Joe nodded briskly.
"That's it!" he exclaimed. "I knew it was ornery something-or-other, and—and that makes it fit the case all the prettier, now don't it? Because in the last half-hour or so, since I left you here to tend to the cookin', I've been studying the birds somewhat myself. And having been a little successful, so to speak, I'm ornerier'n even before I commenced." He stopped to swallow half the steaming coffee in his cup, and if when he began again his voice had hardened perceptibly, it was nevertheless still elaborately guileless. "Steve," he said, "have you ever stopped to consider real close and earnest any of the peculiarities of our feathered friends? Say—well, say owls, for instance?"
Then Steve ceased to smile. He thought a moment, but his reply remained tuned to the other's artless key.
"Why, yes," he drawled. "Yes, and no. As for the latter, however, I will admit that I have always believed their reputation for—er—wisdom to be a greatly overestimated thing."
Widely Fat Joe grinned his pleasure. His chief's eyes were no longer vague nor blank.
"Which just bears out my own personal research in the field," he stated. "Not that I'm saying I've been real thorough in the matter, because I ain't had the time. But what I've done I accomplished because I just naturally dote on that kind of thing." His eye flitted carelessly toward a window. "I happened to run into Harrigan, too, this morning," he murmured.
As disinterestedly as had Joe, Steve now drained his coffee cup and waited.
"He was down to the cook shanty," Fat Joe rambled on. "It's an hour since he'd ought to have been out there with the powder squad in the north cut, and when I asks him if he was feelin' indisposed this morning he says no, but the supply teams was going out and one of the drivers had told him that I was sending him along to help with the loadin'. He had such a nice, frank, open-faced way of lying that I couldn't bring myself to correct him. I just let it stand that way and told him such was the arrangement." Joe saw swift satisfaction play across Steve's face. "And—and then, after that, him and me—why, we just drifted off into a real interestin' and scientific discussion about them birds I been mentionin' to you. We—somehow we got to discoursing about owls.
"I told him I'd never noticed 'em to hoot so close together and persistent as they did last night, down along the trail, and wondered if by any chance he'd heard 'em, too. And he said he had. He's a nice smooth talker, Harrigan is, when he ain't too sober and not too drunk. Oh, yes, he'd heard 'em, being wakeful, he explained, what with worrying all night whether we'd ever get this line of steel laid before our contract run out on us! Now wasn't that interestin'—wasn't it, especially coming from him? Neatly put and self-possessed, I call it. He was worried because he's dreadful superstitions. [Transcriber's note: superstitious?] He claims when them birds gets to hedgin' in on each other's solos like they did last night it's a sign of bad luck or an accident for somebody, sure. That give me an opening to ask him if the accident hadn't happened already, him having a bandage around his head not much different from this one our friend here is wearing. But he couldn't see it that way. A scratch he called it—just a scratch from a twig."
The room was very quiet for a breath. That thin note had crept into Fat Joe's tenor voice—thin and chill and menacing. And there as abruptly as he had assumed it, he flung aside his mask of disingenuous irrelevance. Fat Joe wheeled, put both elbows upon the table edge and leaned forward heavily. It was much as though he were setting himself to shoulder by sheer weight through the discouraging wall of indifference behind which the other was apparently withdrawing once more.