"We won't say anything about this, gentlemen," Earle said quietly to the men.
That night Frank lay in the crowded lobby of the hotel, ears pricked toward the wide-screened dining-room door. He had already had his supper, out in the rear courtyard near the kitchen where many dishes rattled.
"Two porterhouse steaks—raw," Steve Earle had said.
"And a big dish of ice cream," Marian Earle had added with a smile, for old Frank was an epicure in his way.
And now the sheriff was telling the crowd about him.
"He followed that car for two hundred miles. That was nothin'—been huntin' all his life. But he kept out of sight—that's the thing! They never saw him, and he never left them. That's what put us on the trail. That's the reason the boy's eatin' supper with his father and mother in there instead of bein' out in the woods with them brutes."
He puffed at his cigar.
"Some men fishing in the mountains passed him. He tried to flag 'em. Yes, sir—that's what he tried to do. But they didn't catch on. Might have, but didn't. Next day they read in the papers about a boy and Irish setter being lost. Then they caught on and telephoned Mr. Earle."
"The woman that came in with the mother and went upstairs with her," asked a man, "who's she?"
The big sheriff took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the questioner with narrow, disapproving eyes.