"But I can save his memory the disgrace of a brutal murder!" the widow cried, as though suddenly persuaded that the officer was a genuine one. She fluttered out of her chair into a more confidential position at the counter.
"Bart did shoot Ben Tabor but he had to fire in self-defense. It was his life or Tabor's; he made a brave man's choice." She paused a moment to catch a sob that seemed determined to escape, then proceeded to eulogize as best she might. "Bart Caswell was the gentlest of men. I never knew of his harming a soul before. Except for his wrong idea that the world owed him a living and his peculiar way of collecting it, there is nothing that could be said against him."
"I'm ready to be shown, Mrs. Caswell," the sergeant encouraged her.
He listened then to the old, old story of the double-cross in a new setting and with unusual variations. The First Bank of Gold, according to the widow, used considerable currency in its purchase of dust from the miners. To guard against robbery, the shipments were made in supposed secrecy by the weekly baggage stage, but the driver knew of the valuable load he carried occasionally. Caswell and Tabor had been friends in Vancouver before either came into the north country and soon after their meeting in Gold, the robbery had been planned.
Bart had "stuck" the stage at the agreed point, only to be told by Tabor that the expected $30,000 shipment for that week had been withheld. Not then suspicious, Bart had accepted the statement as fact, expressed his hope that they'd have better luck next time, and was disappearing into the brush when Tabor fired upon him. The bullet struck a silver plate in Bart's back that had been placed there to repair a wound received during a Seattle gun-fight some years before.
The blow staggered him, but he was uninjured. Turning as his friend was in the act of firing again, he had brought down the traitor with a single shot.
A hurried search of the express book showed that the currency shipment had been made. Driving the stage off the trail, Bart had examined the load thoroughly but had found no bank package. He concluded that Tabor had concealed it somewhere along the trail, meaning to get the whole of the loot for himself after putting the blame on the friend he expected to kill.
Watchful for flaws in the widow's account, Seymour seized upon a seeming one. "But if Bart had been killed in the brush, no loot would have been found on him," he pointed out. "Tabor still would have been held responsible for the currency."
"They had planned in advance," she smiled wearily, "that Tabor should report his stage robbed by three masked men. He need only have sworn that the other two got away with the bank package."
Seymour made mental note of at least one way of checking up on Mrs. Caswell's account, then asked her about the uniform.