It was nearly eleven when the Limited drew in to Tucson. Sabin was on the platform anxiously awaiting their arrival. Collins reached him even before the conductor.
“Ordered the special, Mr. Sabin?” he asked, in a low voice.
The railroad man was chewing nervously on an unlit cigar. “Yes, sheriff. You want only an engine and one car, I suppose.”
“That will be enough. I’ve got to go uptown now and meet Dillon. Midnight sharp, please.”
“Do you know how much they got?” Sabin whispered.
“Thirty thousand, I hear, besides what they took from the passengers. The conductor will tell you all about it. I’ve got to jump to be ready.”
A disappointment awaited him in the telegrapher’s room at the depot. He found a wire, but not from the person he expected. The ranger in charge at Douglas said that Lieutenant O’Connor was at Flagstaff, but pending that officer’s return he would put himself under the orders of Sheriff Collins and wait for instructions.
The sheriff whistled softly to himself and scratched his head. Bucky would not have waited for instructions. By this time that live wire would have finished telephoning all over Southern Arizona and would himself have been in the saddle. But Bucky in Flagstaff, nearly three hundred miles from the battlefield, so far as the present emergency went, might just as well be in Calcutta. Collins wired instructions to the ranger and sent a third message to the lieutenant.
“I expect I’ll hear this time he’s skipped over to Winslow,” he told himself, with a rueful grin.
The special with the posse on board drew out at midnight sharp. It reached the scene of the holdup before daybreak. The loading board was lowered and the horses led from the car and picketed. Meanwhile two of the men lit a fire and made breakfast while the others unloaded the outfit and packed for the trail. The first faint streaks of gray dawn were beginning to fleck the sky when Collins and Dillon, with a lantern, moved along the railroad bed to the little clump of cottonwoods where the outlaws had probably lain while they waited for the express. They scanned this ground inch by inch. The coals where their camp-fire had been were still alive. Broken bits of food lay scattered about. Half-trampled into the ground the sheriff picked up a narrow gold chain and locket. This last he opened, and found it to contain a tiny photograph of a young mother and babe, both laughing happily. A close search failed to disclose anything else of interest.