“I coincide,” assented Murray, curtly. Fred Ross briefly told him about the suitcase, in so far as he knew about it.
“Now,” pursued Ross, “you and I ain’t blamin’ him or any other man for gettin’ old Mackintavers up on his ear. But Shea, in spite o’ the stories goin’ around about him, ain’t no fighter, Bill. He’s a downright honest man, and he’s terrible when he gets roused, but I don’t guess he could fight for little apples. And, he don’t know Sandy and Dorales are comin’ to town.”