Crooked Trails and Straight by William MacLeod Raine (best large ebook reader .txt) 📖

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.”