“And supposing they’re sweethearts, sir,” ventured Tyler. “It ain’t impossible. The police records are crammed with stranger cases than that. If they’re intimate, she’d be in on the game, wouldn’t she? And it’d be the easiest thing going for her to hide that twenty thousand where nobody’d find it. Another thing, Billy Gee, according to all reports, has either relatives or mighty close friends in Soapweed Plains.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, men,” said Lex finally. “I’m going back to town to-night, and I’ll ascertain all about Miss Huntington—if she has a sweetheart, the type of girl she is, everything regarding the family. In the meantime, drop this accomplice business and settle down to a systematic, thorough search.”
It was dusk when Lex stopped his machine before Mrs. Liggs’ dry-goods store. The night life of Geerusalem was beginning to waken, stretching itself like some blinking giant making ready to be off on his rampant adventuring. For five crooked blocks down the wide gulch which sloped gently out of the hills, onto the smooth floor of Soapweed Plains, the main street was ablaze with lights, pouring from business houses, saloons, gambling houses, and dance halls. Already the sidewalks were packed with as heterogeneous a stream of humanity as may be seen only in those out-of-the-way places of earth where men have discovered fabulous wealth bursting from the rock.
Here swaggered the hordes of miners coming off shift from a hundred working properties in the neighboring hills, grimy, spattered with candle grease, and adding to the bustle and confusion of the gold-mad crowd, was the torrent of traffic that surged up and down the rough, rocky thoroughfare—wagons of every description from the slim rattletrap buckboard, up through the various stages of all known vehicles, great freighter’s outfits, horse-drawn hacks, carts, automobiles; all these contributed to the bedlam that roared through the hills from early dawn to midnight, incessantly from one day to another.
Lex stepped out of the roadster and began shouldering his way across the sidewalk to Mrs. Liggs’ store. He suddenly noticed that the place was open, the display window brilliantly lighted up, and he made out over the heads of the throng, the figure of the little proprietress bustling energetically about behind the counter, waiting on customers. The marked difference between his visit that afternoon, when he had found the establishment closed and its owner showing traces of prolonged grief, and his present one, caused him to wonder curiously. The next moment, however, an unlooked-for incident drove the thought from his mind.
He had almost cleared the jam on the sidewalk and was within a step of the store entrance, when a man collided heavily with him. As he staggered back into the arms of one of the crowd, a coarse voice yelled in his ear:
“What the hell! Look where you’re going, you poor fish!”
Lex got his feet and stood blocking the other’s way, gazing steadily at him. The press of men around them, sensing trouble, scattered like magic, for it was no unusual thing for revolvers to flash at the least provocation.
The man before him was big and powerfully built, forty-five or thereabouts, with heavy face and piercing, arrogant, coal-black eyes. His clothes—Norfolk suit of the finest whipcord, silk shirt, jaunty, stiff-brimmed Stetson and nap-a-tan half boots of superior quality—his whole bearing, in fact, stamped him a person of wealth and prominence.
There was a tragic silence. In that brief interval, the center of the street was a solid mass of staring humanity, the two principals standing alone, the hub of a wide circle. Even Mrs. Liggs, attracted by the sudden commotion, stood watching now, pale and trembling, from the rear of the store, her eyes riveted on the contestants facing each other before her door.