Toward the end of August—a few weeks after Billy Gee’s spectacular flight from the Huntington ranch in the rented car—Warburton reached Blue Mud Spring, a forlorn, seldom-visited trickle of water lost in a topsy-turvy hill country some three miles west of Lemuel’s quarter sections. Warburton camped there four whole wretched days, waiting; he had found a rather significant clew, as he thought.
Carved on the flat surface of a soft lime boulder, a few rods away from the spring was the legend, “Dot H., Aug. 20, 1913.” It had been done by a man, the work of an idle jackknife. The date was the one on which Warburton had trailed Billy Gee to the Huntington ranch. It was the one on which the bandit had met Dot, reasoned the sheriff.
Inspection of the ground back of the boulder showed that the owner of the jackknife had lain there for some time. The imprint of a cartridge belt appeared in the dirt. A short distance up a near-by shallow gulch, his horse had pawed a hole in the loose gravel during intervals of hunger or impatience.
On the evening of Warburton’s fourth day of solitary vigil, while he was preparing his supper prospector fashion, the first person he had seen since leaving the railroad hove in sight from around a bend in the gulch. Warburton recognized him. It was none other than Tinnemaha Pete. The old desert rat came pattering forward, driving his two shying burros before him, urging them onward with wild, falsetto cries. As he neared the muddy seepage of spring he shooed them over to drink and toddled up to the sheriff.
“Howdy, stranger!” he piped. “Kinder sultry weather, the last day or so. Better’n that damn wind we bin havin’. You bin out in it? Lookit my eyes!” He lifted his rheumy red lips at the other for inspection, at the same time squinting craftily at him. But he couldn’t penetrate the thick disguise of beard.
“They sure are alkalied,” said the sheriff. “That’s tough. You’re jest in time for a feed, friend. Sit in. Where’re you headed?”
“I got claims ’crosst the hills yonder,” said Pete, waving his skinny arm toward Geerusalem. “Sometimes I come here, sometimes I hike to camp for water. Prospectin’?”
“That’s my middle name. Lookin’ for rock with one eye an’ watchin’ for that two-gun chap, Billy Gee, with the other. ’Tain’t pleasant, let me tell you.”
Tinnemaha Pete broke into a wild cackle. “A big walloper like you skeart of a kid! Say, you’re a tenderfoot, ain’t you?” He leered suddenly. “Yer hands’re soft. I jest seen the inside of one of ’em. You can’t fool me, mister.”
“I ain’t tryin’ to, dad,” grinned Warburton. “This here is my first trip out for nigh on a year. I bin bartendin’ for McGregor, over to Twenty-nine Palms. You know ‘Gold-tooth’ McGregor, the locoed Scotchman, wears a clean boiled shirt every day, an’——”