Kate called up the hotel where Maloney was staying at Saguache, but could not get him. She tried the Del Mar, where her father and his friends always put up when in town. She asked in turn for Mackenzie, for Yesler, for Alec Flandrau.
While she waited for an answer, the girl moved nervously about the room. She could not sit down or settle herself at anything. For some instinct told her that Fendrick’s taunt was not a lie cut out of whole cloth.
The bell rang. Instantly she was at the telephone. Mackenzie was at the other end of the line.
“Oh, Uncle Mac.” She had called him uncle ever since she could remember. “What is it they are saying about dad? Tell me it isn’t true,” she begged.
“A pack of lees, lassie.” His Scotch idiom and accent had succumbed to thirty years on the plains, but when he became excited it rose triumphant through the acquired speech of the Southwest.
“Then is he there—in Saguache, I mean.”
“No-o. He’s not in town.”
“Where is he?”
“Hoots! He’ll just have gone somewhere on business.”
He did not bluff well. Through the hearty assurance she pierced to the note of trouble in his voice.