“All right, cap’n.”
Ranger Burnham returned to the hotel. So, after a little, did Captain Carmichael, who observed as he entered that Andrew Miller was still sitting quietly in the same place, still deep in thought and unsmiling, and that Burnham was seemingly engrossed in a magazine at the other side of the lobby.
The captain did not take further notice of the Argentinian. Indeed, there presently developed something else for him to do, when two well-dressed, Spanish-featured men, typical Mexican refugees of the wealthy class, entered together and met, apparently by accident and to the mutual surprise of all the trio, a big, gray-mustached man who looked like a retired cattleman, was a lawyer of sorts and really made the bulk of his excellent income as a lobbyist.
These were some of the people—none of them directly connected with the Tarbox Company, but all interested, for various reasons, in keeping alive friction between Mexico and the United States—on whom he had hoped to get his eyes this evening, and he was too busy observing them until they separated for the night to think again more than casually of the man with the disdainful scar.
Nor did he see Miller during all the following day. At six o’clock, while he was washing up for dinner in his hotel room, Ranger Burnham knocked at his door and came in briskly.
“Wallace Locke!” he exclaimed, the moment he had closed the door behind him. “If there is anything about Locke that this Miller hasn’t found out, I don’t know what it could be. He’s asked questions about him from the cradle to this good day. And—didn’t you tell me he is a stranger? Never been in the States before?”
“That’s what he claims,” Carmichael said.
“Bunk!” ejaculated Burnham. “This isn’t the easiest city in the world for a stranger to find his way about in—and Miller got around it like it was his own dooryard. Without asking, usually. When he did ask it was about some part of the town that has changed the last few years. If he never was in San ’Ntonio before, I never saw a tarantula.”
“And he wanted information regarding Locke, eh? What sort? And where did he go for it? Did he see any of the gang we are watching?”
Ranger Burnham answered the last question first.