Everybody's Magazine/Proofs Positive

by Raymond S. Spears

 

Proofs Positive

By Raymond S. Spears

A Thrilling Complete Novel of a Murder
Mystery that Baffled a Western Desert Town

CHAPTER I

The New Jail

THERE were two minds about the reinforced concrete steel prison which had been built for the sheriff's department in Sun Pasture County. The idea was to save the county the expense of boarding prisoners in secure restraint elsewhere and also to bid for accommodation of culprits from other counties not yet in a position or mood to have cages of their own. A new bond issue made the project irksome to some people.

Jerry Macon, 27 years of age, accused of loitering, was the first prisoner. He went up for 40 days less 1. To have only one so insignificant a prisoner in so expensive a house of detention enabled the wits to exercise their fires in scorn and stinging remarks. Raining Sands, the county seat, consisted largely of dobe and other one story buildings spread over a wide domain. The jail loomed huge, even in comparison with the courthouse, which was a small dobe structure eventually to be replaced by an adequate brick and concrete residence of the Law.

Emma Dolind, daughter of the sheriff, took particular offense when she read the covert slurs in the Sun Foundry which was edited by Deck Rankin. Especially she resented one item which she clipped for reference:

 

OCCUPIED!

Sheriff Dolind is rejoicing in the fact that his new Pen de Luxe is now occupied by an unwilling resident, a tiny fellow about the size of a gopher and therefore a good test of the security of the jail. A new cage is apt to have a few holes and exits overlooked. So, if Jerry the Lingerer does not slip out, we can breathe in peace, knowing that a more important bird or beast will not be able to dig, climb or burst out—an important consideration if some of the desperadoes rambling around at large in our bright and happy land ever happen to be caught. A hobo must feel embarrassed by such munificent surroundings, so much lug put on for so trivial a purpose.

 

Emma Dolind knew how square and unflinching her father was. She neither cared nor understood the exigencies of county affairs, but in a purely personal capacity she headed for the office of the offending newspaper, looking for the editor who had aroused her ire.

She had known Rankin long enough for his offense to seem that much worse. He was clever, handsome and one of her own kind of people. As she entered, she saw his face light with a quick smile of welcome, which gave her an advantage she had not anticipated. Instantly she attacked him with a tongue as sharp as his own and with a cruel boldness beyond his own careless humor and clever words.

She sought to hurt him with every word, glance and gesture. And she rejoiced in his visible wincing. When, for want of breath, she paused, he told her some things she had never known. Rankin, too, had his grievances. He had had advantage taken of his inexperience, his youthfulness, his lack of friends; and even his high ideals had been slurred. And when he had had his say, she stood nonplused by this view of the other side of things. It was true. Her father had scorned the outsider with more education than experience. Surprised, with no word for rebuttal, she scurried forth—for once, speechless.

Bystanders carried the story of her rebuff to her father who was angry at the interference with his affairs.

“Look here, Emma,” he told her angrily, “I wish you'd mind your own business. I can take care of my job without your help. What'll the boys think, you running around protecting me with petticoats!”

She laughed gayly in his face; for she had her way, always. She came and went as she pleased. Catching the hem of her skirt, making a pair of wings, she danced a saucy measure, her heels and toes twinkling. He knew she had learned that down at the Tivle Dance Hall, to which, perhaps, had she had a mother's watchful training, she would never have gone.

She knew everybody. She understood all the books she read and now she was meddling in what her father called his own affairs. She mocked his helplessness and exasperation, and then coaxed him back to smiling admiration and pride. Sheriff Dolind was a two hundred pound, rotund, smooth shaven, hardy man. He was unflinchingly honest in his performance of every duty as he saw it. He could boss everyone but his own daughter, whose caprice was much the more interesting because of her wilfulness.

