The deputy forced her to commit herself more definitely. “Find out what?” 150
“Where I put the box.”
“I’ll go back and answer some of those other questions first. I might as well own up that I knew all the time your father didn’t hold up the stage.”
“You did?”
“He’s no fool. He wouldn’t leave his tracks all over the place where he had just held up a stage. He might jest as well have left a signed note saying he had done it. No, that didn’t look like Champ Lee to me. It seemed more likely he’d arrived after the show than before. It wouldn’t be like him, either, to go plowing up the side of the ditch, with his partner on the other side, making a trail that a blind man could follow in the night. Soon as I knew Lee and Boone made those tracks, I had it cinched that they were following the lateral to see where the robber was going. They had come to the same conclusion I had, that there wasn’t any way of escape except by that empty lateral, assuming it had been empty. The only point was to find out where the hold-up left the lateral. That’s why they rode one on each side of it. They weren’t missing any bets, you see.”
“And that’s why they drove the sheep down to water—to hide the wheel-tracks. I couldn’t understand that.”
“I must ’a’ been right on their heels, for they were jest getting the trotters out of the corral when I reached the place where your rig left the water. 151 ’Course I fell back into the brush and circled around so as to hit the store in front.”
“But if dad knew all the time, I don’t see—surely, he wouldn’t have come right after me and made plain the way I escaped.”
“That’s the point. He didn’t know. I reckon he was sort of guessing around in the dark, plumb puzzled; couldn’t find the switch at all at first. Then it come to him, and he thought of the sheep to blind the trail. If I’d been half a hour later he would have got away with it too. No, if he had guessed that you were in the hold-up, him and Boone would have hiked right out on a false trail and led us into the Galiuros. Having no notion of it at first, he trails you down.”
“And the gold—how did you find that?”