Treasure and Trouble Therewith Part 35

He was rewarded by seeing her s.h.i.+ft her head on the pillow that she might command him with a vivid, bird-bright eye.

"What about him?"

"Every thing, my dear. We've got him coming and going. We've got him dead to rights. He's a rogue and a thief."

With her hands spread flat on either side of her she raised herself to a sitting posture. Her face, framed in its bush of hair, had a look of strained, almost wild, inquiry.

"Thief!" she exclaimed.

"Yes. It's a honeycooler of a story. Burst out all of a sudden like a night blooming cereus. But before I say a word you've got to promise on everything you hold sacred that you won't breathe a word of it."

"I promise."

"It's only for a little while. It'll be public property in a day or two--Thursday or Friday maybe."

"I'm on. How is he a thief?"

Crowder told her. The story was clear in his head by this time, and he told it well, with the journalist's sense of its drama. As he spoke she drew up her knees and clasping her hands round them sat rigid, now and then as she met his eyes, raised to hers to see if she had caught a point, nodding and breathing a low, "I see--Go on."

When he had finished he looked at her with challenging triumph.

"Well--isn't it all I said it was?"

Already she showed the effect of it. There was color in her face, a dusky red on the high cheek bones.

"Yes--more. I didn't think--" She stopped and swallowed, her throat dry.

"Did you have the least idea, did he ever say a word to suggest he had anything as juicy as that in the background?"

"No. I can't remember all in a minute. But he never said much about himself; he was always asking about me." She paused, fixedly staring; then her glance, razor-sharp, swerved to the young man.

"Will he go to jail?"

"You bet he will. I'm not sure on just what count, but they'll find one that'll fit his case. He's as much a thief as either Knapp or Garland. He knew it wasn't Captain Kidd's treasure; he saw the papers. He can't play the baby act about being ignorant. The way he hid his loot proves that."

"Yes," she murmured. "He's a thief all right. He's bad every way."

"That's what I wanted you to see. That's why I told you. You can't go on caring now."

"No." Her voice was very low. "It puts the lid on that."

"You can thank G.o.d on your bended knees he threw you down."

"Oh, yes," she rocked her head slightly from side to side with an air of morose defiance, "I _can_."

"_Do_ you?" said the young man, leaning closer and looking into her face.

He was satisfied by what he saw. For a moment the old pride flamed up, a spark in the black glance, a haughty straightening of the neck.

"A common thief like him for my lover? Say, you know me, Charlie. I'd have killed myself, or maybe I'd have killed him."

Crowder had what he would have called "a hunch" that this might be true.

From his heart he exclaimed:

"Gee, I'm glad it's turned out the way it has!"

"So am I. Only I'm sorry for one thing. It's _you_ that have caught him, not _me_."

Crowder laughed.

"You Indian!" he said. "You red, revengeful devil!"

"Oh, I'm _that_!" she answered, with biting emphasis. "When I get a blow I want to give one. I don't turn the other cheek; I strike back--with a knife if I have one handy."

"Well, don't you bother about knives now. The hitting's going to be done for you. All you have to do is to sit still, like a perfect lady, and say nothing."

"Um." She paused, mused an instant, and then said: "You're sure you can't be mistaken?"

"Positive. Funny, isn't it? It was the paper that gave me the lead. Sort of poetic justice his being landed by that--the paper that had the article about you in it."

She looked at him, struck with a sudden idea:

"Perhaps it was that article that made him come to see me in the beginning."

Crowder smiled.

"I guess he wasn't bothering about articles just then. He'd used it to wrap the money in. It was all muddy and ragged, the lower half of the letter gone--the piece about you--got torn out by accident I guess. As I see it he happened to have the paper and when he got the sacks out of the ground, put some of 'em in it. Then when he was in the Whatcheer House he stuffed it in the hole under the floor. It was the handiest way to get rid of it."

Soon after that Crowder left, feeling that he had done a good work. The news had had the effect he had hoped it would. She was a different girl.

The last glimpse of her, sitting in that same att.i.tude with her hands clasped round her knees, showed her revitalized, alive once more, with something of the old brown and red vividness in her face.

When he had gone she remembered her letter. It was of no use now. She would have liked to recall it, but it was too late; the clock on the table marked eleven. Through the fitful sleep of her uneasy night it came back, invested by the magnifying power of dreams with a fantastic malignity; in waking moments showing as a bit of spite, dwindled to nothing before the forces gathering for Mayer's destruction.

CHAPTER XXVII

BAD NEWS

Old Man Haley's shack stood back from a branch road that wound down from Antelope across the foothills to Pine Flat. Commercial travelers, staging it from camp to camp, could see his roof over the trees, and sometimes the driver would point to it with his whip and tell how the old man--a survival of the early days--lived there alone cultivating his vegetable patch. In the last four or five years people said he had gone "nutty," had taken to wandering down the stream beds with his pickax and pan, but he was a harmless old body and seemed able to get along. He said he had a son somewhere who sent him money now and again, and he always had enough to keep himself in groceries and tobacco, which he bought at the general store in Pine Flat. Maybe you'd see him straying along, sort o' kind and simple, with his pick over his shoulder, smilin'

up at the folks in the stage.

On that Sunday when Mayer had made his last trip to Sacramento Old Man Haley had risen with the sun. While the rest of the world was slumbering on its pillow he was out among his vegetables, hoe in hand.

It was one of those mornings that deck with a splendor of blue and gold the foothill spring. The air was balmy, the sky a fleckless vault, where bird shapes floated on aerial currents or sped in jubilant flight. From the chaparral came the scents of sun-warmed foliage, the pungent odor of bay, the aromatic breath of pine, and the sweet, frail perfume of the chaparral flower. This flecked the hillside with its powdery blossom, a white blur among the glittering enamel of madrona leaves.

Old Man Haley, an ancient figure in his rusty overalls, paused in his labor to survey the sea of green from which he had wrested his garden.

His eye traveled slowly, for he loved it, and had grown to regard it as his own. Leaning on his hoe he looked upward over its tufted density and suddenly his glance lost its complacent vagueness and became sharp and fixed. Through the close-packed vegetation a zigzag movement descended as if a fissure of earth disturbance was stirring along the roots. After a moment's scrutiny he turned and sent a look, singularly alert, over the shack and the road beyond. Then, pursing his lips, he emitted a whistled bar of bird notes.