Having snapped her fingers in an editor's face, forcing explanations, and having laughed her father into good nature, the whimsy took her to order her horse saddled for a ride in the starlight. No one ever knew what to expect of her. One time she had even ridden down the street, shooting it up for excitement. And her own father had demanded that the city recorder punish her exuberance of spirits by sending her to jail. Instead, the judge fined her ten dollars and remarked that Raining Sands needed some excitement once in a while.

“Lend me ten dollars!” she asked her father, who turned his back in one of his bursts of disciplinary temper, stalking out of the courtroom.

“I'll pass the hat,” said the city marshal, grinning; he had made the arrest. And so everybody chipped in to make up the sum of the punishment.

Nearly three hours after Emma Dolind was seen riding out into the desert night, the Tivle Dance Hall on the Busy Corner was in its usual Saturday night stride, noisy, joyous, and doing a big business. The music was strident and wailing, booming in the desert gloom. Dancers were pounding the floor with rhythmic stamp and scuffle. The gamblers, far quieter, were playing at their various specialties, the games running high and reckless. The bar was lined with a clientele who came and went.

Wakeful Sam Lucern was the proprietor, a slithery, sharp featured, cunning man of medium height and swift gracefulness. He moved back and forth noiselessly. His quick eyes noted details: the gamblers at the tables, how their stacks stood; the bartenders, whether they were working right; the floor manager, whether he was keeping the music according to the merry makers' desires and if he was properly holding in check the reckless, keeping everything far within the bounds prescribed by his own innate sense of propriety and good business.

Tonight he was particularly pleased with the appearances. The intake was unusually heavy and profitable. There wasn't a sorehead anywhere making a nuisance of himself. The laughter was really gay. The losers along the tables were taking their luck in good part; and there were winners, too, who showed that the house was on the level. There wasn't a jarring note anywhere in the vibrant undertone.

ABOUT eleven o'clock Lucern slipped around to take up surpluses and to empty the tills at the bar and the ticket office. He filled a good sized canvas bag with stacks of metal and wads of paper money, currency of many kinds. When the round had been made, he carried the toll upstairs into the office, where he emptied it on a hardwood table with a polished surface, and with swift, accustomed fingers sorted out the small stuff and shaped up the large certificates in bank clerk's stacks. He had four thousand, six hundred and seventy eight dollars by the tallies, and he turned with a glow of satisfaction toward the vaultlike safe which had been bricked into the center of the big building.

Throwing the combination, a turn this way and a half that, he opened the thick door and snapped out the wide, deep cash drawer. On the instant a light, mocking voice, feminine and low, chuckled in his ear, as something prodded against his spine, not too gently.

“Up—so!” he heard.

Lucern froze, helpless. He tended to his money alone. No one saw the inner details of the Tivle Dance Hall finances. He felt his own revolver drawn from its holster under his coat; and then a small hand swiftly frisked the two automatics which he kept flat and convenient up under his armpits. Lucern started to face about, but as he did so, the intruder's voice gave swift warning:

“You turn your nose and I'll sure make a bridge opening through it. Get over into the corner there!”

Lucern's nose was pointed, prominent. He felt a certain assurance that the invader would spoil his rather good looks. He started for the corner, and took a sidelong glance into the mirror he had thoughtfully placed on the wall. He stopped short, amazed by what he saw.

He had seen Emma Dolind too often, knew her too well, not to recognize this slim, trim, girlish figure in her skirt, riding boots, gauntlets, ornate ammunition belt and pretty holsters.

He had watched her a long time, speculatively, wondering when she would make a serious break in her reckless exuberance. Raining Sands offered one of her tremendous activity little enough to do. She craved occupation, demanded something going on. He might have surmised she would sometime undertake a holdup just for the excitement and adventure. And there she was. Sure—it was a joke!

As Lucern stopped in the corner like a dunce, he heard the currency from his cash drawer in the vault chunking and plopping into the canvas bag on top of the close packed contents. He chuckled, for she was carrying her joke to a point where it had a tang to it. He grinned as he reflected that unquestionably some of the boys had seen her come and allowed her to sneak in on him. They, too, probably were in on the humor of it. Anyhow, they wouldn't interfere with the sheriff's daughter if she wanted to go into Lucern's office. Hardly!

