To Property
Apply To Hugh McClintock
The owner of the printing plant looked the copy over a second time. “ ’Course, I’m not here to turn business away, Mr. McClintock, but—well, are the dodgers necessary? Wouldn’t the ad in the paper be enough?”
“Maybe so. But I want to be sure the owner sees it. I reckon I’ll take the bills, too,” Hugh said easily.
He hired an old coloured man to tack up the bills on buildings, fences, and posts. To make sure that they were in conspicuous places Hugh went along himself. He also made arrangements with saloon keepers and gambling house owners by which he was allowed to have the posters put on the walls of these resorts. His manner was so matter of fact that not one of his innocent accomplices suspected there was more behind the advertisement than appeared on the face of it.
“Fourteen notches. Looks like it might be Sam Dutch’s bowie you found, stranger,” one bartender suggested. “This camp sure howls, but I reckon it ain’t got many fourteen notchers. Only one far as I know.”
“If the knife belongs to Mr. Dutch he can have it by applying for it,” Hugh said mildly.
“I expect he can have ’most anything he wants in this man’s town if he sure enough asks for it,” the man in the apron grinned.
In the middle of the afternoon, at which hour he first daily appeared to the world, Sam Dutch slouched down town with a story already prepared to account for his battered face. The tale he meant to tell was that in the darkness he had fallen into a prospect hole and cut his cheeks, forehead, and lips on the sharp quartz he had struck.
On a telegraph pole near the end of Turkey Creek Avenue a poster caught his eye. He read it with mixed emotions. The predominating ones were rage, a fury of hate, and an undercurrent of apprehension. He tore the bill down and trampled it in the mud under his feet.