It was a good thing that the motor driver came back with them along the trail to Cobalt. There were times when the track branched deceptively, and they might have gone astray. It was he who shone his torch on the dusty earth and said, “This way. There’s the heart-shaped tread of the new tire I got on me back wheel.”
Also he enlivened a monotonous journey by his story of the coming of Neuburg to Cobalt.
There was that grim humor in it that Clement naturally connected with the mountain of a man and the circumstances.
Henry Gunning had been in a billiard saloon, “half-canned,” as the driver said, with “bootleg” whiskey. He had been bragging violently about the millionaire he’d be in ten minutes after his marriage. Neuburg had just walked into the billiard dive and looked at him—or rather looked over his shoulder.
Gunning had crumpled at once, and, a thing of limp fear had followed Neuburg “like a dorg.—”
“Jist like er dorg. Neuburg never said a word, but that Gunning feller put his moral tail between his hypothetical legs and went out arter him. When they made the train he was still follering th’ big man—without a word.”
The driver also told them about the coming of Heloise. He had been in that, too. He had heard that she was inquiring for Gunning, and, as he had seen all that had happened, he had “greased” along to the hotel. But, of course, he had not been allowed to get near Heloise.
“A woman with a glacial face handed me the frozen mitt,” he explained. “She come down an’ saw me in the lobby, and said she was glad to hear what I tole her, an’ it was very interesting, an’ she’d make a note o’ it, an’ here’s a dollar fer yer trouble an’ good-by.”
That was how Heloise had been fenced off from the truth.