A quick breath and the soft sound of footfalls indicated the end of the job. The holdup had the money bagged, and now would be a good time to laugh and let the girl know how appreciative the victim was of such a genuine piece of good humor which would go big in Raining Sands. Sure!

Wakeful Sam lowered his hands and turned, a smile beginning to break across his countenance. On the instant there was a crashing shot and through the gambler's large nose, creasing his cheek on both sides smashed a bullet. The blow blinded him for the instant, as he grabbed with both hands at the bridge. Undercut, as the holdup had promised!

Lucern staggered, leaning against the table, shaking his head and blinking, trying to see. Dimly he was able to make out the things as they instantly continued to happen. The light went out as the invader switched off the globes in the office. The door flung open. The yelps and cries, as those outside greeted the heavy shot, showed that attention was instant.

As the holdup ran out into the upper landing, there was a yell and then another shot. The scream of a hard hit man in frightful agony. The running patter of light feet and the scurrying about of a crowd, none of whom knew what to do.

The wounded man outside fell to the floor heavily. Lucern recognized the voice. It was Dickers, his special manager guard who always hung around at money collecting time.

“Catch her! Stop her!” Lucern shouted, recovering first. “The back way. Around the front. Hustle!”

Then Lucern dropped on his knees beside the wounded man, who, after the first hurt, quieted and immediately began to whisper in his employer's ear.

“I seen 'twas sheriff's girl, so I thought 'twas all right,” the guard said. “Course, I did! I seen her come in out the back, along the corridor in here upstairs. I tell you I knowed her!”

“Don't tell nobody else!” Lucern begged. “Don't let on! Sheriff's a friend of mine. Emma's run hog wild! At the same time—likely it's just foolishness. Anyhow—Dolind's been friendly.”

“I'll keep still, sure,” the wounded man promised. “I'm done, Lucern. Pull off my boots, will yo'? Then tell my folks I didn't die in 'em. You know 'em—back East ... Nice and respectable. I'd hate to have 'em know I was shot—by a girl holdup!”

The men downstairs were dashing around outside to head off the raider. Some time had been lost in bumping confusion and through the switching off of the lights at the big lever. The holdup had more than sixty seconds start. A dozen had caught a glimpse of a slight figure upstairs, in skirts and wide brimmed hat, pretty boots and yellow gauntlets, darting past with a smoking gun in one hand and a dirty canvas bag in the other.

But when the hunters, who dashed outside, circled around and sought to head the bandit off, they found no one. A group went up one alley, another circled around the block, a third man ran down the street; and, in ten minutes, more than a hundred men were circling and dashing around on the lookout.

Somewhere in burrows or passageways, over a roof or through a hallway, the escape was safely made—at least for the present. The city marshal, two or three deputy sheriffs, scores of volunteers kept up the search; but the quarry had made a clean getaway.

CHAPTER II

A Sheriff's Grim Duty

WHEN Dr. Evans was dressing the disfiguring wound of Wakeful Sam Lucern, a bystander began to talk.

“By gad, I'd know her any——”

“Shut up!” Lucern shouted. “You don't know anything! If you think you do open yer head.”

The proprietor had recovered his own weapons, except one of the small automatic pistols which search in the office had failed to reveal. The holdup had thrown Lucern's revolver behind the heavy typewriter desk, and the other pistol of the pair was found in the corridor. For once, the Tivle establishment's conveniences for a quick, obscure escape had been used against the owner. Moreover, it would take a lot of beautifying to restore even ordinary looks to what had been a face in which Lucern took pride.

City Marshal Searls heard about the shooting a few minutes after it happened. When he arrived at the amusement palace, he found a dead man stretched on the floor and Wakeful Sam Lucern with a wide, white bandage across the middle of his face.

