Mr. Cook laughed.
“My boy,” he said, “there’s some laws that never get into the printed statutes. You know how it is if a man and his wife are lost at sea in the same wreck? The printed law presumes that the woman died first because she’s weaker than the man. In the desert, we have a lot of our own laws. If two men come together with shooting irons and both fire and one dies, the live one is given the benefit of the doubt.”
Roy couldn’t see the logic of this, but he hastened to explain that he had no desire to despoil the dead bartender’s body. “I have an idea,” he said.
A short search confirmed his theory. In Hassell’s vest pocket, Roy found a carefully folded two-dollar bill.
“I can’t be mistaken,” he said, rising to his feet, “for all my bills were alike. This is the money I gave Mike to pay for Banning’s supper. He even robbed Joe, his boss.”
“And when Old Utah set up a howl for the bill,” added Mr. Cook, “Mike shut him up by murderin’ him. Don’t you bother about which of us shot first. If Mike didn’t he’d ought to.”
Soon after nine o’clock, the aeroplane was in the Company corral again. The flight back to Bluff was made at top speed, and, strange to say, the landing attracted no attention. In the Company office, both clerks were already at work or going through the motions of it. As a matter of fact, they were both too much excited over the theft of the previous day to do more than discuss it.
Mr. Cook and Roy entered the office together. Offering the tired boy an easy chair, Mr. Cook stepped to a tank in a corner of the room, drew a glass of water which he considerately carried to the hot and nervous lad and then helped himself to one. That done, he extracted from his pocket his long-delayed morning cigar and lit it with great gusto.
“Mr. Blocki,” he said at last, addressing the clerk with the bent leg, “some time to-day make me a sketch map showing where all our men were the last time we heard from them.”
“Yes, sir.”