“I’d like you to. Sit down.”
Stanley Fyles took the dirty, unsigned sheet of paper from the officer. He pulled up a Windsor chair and sat down. Croisette went on with the work of dealing with his official correspondence. The sergeant-major sat chewing and furtively eyeing the subordinate who had never yet failed him in any difficult problem.
Fyles was absorbed in the document handed to him.
Nobody but a bunch of foolheads like the police would need to be told the things happening in Buffalo Coulee. You send a lone-handed boy, whod orter have a mother around, to lick a bunch of toughs into shape. Well hes got it. An the folks who done it will clear away with it if you dont send along quick. It aint use sending any hoodlam. Itll take a big bunch of red-coated gophers to beat up Buffalo Coulee.
Ill-written, scrawling, illiterate document as it was, it yet managed to convey in the fewest possible words all the venom of the writer as well as the news to be conveyed. Sinclair had “got it.”
“She’s pretty mad about it,” Fyles observed, still considering the paper in his hands. “And she’s used paper that belongs to a heading. The heading’s been cut off with scissors.”
“She?”
The superintendent’s eyes were alight with interested approval.
“Yes, sir. A man don’t cut paper with scissors. A man who wants to tell things to the police won’t worry to pass meanness to them with a shovel. And it’s a female who hasn’t seen the inside of a state school, too. I’d say that letter comes from the inside of the outfit who knows what’s happened. Buffalo Coulee—that’s the hunting ground of the Wolf Pack.”
Fyles returned the letter across the desk. And the eyes of the superintendent conveyed his approval.