“What happened, Wakeful?” Searls asked.

“Holdup. A cowgirl in skirts, boots, gauntlets, and mask raided us.”

“Get much?”

“Better than fifteen thousand.”

“My land!”

“Killed Dickers ... Look what she did to me! Right through my nose—with a .45.”

“One of the girls did it?” the marshal exclaimed, glancing around at the crowd in the open rotunda upstairs. The dance hall business had stopped short at the excitement.

“She came in by the outside back stairs. Caught me in front of the safe as I tucked away some spare cash. She stood me in the corner like a fool. When I turned, she smashed my nose ... Dickers was waiting outside, and as he pulled, she shot upwards from the hip.”

“He was guarding you?”

“He saw her come. Thought it was a friend, he said, as he passed out.”

“What friend?”

Lucern shook his head.

“He didn't say.”

The Saturday evening sports were broken up by the incident. The Raining Sands populace moved away homeward, having heard and discussed the matter. The dispersion was simultaneous as by a common impulse. Cowmen and other visitors from out of town worked away from the Tivle to where their horses were standing along the rails. From down in the livery barn came the sound of tramping horses, uneasy in strange quarters, buckboards and and other vehicles along the walls indicating how some of the strangers in town would take their departure with loads of mine or ranch supplies.

The crowd had just nicely scattered, small groups and individuals going their respective ways, when, coming in from the big irrigation project with its new alfalfa squares, the quick, accustomed ears of the open country riders heard the sound of an approaching rider thumping on the baked clay of the hard road. An instant later several recognized the easy gait of the running animal, and passed the word around with excited ejaculations.

A little later they saw, coming under the outlying electric light, a rider whose spangles sparkled and whose animal covered the ground with a swift, enduring gait. The spectators who were in mid street hastily backed to the nearest side. From shadows and in backgrounds the ones who had just left the Tivle saw the daughter of the sheriff, Emma Dolind, going by, wearing a wide hat, divided skirts, gauntlets, a gray waist. But with a dark neckerchief knotted around her throat—rather than across her face!

She seemed to notice none of the spectators. She romped on by and turned to the northward. Those who dashed to the corner saw her throw the reins to the livery barn hostler and go on swift footsteps toward the big gray jail sparkling in the starlight in the way of new concrete structures which loom in the deserts.

No one made any comments. A distinct silence rested upon the tightly pressed lips of a hundred or so discreet men and their feminine companions. The homesteaders, irrigation farmers, cowmen, prospectors and what not took their departure without even a yell, or a whisper which the echoes might repeat. Miles out on the rolling desert, as they followed the trails to their abiding places, couples might venture to talk in tones a lurking wolf or owl could not detect at twenty yards. But where there were more than two, no one said a word. It never did any man any good to talk about a lady.

Thereafter, during the sunrise period and the brightness of the day, even garrulous old grannies among camp cooks and hard rock men in the mines, in cow outfits and pottering for commercial emporiums went around with visibly swelling throats, just bursting to talk—yet afraid to say one word.

“'Tain't none of my business!” City Marshal Searls declared, in a kind of whimpering exasperation. “Course, I heard some say ... But what's a man going to do, when them as is most concerned won't talk atall, so's you can swear out a warrant, or sunthin'?”

NO ONE notified Sheriff Dolind till the following morning after nine o'clock. He came downtown and picked up the twice a week Sun Foundry. He saw an account of the holdup on the front page.

 

An unknown bandit shot and killed Dan Dickers, while holding up the Tivle last night. The desperado also shot Wakeful Sam Lucern through the bridge of his nose, gashing both cheeks. The bandit got away with more than fifteen thousand dollars.

