Crooked Trails and Straight Read online

  Any theory of his disappearance that accepted his guilt did not occur to her mind for an instant. The two had been very close to each other. Luck had been in the habit of saying smilingly that she was his majordomo, his right bower. Some share of his lawless temperament she inherited, enough to feel sure that this particular kind of wrongdoing was impossible for him. He was reckless, sometimes passionate, but she did not need to reassure herself that he was scrupulously honest.

  This brought her back to the only other tenable hypothesis—foul play. And from this she shrank with a quaking heart. For surely if his enemies wished to harm him they would destroy him, and this was a conclusion against which she fought desperately.

  The plaza clock boomed ten strokes as they rode into Saguache. Mackenzie was waiting for them on the steps of the hotel.

  “Have they—has anything been——?”

  The owner of the Fiddleback shook his grizzled head. “Not yet. Didn’t you meet Curly?”

  “No.”

  “He rode out to come in with you, but if he didn’t meet you by ten he was to come back. You took the north road, I reckon?”

  “Yes.”

  His warm heart was wrung for the young woman whose fine eyes stared with dumb agony from a face that looked very white in the shining moonlight. He put an arm around her shoulders, and drew her into the hotel with cheerful talk.

  “Come along, Bob. We’re going to tuck away a good supper first off. While you’re eating, I’ll tell you all there is to be told.”

  Kate opened her lips to say that she was not hungry and could not possibly eat a bite, but she thought better of it. Bob had tasted nothing since noon, and of course he must be fed.

  The lad fell to with an appetite grief had not dulled. His cousin could at first only pick at what was set before her. It seemed heartless to be sitting down in comfort to so good a supper while her father was in she knew not how great distress. Grief swelled in her throat, and forced back the food she was trying to eat.

  Mackenzie broke off his story to remonstrate. “This won’t do at all, Kate. If you’re going to help find Luck, you’ve got to keep yourself fit. Now, you try this chicken, honey.”

  “I—just can’t, Uncle Mac.”

  “But you need it.”

  “I know,” the girl confessed, and as she said it broke down again into soft weeping.

  Mac let her have her cry out, petting her awkwardly. Presently she dried her eyes, set at her supper in a businesslike way, heard the story to an end quietly, and volunteered one heartbroken comment.

  “As if father could do such a thing.”

  The cattleman agreed eagerly. There were times when he was full of doubt on that point, but he was not going to let her know it.

  Curly came into the room, and the girl rose to meet him. He took her little hand in his tanned, muscular one, and somehow from his grip she gathered strength. He would do all that could be done to find her father, just as he had done so much to save her brother.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said simply.

  “I’m glad you’re glad,” he smiled cheerfully.

  He knew she had been crying, that she was suffering cruelly, but he offered her courage rather than maudlin sympathy. Hope seemed to flow through her veins at the meeting of the eyes. Whatever a man could do for her would be done by Curly.

  They talked the situation over together.

  “As it looks to me, we’ve got to find out two things—first, what has become of your father, and, second, who did steal that money.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Mackenzie agreed. “I always did say you had a good head, Curly.”

  “I don’t see it yet, but there’s some link between the two things. I mean between the robbery and his disappearance.”

  “How do you mean?” Kate asked.

  “We’ll say the robbers were his enemies—some of the Soapy Stone outfit maybe. They have got him out of the way to satisfy their grudge and to make people think he did it. Unfortunately there is evidence that makes it look as if he might have done it—what they call corroborating testimony.”

  Billie Mackenzie scratched his gray poll. “Hold on, Curly. This notion of a link between the hold-up and Luck’s leaving is what the other side is tying to. Don’t we want to think different from them?”

  “We do. They think he is guilty. We know he isn’t.”

  “What does Sheriff Bolt think?”

  Curly waved the sheriff aside. “It don’t matter what he thinks, Miss Kate. He says he thinks Luck was mixed up in the hold-up. Maybe that’s what he thinks, but we don’t want to forget that Cass Fendrick made him sheriff and your father fought him to a fare-you-well.”

