It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when the partners left their mules in a feed stable, brushed the dust from their clothes, and after a brief stop at a restaurant presented themselves at the county jail and asked for the sheriff. And the sheriff, being an old friend of theirs, granted their request for permission to interview his prisoner and as a further evidence of confidence gave them the use of his private office.
“I’ve got just one condition, David,” he said, “and that is that if you hear of anything I’d ought to know you’ll tell me. Because, between us three, I can’t get this thing quite straight in my own mind, and if this young chap Ray is a criminal my judgment of human nature isn’t worth a cuss any more. I can’t make myself believe, in spite of the fact that we’ve got him shut up, that he held up that stage; and that’s the honest-to-God truth!”
Ray was brought into the office and started in surprise when he recognized his visitors. He had the look of a helpless and hunted animal and when David and Goliath thrust out their hands and said, “No use in asking questions, because we’ve come to help you,” threatened to break down. At first he could tell them nothing that they did not already know and made the same protestations of ignorance and innocence that had been made at the time of his arrest.
“We’ve heard all that and believe you,” David said at last. “But what we want to learn—who are your enemies?”
“But I haven’t any, that I know of,” Ray insisted. “I came West from Iowa and worked in two or three mines and watched and picked up all I could because I want to be a miner. Then I went to Wallula and was one of the first to stake a claim on Torren’s Gulch, and since then have been too busy trying to find gold on it to fool around the camp, or make enemies. I’ve kept my mouth shut, and women don’t come in my catalogue because”—he stopped, flushed, looked embarrassed and then boyishly added—“because the reason I came West was to try to make money enough to marry a girl I grew up with back there in Iowa. And now—my God! What will she think when she hears of this!”
He rested his head in his arms on the table by which he sat and for a moment gave way to despair.
“There! There! Don’t take it to heart, son,” Goliath rumbled, laying his huge hand on the prisoner’s bent shoulders. “That girl is too good to hold anything against you if you’re proved innocent, and my pardner and me are goin’ to do that, or go the limit tryin’ to do it.”
But David sat apparently unmoved and with his eyes fixed absently on the window beyond.
“Come, come!” he said finally. “Pull yourself together and answer some more questions. Do you know a man named Shaughnessy, or one named Pinder, or one named MacPharlane?”
Ray looked up and appeared perplexed by this line of interrogation as he answered, “Why, yes. I know all three of them. They’re all of them good friends of mine. Mr. Shaughnessy wanted to buy my claim but I wouldn’t sell it at any price he would give. The best he would offer was a thousand dollars. Then Mr. Pinder came and told me confidentially that his ground, which is above mine, was no good and that he was going to sell to Shaughnessy for five hundred and advised me to sell out. After that Mr. MacPharlane came and I didn’t like him quite so well. He told me confidentially that Shaughnessy was a bad man to cross, and said that I ought to make friends with such a man rather than try to go against him in anything he was after, and intimated that Shaughnessy would make trouble for me if I didn’t sell. But of course I didn’t believe that and told him so in mighty plain language. He sort of lost his temper and let it out that the reason Shaughnessy wanted my claim was that he’s got those on both sides of my ground and, as I understand it, wants to get a solid unbroken string of claims which he’s going to sell to some capitalists back East, or make a stock company out of and sell stock; or something like that. But of course one can’t believe anything one hears from a fellow like that MacPharlane. I was too wise for that; and, besides, Shaughnessy doesn’t own them all because Pinder has a lot of ground—which proves that what MacPharlane said was a lie.”