 

The sheriff read on till he had obtained the account of what was news to him. The coroner had been called. City Marshal Searls had been summoned. Deputy Sheriff Jim Cook had organized a thorough search for the holdup. Dolind read with increasing dismay the only description of the invader——

 

According to the spectators, the holdup was dressed in a leathery skirt, with silver bangles and a studded belt around the waist. She wore a waist of dark material and had dusty laced riding boots and a gray felt hat with a wide brim. Her gauntlets were fringed and chrome gray, tanned. Around her face was tied a black or dark brown silk handkerchief. Her voice was throaty and penetrating, several hearing her tones through the walls of the office; or perhaps the door was ajar. She was swift, agile and sure, and her marksmanship was as deadly as it was prompt. When Lucern turned his head as she left the office, she made a bridge of his nose as she had warned, turning to throw a bullet upward from the lower ribs into the left shoulder of the unfortunate Dickers who had seen the visitor enter, but supposed it was one of the girls who sometimes visit the Tivle clandestinely, on errands of their own.

 

Dolind went to his office in the old dobe county court building. He was angry to think that nearly twelve hours should have elapsed without any one informing him of the murder and robbery. He stormed down on Jim Cook, who was red eyed with weariness and incessant searching. The coroner and the city marshal, too, had been up all night. The prosecuting attorney, Richard Curlew, was putting the statements of witnesses into affidavits. Even the adminstration's enemy, Deck Rankin, had heard the story and written it for the paper.

Sheriff Dolind seldom lost his temper, being more inclined to feeling sorry than angry. Now his urbane manner gave way to the hot indignation of a man who knew he hadn't been treated right, who felt that someone had taken advantage of his good nature. He talked right out loud, careless of who heard him. County Judge Pressley took him into the consultation chambers and with embarrassed reluctance, said:

“My laws, Dolind, what else could the boys do!”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Don't you know ... Is that right, Sheriff?”

“Isn't that what I'm kicking about, Judge?”

“Oh—ah—um!” Pressley wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Why, we thought it was just a good bluff you were throwing——”

“You blamed scoundrel! Why'd I bluff?”

“A dozen saw her, Sheriff. Wakeful refused to make a complaint. Emma did it. What other girl could have shot like that?”

“Emma did it! My girl Emma did it?” Sheriff Dolind repeated, swallowing hard against the words. “You say Emma ... Why—why——”

Dolind shook and swayed, his eyes bulging as they rolled in their sockets.

“Emma killed a man! Emma robbed the Tivle! Why—why—Judge!”

Pressley eased the stunned sheriff into a chair and sat down beside him, patting him on the shoulder.

“There, there,” the judge exclaimed “The proof's lacking. Probably she was joking——”

“My Gawd! Murder for a joke!” the sheriff gasped. “That's no joke ... I'm—I'm sheriff. I'm—I'm responsible. I swore to do my duty——”

“Now look here, don't! Not so loud!” Pressley urged, “Don't——”

Sheriff Dolind rose from his chair. He could hardly lift himself at the start, but as he came erect his haggard face hardened. His eyes narrowed. His jaws set.

“I swore to do my duty, Judge!” he declared, a low growl in his tone.

Judge Pressley backed away. He was himself a stickler for the letter of the law, yet gifted in the arrangement of that alphabetical phenomenon. He had sat in with Sheriff Dolind in many political and governmental conferences. He had found the old boy easy, good-humored, and on the level. They had compromised sensibly all along the line, easing up here and pressing down there, in the practical ways of politics. Yet rather better in the observance of their code of honor, their standards on a rather higher plane, than most of their constituents. They had shaded in favor of mistaken wrongdoers. Pressley faced now a man who refused to take advantage of power in his own behalf.

“I'm going after her myself,” the sheriff declared, his voice hoarse with bitterness.

“You can't!” the Judge urged. “I tell you, there's no information! They won't testify——”

“Because she's my daughter!” Dolind brushed aside the technicality.

“You fool!” Pressley lost his temper. “She could sue you for false arrest. She'd hate you all the rest of your life.”