  “Then we can’t expect any help from him.”

  “Not much. He ain’t a bad fellow, Bolt ain’t. He’ll be square, but his notions are liable to be warped.”

  “I’d like to talk with him,” the young woman announced.

  “All right,” Mackenzie assented. “To-morrow mo’ning——”

  “No, to-night, Uncle Mac.”

  The cattleman looked at her in surprise. Her voice rang with decision. Her slight figure seemed compact of energy and resolution. Was this the girl who had been in helpless tears not ten minutes before?

  “I’ll see if he’s at his office. Maybe he’ll come up,” Curly said.

  “No. I’ll go down to the courthouse if he’s there.”

  Flandrau got Bolt on the telephone at his room. After a little grumbling he consented to meet Miss Cullison at his office.

  “Bob, you must go to bed. You’re tired out,” his cousin told him.

  “I ain’t, either,” he denied indignantly. “Tired nothing. I’m going with you.”

  Curly caught Kate’s glance, and she left the boy to him.

  “Look here, Bob. We’re at the beginning of a big job. Some of us have to keep fresh all the time. We’ll work in relays. To-night you sleep so as to be ready to-morrow.”

  This way of putting it satisfied the boy. He reluctantly consented to go to bed, and was sound asleep almost as soon as his head struck the pillow.

  At the office of the sheriff, Kate cut to essentials as soon as introductions were over.

  “Do you think my father robbed the W. & S. Express Company, Mr. Bolt?” she asked.

  Her plainness embarrassed the officer.

  “Let’s took at the facts, Miss Cullison,” he began amiably. “Then you tell me what you would think in my place. Your father needed money mighty bad. There’s no doubt at all about that. Here’s an envelope on which he had written a list of his debts. You’ll notice they run to just a little more than twenty thousand. I found this in his bedroom the day he disappeared.”

  She took the paper, glanced at it mechanically, and looked at the sheriff again. “Well? Everybody wants money. Do they all steal it?”

  “Turn that envelope over, Miss Cullison. Notice how he has written there half a dozen times in a row, ‘$20,000,’ and just below it twice, ‘W. & S. Ex. Co.’ Finally, the one word, ‘To-night.’”

  She read it all, read it with a heart heavy as lead, and knew that there he had left in his own strong, bold handwriting convincing evidence against himself. Still, she did not doubt him in the least, but there could be no question now that he knew of the intended shipment, that absent-mindedly he had jotted down this data while he was thinking about it in connection with his own debts.

  The sheriff went on tightening the chain of evidence in a voice that for all its kindness seemed to her remorseless as fate. “It turns out that Mr. Jordan of the Cattleman’s National Bank mentioned this shipment to your father that morning. Mr. Cullison was trying to raise money from him, but he couldn’t let him have it. Every bank in the city refused him a loan. Yet next morning he paid off two thousand dollars he owed from a poker game.”

  “He must have borrowed the money from some one,” she said weakly.

  “That money he paid in twenty-dollar bills. The stolen express package
was in twenties. You know yourself that this is a gold country. Bills ain’t so plentiful.”

  The girl’s hand went to her heart. Faith in her father was a rock not to be washed away by any amount of evidence. What made her wince was the amount of circumstantial testimony falling into place so inexorably against him.

  “Is that all?” she asked despairingly.

  “I wish it were, Miss Cullison. But it’s not. A man came round the corner and shot at the robber as he was escaping. His hat fell off. Here it is.”

  As Kate took the hat something seemed to tighten around her heart. It belonged to her father. His personality was stamped all over it. She even recognized a coffee stain on the under side of the brim. There was no need of the initials L. C. to tell her whose it had been. A wave of despair swept over her. Again she was on the verge of breaking down, but controlled herself as with a tight curb.

