Gopher Gabe heard it through without apparent emotion, but a bit of color came into his fat cheeks, and his ratlike eyes glittered.
“You tell Cody for me, that he is an a-number-one fool,” was his answer. “Does he take me for an idiot?”
“You don’t know a thing about it?” Shepard asked.
“Certainly I don’t. I’d be a candidate for a lunatic asylum, wouldn’t I, if I done a thing like that?” He crushed the damp cloth in his thick fingers, and looked at Shepard. “Cody has got so excited over his failure to do anything, that he has gone to seein’ visions. Now, there ain’t no band of highwaymen makin’ their headquarters in this town; and you, as sheriff, ought to know that. There’s been hold-ups and robberies; but they’ve been done by individuals. Cody’s like a blind snake in August—scared at every sound he hears, and strikin’ out at everything.”
Matt Shepard was about convinced that this was the truth.
“Of course, he’s naturally he’t up by this disappearance of his pard,” he said, almost apologetically.
“Maybe the Dutchman is on a drunk, and layin’ out somewhere,” Gopher Gabe suggested.
“It might be,” Shepard admitted.
“As for that woman, the place to find out about her is at the Casino; if the manager of the show can’t tell you anything about her, I can’t.”
“About this Fool of Folly Mountain?” said Shepard, coming back to what to him was a subject of mysterious interest. “They tell me he’s been buckin’ the tiger heavy of late, in your rooms back there.”