The father wavered. He stood like a wounded bull, his head swaying from side to side. He could think clearly, coherently; and yet on that account he was obliged to restrain his determination to force the issue. Accusation against him had hurt more than he was willing to admit. The Sun Foundry had blistered him personally and attacked his organization individually and collectively. Perhaps the new county jail had been a mistake; but it wasn't crooked. He was going to give the board of assessors particular and general Hades for their folly in doubling the taxes of Deck Rankin, keeping the rate up even after the editor-publisher had been in town two years and longer. That wasn't according to precedent. It showed malice. And stupidity.

“All right, Judge,” Dolind declared bruskly. “I have your word for it. Now I'll find out for myself.”

WHEN Sheriff Dolind charged out of the consultation chambers in the old courthouse, one look at him confirmed the rumor that now he had been told what was under the holdup news. He looked thirty pounds lighter, six inches taller, and as grim as he had that day three years before when he performed his duty as prescribed by law, hanging the son of one of his old, but now broken, friends for double murder. There had been no saving the boy, who had been bad, mean, sneaking, thieving. He had needed hanging if any one ever did. At the same time the sheriff had taken the job to heart.

Dolind headed for the Tivle Dance Hall. He barked a demand to know the whereabouts of Lucern. The proprietor was home in his private dobe house up the street. The sheriff went to the house. He found the man sleepless from pain and worn by weariness.

“Lucern,” Dolind demanded, “who robbed the Tivle?”

“I don't know,” the gambler replied.

“You lie. Tell me about it.”

The close set eyes of the man flared purple with anger, as though he would resent what he considered an insult; but after the first resentful shock at this accusation, Lucern's glare turned to one side. Dolind was good. And in this hot, hard mood it wasn't best to cross him. The sheriff had scant regard for personages.

“Speak up!” Dolind ordered. “If you don't. I'll take you downtown now on a charge of running a disorderly place. I want all you know. No more and no less.”

Lucern twisted as the flooding blood wrenched the wound in his face, throbbing in the lacerated nerves and aching across the broken flesh.

“Sheriff,” he said in a low voice, “honest to Gawd, I didn't see her face!”

“What did you see?”

The gambler told him. He gave the full account of what he had done.

“Dickers told you something as he died. What was it?”

“Who said——”

“The Sun Foundry. Speak up!”

“Why—why, Sheriff, he said he thought she was just coming to see me. That's all. Honest——”

“Thought who was——”

“Why Emma— My God! I mean the holdup!”

“Wakeful, you covered her up for me?”

“I thought it was a joke, Sheriff. It must of been an accident.”

“She'd been there to see you?”

“No. Never. Dancing some—that's all. She's a good kid, all right. Wild, some, but on the level. I always liked her. But she had no use for me at all. Give me a call down with trimmings when I—made a mistake.”

“What'd you cover it up for?”

“Why—I couldn't figure it out. I can't. I tell you, I thought it was a joke. Ye know, sometimes a joke runs out on a man.”

“You'll have to testify to it, Lucern,” Dolind declared.

“But she's your daughter, Sheriff!”

“That's it. I'm sheriff. She's gone the whole hog now——”

“It's murder. This holdup's a hanging crime....”

Dolind nodded. He couldn't speak. But the man who had all his life been a cheat and a quite successful scalawag, with a sense of propriety which never bound him to any code of honor, saw in the official a terrible sense of responsibility, one that would sternly answer to the hard est of demands upon him.

Dolind had broken through the barriers of reticence at their strongest point. He went downtown and rounded up the other reluctant witnesses. He collared them, literally, and standing over them in the district attorney's office repeated the questions heretofore asked in vain, and so the wretched story was at last written down in legal form.

When the testimony was all obtained, even Lucern's name being attached to the affidavit to which he protested every other phrase. Sheriff Dolind broke down and cried. Everyone had recognized his daughter's hat, waist, skirt and even her boots; the petite figure; her voice, even—hard and shrill with tense excitement, feminine and determined. They recognized, especially, her .45 revolver.

