“Not quite, but there’s a bucket yonder. See how many times you can fill it with the stuff we shoveled off, while I take a smoke. Build up the pile to look as if we hadn’t disturbed it.”
Stanton did as he was bidden, counting each bucketful he replaced, and then Curtis sent him to clean out the stove and estimate the quantity of ash before he put it back. Then he made a calculation.
“Allowing for some of the ash slipping down the pile and for our having moved a little that was there before Wandle threw the cash-box in, it fixes the time he did so pretty close to Jernyngham’s disappearance,” he remarked. “Looks bad against the Austrian, doesn’t it?”
“You have quite as much against Prescott.”
“Yes,” Curtis admitted regretfully; “that’s the trouble. It isn’t quite so easy being a policeman as folks seem to think. Now we’ll ride along and call on the hardware man.”
They mounted and soon afterward saw a buggy emerge from the short pines on the crest of a distant rise, whereupon Curtis rode hard for a poplar bluff, which he kept between himself and the vehicle.
“Looks like Wandle coming back,” he said to Stanton, who had followed him. “I can’t see any reason he should know we’ve been prospecting round his place.”
Reaching the settlement they visited the hardware dealer, who remembered having sold Jernyngham a small cheap cash-box about twelve months earlier. On being shown the bent-up iron, he expressed his belief that it was the article in question.
A day or two after the corporal’s discovery, the mail-carrier left some letters at the Prescott homestead, and when it was getting dusk Gertrude strolled out on the prairie, thinking of one she had received. After a while Prescott joined her and she greeted him with a smile.
“My team was looking a bit played out and the boys will be able to keep the separator gang going as long as they can see,” he said.