"They're all yours, Tom. I fired a shot and they looked up. Then Scotty and Hank fired over their heads from each side and they saw they were trapped. They upped hands, polite as you please, and we moved in to put the cuffs on."
Scotty elaborated later. Deadrock had waited until some of the stolen goods had changed hands before firing his warning shot. That was for purposes of evidence.
Pancho and Mac maintained a stony silence, but Dusty Rhoads was eager to talk. The other two had threatened to kill him, he claimed, and had forced him to steal. No one believed this, but Dusty's tale at least showed the connection between Miller and the thefts.
Pancho had stumbled across evidence that Miller was the Earthman, Dusty said. Dusty didn't know what the evidence was, and Pancho refused to tell him. But when Big Mac heard about it, he accused Miller, and promised to keep silent in exchange for co-operation. He demanded to be told when a shoot was to be sabotaged. Miller agreed, in exchange for part of the profits. Mac, Pancho, and Dusty had not participated in any way in the sabotage.
The other men, who had captured Rick and Scotty at Steamboat, proved to be well-known thieves with prison records. One admitted they had depended on Mac and Pancho to tip them off to any trap that might be waiting, but of course Preston had made sure no inkling reached Mac and Pancho that they were under suspicion. For that reason, the thieves had driven without hesitation to Careless Mesa to pick up the latest batch of stolen equipment—and had received the shock of their lives.
Rick thought that the trail of the Earthman had been a pretty devious one, complicated as it was by a gang of thieves as well as the saboteur himself.
He wondered briefly if Miller's identity would ever have come to light if he hadn't been trapped in the rocket. But the next moment he realized it would have, eventually, because the thieves were known, and at least the janitor would have talked.
Rick and Scotty still had their jobs. Both had done well in their assigned work, and could have stayed on indefinitely. But in spite of the temptation to remain for a while, the call of Spindrift was strong.
As Rick said, "It's nice to travel, but one thing that makes it nice is that we can go back home."
A letter from Barby had made him a little homesick. Everyone was fine. Dismal was lonesome. Jan Miller was back, with her parents. Dad was worried because he hadn't heard from Tony Briotti and Howard Shannon, but that was probably just the slowness of mail. Barby urged them to hurry back and hoped they were finding life dull enough so they would. She and Jan needed instruction in sailing, because they had just bought a new Comet-class sailboat.