“Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” Sandy dragged himself up on one elbow despite Mrs. Gonzales’ efforts to make him lie still. “It proves no such thing!”
“But if he did make those three touchdowns he was always bragging about....” Pepper started to protest.
“Four touchdowns, the telegram says,” Sandy panted. “Now look, all of you. Maybe a real football player might add a touchdown to his record if he thought no one would catch him at it. But who would subtract a touchdown? Nobody. That’s who!
“Cavanaugh is a phony, I tell you. Whoever he really is, he wanted to impress people, and keep them from asking too many personal questions when he went to Valley View and started building his lab with the money he had stolen from Mr. Gonzales. He remembered that there was another Cavanaugh on the State team, so he took his identity. But the game had been played so many years ago that he got the details wrong, see? I’ll bet that, if we start digging into his past, we’ll find lots of other queer things.”
“We’ll need to do a lot of digging, too, to make any charges stick against him after we catch him,” White said grimly.
“What do you mean?” Hall exploded. “He’s guilty of attempted homicide, defrauding the Indians, disturbing the peace, and I don’t know what all else.”
“Oh, he’s guilty all right,” the Agent agreed, “but could you prove that to a jury, particularly out here where so many people still think that the only good Indian is a dead Indian?”
“Oh, you’re being an old woman, Ken,” the oilman snapped.
“Maybe so, John. Maybe so. But I’ve been in this business a long time. If Cavanaugh or whoever he is hadn’t lost his head, he would have come right down here and given himself up. Then his lawyers could have claimed that he was only defending his property from a prowler. No. No. Shut up and listen to me. People are awful touchy about property rights out here. Remember what they used to do to cattle rustlers—still do, for that matter, on occasion.
“And now about this message that Sandy heard: Cavanaugh’s lawyers would say ‘Prove it!’ And what real proof have we got? We’d be putting up the word of a minor who did prowl—I’m not blaming you, Sandy. You did the only thing possible and your idea of using the light beam to call for help was a stroke of pure genius—but, as I say, the word of a minor against the word of an established businessman who has a lot of friends in these parts.”