He broke off and scanned the hard earth, rocks and dust inch by inch for a long time, and betrayed his disappointment when again he mentally commented. “Can’t be sure about it. Maybe I’m imagining it. Everything so faint and beaten out; but it does seem to me that this buggy was driven up here off the main road, stopped, tied, stuck here for some time, then was turned round and driven back. The marks of the horse’s fore hoofs show that, and look as if they might have been made just about two days ago, or—say—at about the same time the footprints I followed were made. If that’s so, it accounts for a lot of things, and I dope it out about this way: Two men drove here and separated. One of them went straight back down the road, held up the stage, and after the job was done, slid up the hillside to throw Bill off the scent; then after Bill and the stage had gone made his way back into the main road and finally returned here to the buggy. When the two who did the job first separated the man with the iron on his heel went and climbed up to that spot where he could watch and from which, if it came to a show-down, he could shoot. He didn’t have to shoot, and probably made a bolt for it as soon as the stage had made a get-away, after which he also went down to the road and then back up here. The job was done and all the two men had to do was to drive away. The sheriff’s posse, taking Bill’s word that there was but one man, naturally picked up but one trail, followed it to where it came to the main road and was lost, and so entirely missed the trail left by the watcher a hundred yards away. Now which way did that buggy go and who was in it? It’s my guess that I know one of the men that was in it and that it went straight back to Wallula where it came from, and from where it started probably mighty early on that same morning. Ought I to get word to the sheriff right away, or ought I to wait a day or two and see what turns up?”
For a long time he debated this and then made his decision for the latter alternative, after which he again took to the hills to return to his and his partners’ claim and cabin.
Six days slipped away with the three partners waiting to hear any news concerning the stage robbery, chuckling over the information received in a roundabout way that no further developments had taken place, before the spell was broken by the chance arrival of a lank prospector from Wallula Camp who was invited to pass the night. He came opportunely as the partners were seating themselves for supper and Mrs. Hank Mills was cheerfully placing the food on the table. And almost the first question that he was asked was whether the deputy sheriffs had succeeded in learning who had “collared Shaughnessy’s package.”
“They have,” he replied, an answer which caused all three of his male auditors to pause and look at him.
“And who was it, Tim?” David urged when the visitor showed signs of preferring food to recountal.
“Why, it was a chap named Ray. Tom Ray, I think his whole name is. Sort of a tenderfoot, so the boys say, although I don’t know him pussonally. Comes from back in Iowa, or some of the corn States, and the pore durned fool must have got sort of discouraged because he hadn’t found no pay streak up on Torren’s Gulch where he had a claim, and is so hard up he has to beg for credit to get even some beans and sow belly and—well—does a fool thing! Goes and sticks up the stage and—What do you think! You’d never guess how they came to nail him! No siree! Not in a hundred years! That’s what they calls the mysterious circumstances!”
“Sheriff gets one of these anonymous letters that says the writer’s a woman and that this gink Ray done her dirt, so she’s goin’ to squall. Says he robbed the stage and that he’s got the money hid somewhere, most likely under a loose board under the bunk in his cabin where he’s keepin’ it till it’s safe to spend some of it. Well, the sheriff himself comes up, so the boys says, and goes out to this tenderfoot’s cabin, and Ray pretended he didn’t have nothin’ to hide, wouldn’t think of robbin’ anything or anybody, and swears he never done no woman any wrong because he’d never had nothin’ to do with a woman since he came to Californy, and that as far as he knows there’s never been a member of the female sex in his cabin since he built it. They say he put up grand indignation talk—probably tryin’ to bluff it out, you see. But it didn’t go. Not at all! Sheriff and his men goes in, pulls out the bunk, finds the board and there, in a nice tin cracker box, is Shaughnessy’s money all done up in the package the way it was shipped. Ray hadn’t even busted the seals. When it’s shown to Shaughnessy he proves it’s his because he’d taken down the numbers on the bills, which were new ones he’d got from somewhere.”
“What? What’s that? New bills, you say?” David exclaimed. “Then he must have got ’em from some bank, and the only bank in Wallula is one he’s not friendly with, because we all know he had a row with the manager when it opened because said manager wouldn’t play in on the Shaughnessy game. Besides, since when does any one suppose Tom Shaughnessy’s a careful enough business man to take down the numbers on bills he’s going to ship out by express?”
“Don’t know about all that, but I’m just tellin’ you what I heard and what’s common talk about the camp.”
Goliath, big, phlegmatic, and apparently wholly occupied with his food, lifted his dark eyes slowly and after waiting to see whether any one else had questions to ask or information to volunteer inquired, “Did you say this fellow Ray is working up on Torren’s Gulch?”