“You carry good life insurance, Colonel?” asked drily the old forty-niner.
McClintock divided his command. One third of the men he left with Byers in charge of the Ground Hog. The rest he took with him to the other claims that had been jumped. One of these was deserted. At another they found the guard asleep. The jumpers on Scot’s claim surrendered at discretion to superior numbers. Those who had been left at Vicky’s fired a few wild shots, but as soon as they learned that the Ground Hog had been captured they gave up with the honours of war.
The battle of Bald Knob had been won by the attackers with no casualties.
CHAPTER XXXIX
SLEUTHING
Scot was called back to Carson on official business, so that it was Hugh who entrained for Austin to join Browning on his search for evidence. In the old days of the pony express the boy rider had seen Austin a score of times. It was in the heart of a desert that stretched six hundred miles from east to west, a desert walled in by the Rockies on one side and the Sierras on the other. The town lay huddled between the sides of a cañon which ran sharply up from the Reese River valley. Houses were built everywhere and anywhere, on ground so steep that one side of a house often had a story more than the other. It was a place of dirty sprawling shacks surrounded by dry dusty plains upon which no birds or wild beasts could be seen. The note of the place was its raw crudeness. For here, half a thousand miles from San Francisco, the first wave of Pacific Coast migration had spent itself.
Yet even Austin had its social amenities—its churches, its schools, its first-class French restaurant, its theatre, and its daily paper. When Samuel Bowles of Springfield, Massachusetts, passed through the town in the middle ’sixties he found its barber shops as well equipped as those of New York and its baths as luxurious as continental ones.
Over a Chateaubriand with mushrooms, following a soup that could have been inspired only by a Gallic brain, Browning and McClintock sat at a small table in the famous French restaurant and discussed the problem before them. The lawyer had made small headway. He knew the date of William Thornton’s death. The man had fallen down a shaft while drunk two weeks after the date of the contract which the Dodsons held. He had found no evidence of any irregularity. Nobody he had met recalled a visit made by the Dodsons to town, but in the ebb and flow of the camp’s busy life they might have been here. For in the boom days hundreds of men drifted in and out each week.
Browning had worked at the court house. Hugh mixed with people at the post office and in saloons. A dozen times that day he turned the conversation upon Singlefoot Bill. He picked up a good deal of information about the habits of that eccentric character, but none of it seemed very much to the point. The first lead he struck was at the Mammoth Lager Beer Saloon, a big resort on the corner of Main and Virginia.
An old-timer had been telling a story about Thornton. After he had finished he pulled himself up and ruminated. “Doggone it, that wasn’t Singlefoot, either. It was his brother Chug.”