“Well, I’ll be ——!” he ejaculated softly to himself. He looked again at the date of the crime. “Ten days ago. Holy Doodle! they must have been a bloomin’ long time makin’ up their minds to wire East, or I’d have got this long ago. S’pose they figured they had ’em corralled all hunkadory in the town somewhere ... couldn’t get away ... or, when they nailed this Lipinski man in Seattle, that they’d all beat it the same road. Ten days ... an’ this chap—Walters, as he calls himself—has been here for a little over a week. That fits in O. K.”
He sprang to his feet and buckled on his side-arms beneath his stable-jacket; then, putting on his hat, he extinguished the light and slipped stealthily out of the detachment into the dark of the night.
“Here goes for that five hundred ‘bucks,’” he muttered grimly. “No use wastin’ time over Walters. He can’t run away. Let’s have a dekho at this Mr. Shapiro—if it is him. Why in thunder should they choose this place of all places to get playin’ hide-an’-seek in? Well, I guess we’ll know later.”
Entering the lane that lay at the rear of the buildings paralleling the main street, he strode swiftly and silently back towards the cottage where the girl had informed him she was staying. As he approached it there came through the stillness a smothered murmur of voices and, presently the low-pitched, guarded tones of a man’s growling bass, mixed with a woman’s sobbing, reached his ears.
Quickening his pace, he noiselessly drew near the scene of the altercation, the thick carpet of dust effectually deadening his footsteps. There, under the light of the lamp, he beheld the figures of a man and a woman, the latter unmistakably the young would-be “Delilah” who had accosted him earlier in the evening.
“How come you to make such a —— fool break as that?” came the man’s voice, fierce and indistinct with passion. “He ain’t th’ cop that’s here reg’lar. He’s easy, that guy. This feller, he knows me—beat me up one time—him. I—— By G—d! I believe you were a-puttin’ him wise!”
The girl’s weeping response was inaudible to the listening policeman, but it only seemed to add fresh fuel to her persecutor’s rage for, with an inarticulate snarl, he struck at her savagely and, with a piteous, heart-broken cry, she reeled back from the cruel blow.
The sight maddened Ellis and, with an angry shout, he sprang forward. The man, who hitherto had been standing with his back to the light, now swung sharply around at the interruption. In a flash the Sergeant recognized that face again. It was “Harry”—the man who had robbed the woman on the train, and whom he had thrashed so severely some two months earlier.
Like lightning both men’s hands streaked to their hips, but the yeggman was the quicker of the two. The girl saw his action and, with a hasty movement, flung herself between the combatants with raised, protesting hands.
“No, no, no! Harry, don’t!” she screamed.