“It’s just this. Juniper Joe’s wife is one of the road agents.”
“What makes you think so?” Buffalo Bill asked mildly, yet showing interest.
“The thing has come to me by degrees. A while ago I was down in Gopher Gabe’s saloon, just inside the door; I had my hat pulled over my eyes, for I didn’t want to be recognized; and I heard men talking in there, by the bar. I don’t know who they were; but what they said gave me all the information I have about that remarkable hold-up and shooting in Eagle Gap to-day; though I admit that before that I knew something had happened, for I saw your Dutch pard come in with that wounded man on his back.
“What I heard them saying at Gopher Gabe’s,” he went on, “was that the Dutchman reported that one of the agents was a tall man, and the other a small man. Juniper Joe is a tall man; and Mrs. Joe is a small woman.”
“You don’t think that the new Mrs. Joe is a man?”
“I don’t know about that; but probably a woman. Now, inasmuch as Juniper Joe knew all about the plans for sending the stuff over the mountains on burros, what would have been easier than for him and his wife to disguise and go out there and do the hold-up act?”
“It could have been done by them, in all probability.”
“Say that Joe had ten thousand dollars of stuff in the express bags, what of it? There was as much as forty thousand more, as I understand it. That forty thousand would be a big haul.”
“It would.”