“In the first place they won’t dare to, because the shippers will hear of it and refuse to give the packers another dollar’s worth of business. Remember Hart and O’Connell have been reaping a golden harvest at the shippers’ expense. In the second place, even if they do squeal, we’ll have no direct evidence against Nichols.”
“How then do you propose to catch Murky?”
“There are several ways: One would be to find the pass ourselves and then wait for Murky to come through; another would be to follow a west-coast shipment from the time it leaves the hands of Hart and O’Connell; still another, to locate Murky’s cache of stolen fur, and awaiting the next shipment through Blind Man’s Pass.”
“You really think Murky has such a cache?”
“If our theory is correct, he must have. In all likelihood, he has two of them.”
“Two of them!” gasped Dick. “What makes you think that?”
“It stands to reason that he has. In fact, it’s quite obvious. The stolen fur must be stored somewhere before it is shipped. When it reaches the coast, it must be stored again.”
“Why not sold?”
“There’s only one place to sell it—at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at Fort Pennington—and Murky isn’t foolish enough to take that risk.”
“You mean,” asked Dick in amazement, “that he’d continue to—that he’s been hiding it out there on the coast year after year, making no attempt to sell it?”