  Bolt’s voice went on. “Next day your father disappeared, Miss Cullison. He was here in town all morning. His friends knew that suspicion was fastening on him. The inference is that he daren’t wait to have the truth come out. Mind, I don’t say he’s guilty. But it looks that way. Now, that’s my case. If you were sheriff in my place, what would you do?”

  Her answer flashed back instantly. “If I knew Luck Cullison, I would be sure there was a mistake somewhere, and I would look for foul play. I would believe anything except that he was guilty—anything in the world. You know he has enemies.”

  The sheriff liked her spirited defense no less because he could not agree with her. “Yes, I know that. The trouble is that these incriminating facts don’t come in the main from his enemies.”

  “You say the robber had on his hat, and that somebody shot at him. Whoever it was must know the man wasn’t father.”

  Gently Bolt took this last prop from her hope. “He is almost sure the man was your father.”

  A spark of steel came into her dark eyes. “Who is the man?”

  “His name is Fendrick.”

  “Cass Fendrick?” She whipped the word at him, leaning forward in her chair rigidly with her hands clenched on the arms of it. One could have guessed that the sound of the name had unleashed a dormant ferocity in her.

  “Yes. I know he and your father aren’t friends. They have had some trouble. For that reason he was very reluctant to give your father’s name.”

  The girl flamed. “Reluctant! Don’t you believe it? He hates Father like poison.” A flash of inspiration came to her. She rose, slim and tall and purposeful. “Cass Fendrick is the man you want, and he is the man I want. He robbed the express company, and he has killed my father or abducted him. I know now. Arrest him to-night.”

  “I have to have evidence,” Bolt said quietly.

  “I can give you a motive. Listen. Father expected to prove up yesterday on his Del Oro claim. If he had done so Cass Fendrick’s sheep would have been cut off from the water. Father had to be got out of the way not later than Wednesday, or that man would have been put out of business. He was very bitter about it. He had made threats.”

  “It would take more than threats to get rid of the best fighting man in Arizona, right in the middle of the day, in the heart of the town, without a soul knowing about it.” The officer added with a smile: “I’d hate to undertake the contract, give me all the help I wanted.”

  “He was trapped somehow, of course,” Curly cut in. For he was sure that in no other way could Luck Cullison have been overcome.

  “If you’ll only tell me how, Flandrau,” Bolt returned.

  “I don’t know how, but we’ll find out.”

  “I hope so.”

  Kate felt his doubt, and it was like a spark to powder.

  “Fendrick is your friend. You were elected by his influence. Perhaps you want to prove that Father did this.”

  “The people elected me, Miss Cullison,” answered Bolt, with grave reproach. “I haven’t any friends or any enemies when it comes to doing what I’ve sworn to do.”

  “Then you ought to know Father couldn’t have done this. There is such a thing as character. Luck Cullison simply couldn’t be a thief.”

  Mackenzie’s faith had been strengthened by the insistent loyalty of the girl. “That’s right, Nick. Let me tell you something else. Fendrick knew Luck was going to prove up on Thursday. He heard him tell us at the Round-Up Club Tuesday morning.”

  The sheriff summed up. “You’ve proved Cass had interests that would be helped if Mr. Cullison were removed. But you haven’t shaken the evidence against Luck.”

  “We’ve proved Cass Fendrick had to get Father out of the way on the very day he disappeared. One day later would have been too late. We’ve shown his enmity. Any evidence that rests on his word is no good. The truth isn’t in the man.”

  “Maybe not, but he didn’t make this evidence.”

  Kate had another inspirational flash. “He did—some of it. Somehow he got hold of father’s hat, and he manufactured a story about shooting it from the robber’s head. But to make his story stick he must admit he was on the ground at the time of the hold-up. So he must have known the robbery was going to take place. It’s as plain as old Run-A-Mile’s wart that he knew of it because he planned it himself.”

  Bolt’s shrewd eyes narrowed to a smile. “You prove to me that Cass had your father’s hat before the hold-up, and I’ll take some stock in the story.”

  “And in the meantime,” suggested Curly.

  “I’ll keep right on looking for Luck Cullison, but I’ll keep an eye on Cass Fendrick, too.”

  Kate took up the challenge confidently. “I’ll prove he had the hat—at least I’ll try to pretty hard. It’s the truth, and it must come out somehow.”

  After he had left her at the hotel, Curly walked the streets with a sharp excitement tingling his blood. He had lived his life among men, and he knew little about women and their ways. But his imagination seized avidly upon this slim, dark girl with the fine eyes that could be both tender and ferocious, with the look of combined delicacy and strength in every line of her.

  “Ain’t she the gamest little thoroughbred ever?” he chuckled to himself. “Stands the acid every crack. Think of her standing pat so game—just like she did for me that night out at the ranch. She’s the best argument Luck has got.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER VI

  TWO HATS ON A RACK

  One casual remark of Mackenzie had given Kate a clew. Even before she had explained it, Curly caught the point and began to dig for the truth. For though he was almost a boy, the others leaned on him with the expectation that in the absence of Maloney he would take the lead. Before they separated for the night he made Mackenzie go over every detail he could remember of the meeting between Cullison and Fendrick at the Round-Up Club. This was the last time the two men had been seen together in public, and he felt it important that he should know just what had taken place.

  In the morning he and Kate had a talk with his uncle on the same subject. Not content with this, he made the whole party adjourn to the club rooms so that he might see exactly where Luck had sat and the different places the sheepman had stood from the time he entered until the poker players left.

  Together Billie Mackenzie and Alec Flandrau dramatized the scene for the young people. Mac personated the sheepman, came into the room, hung up his hat, lounged over to the poker table, said his little piece as well as he could remember it, and passed into the next room. Flandrau, Senior, taking the role of Cullison, presently got up, lifted his hat from the rack, and went to the door.

  With excitement trembling in her voice, the girl asked an eager question. “Were their hats side by side like that on adjoining pegs?”

  Billie turned a puzzled face to his friend. “How about that, Alec?”

  “That’s how I remember it.”

  “Same here, my notion is.”

  “Both gray hats?” Curly cut in.

  His uncle looked helplessly at the other man. “Can’t be sure of that. Luck’s was gray a
ll right.”

  “Cass wore a gray hat too, seems to me,” Mackenzie contributed, scratching his gray hair.

  “Did Father hesitate at all about which one to take?”

  “No-o. I don’t reckon he did. He had turned to ask me if I was coming—wasn’t looking at the hats at all.”

  Curly looked at Kate and nodded. “I reckon we know how Cass got Mr. Cullison’s hat. It was left on the rack.”

  “How do you mean?” his uncle asked.

  “Don’t you see?” the girl explained, her eyes shining with excitement. “Father took the wrong hat. You know how absent-minded he is sometimes.”

  Mackenzie slapped his knee. “I’ll bet a stack of blues you’ve guessed it.”

  “There’s a way to make sure,” Curly said.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Fendrick couldn’t wear Mr. Cullison’s hat around without the risk of someone remembering it later. What would he do then?”

  Kate beamed. “Buy another at the nearest store.”

  “That would be my guess. And the nearest store is the New York Emporium. We’ve got to find out whether he did buy one there on Tuesday some time after nine o’clock in the morning.”

  The girl’s eyes were sparkling. She bustled with businesslike energy. “I’ll go and ask right away.”

  “Don’t you think we’d better let Uncle Alec find out? He’s not so likely to stir up curiosity,” Curly suggested.

  “That’s right. Let me earn my board and keep,” the owner of the Map of Texas volunteered.

  Within a quarter of an hour Alec Flandrau joined the others at the hotel. He was beaming like a schoolboy who has been given an unexpected holiday.

  “You kids are right at the head of the class in the detective game. Cass bought a brown hat, about 9:30 in the mo’ning. Paid five dollars for it. Wouldn’t let them deliver the old one but took it with him in a paper sack.”