“We gott-a do it!” Dolind repeated over and over again. “But—Jim, old boy. You sign the information, won't ye?”

“Me!” Deputy Sheriff Jim Cook wailed. “My gosh, Sheriff!”

“I'd better,” the prosecuting attorney interrupted to save argument. “It's my duty, anyhow.” Thus they saved the stricken sheriff that.

Hours had elapsed. The morning had seen the gathering of a throng who had heard, not only of a murder, but the additional rumor that this was no commonplace crime. Whisperings repeated the guesses as to what was taking place in the minds of the authorities. The crowd was prepared for almost anything. And, when Deputy Sheriff Jim Cook headed out of the county courthouse, cursing over his shoulder at the men who had ordered him forth to duty, all caught the undertone.

He strode across the plaza and headed up the slight grade to where the new county jail stood on the corner across from a big, bare waste plot of ground. The sheriff lived in that jail, upstairs. Moodily the deputy plowed along, his lengthy legs jack-knifing with regular rhythm. The little crowd of curiosity seekers grouped opposite as he went into the ornate entrance, through the unlocked, but heavily barred gateway, bound for the interior.

HE WAS out of sight nearly an hour. When he emerged, Emma Dolind was with him, a tiny figure of a girl, her head erect, her back stiff, her eyes set, frightened and blinking. She walked with little steps, evidently forcing herself to maintain her composure.

Among the spectators was Deck Rankin, who did most of his own reporting for the Sun Foundry, especially concerning the big news events of which the county had aplenty. He had learned in New York how to gather facts and how to express them clearly; moreover, he added to his patient efforts the knack of saying things so readers remembered them. He crossed the street to follow the deputy and his prisoner downtown.

When they came to the courthouse, Rankin went into the judge's office. There were gathered most of the county officials. Sheriff Dolind sat huddled in a squat armchair, hanging on to all that remained of his nerve force. Enough of the crowding populace were allowed to enter the room so that the proceedings were according to the letter of the law, public.

Judge Pressley swiftly carried on with the formalities.

“You are accused of murder and robbery,” he said. “Anything you may say will be used against you. You are entitled to consult with an attorney at law. Do you wish to say anything?”

“Why, Judge!” her voice rose in high, shrill emphasis. “I haven't killed anybody. I haven't robbed anybody. I don't know a thing about it.”

“I am obliged to hold you for the action of the grand jury,” the judge declared in a sad, puzzled tone. “As the charge is murder, I cannot admit you to bail. I remand you into the custody of—of the sheriff.”

Dolind staggered to his feet, nearly fell and then stumbled over to where his daughter stood facing the desk of the judge. Pressley signed the commitment papers which the county clerk had prepared and, having blotted them, handed the slips to the sheriff, but without looking at the face of his confrère. In fact, he turned his head away.

“Oh, daddy!” the girl turned, blinking, to find her father looking in another direction, trying with shaking hands to fold up the two filled in blanks.

She drew back from that unaccustomed demeanor. Her glance swept the faces of the onlookers to see in their expressions the cold and deliberate stare with which people regard those fallen under the mandate of the law. No one seemed to recognize her in that guise. The group was composed of men and several women with whom she was acquainted. They were as expressionless as strangers.

Her gaze at last came to rest on Deck Rankin. She stared at him even more puzzled than ever. He alone seemed to be familiar to her. Always he had abused her father, so that she passed him by looking straight ahead to ignore his presence, though more than once she had carried items to the newspaper for publication, and had met him here and there around town.

Now she approached him two or three steps.

“Please, please!” she spoke in a low, tense whisper. “What does it mean? When did I kill anybody? What did I steal?”

She heard several sniff distinctly, and turned to see sneering smiles on several lips, recognizing in the eyes of others the hard look of disbelief. They thought she was trying to squeeze out of another escapade. They believed she was acting, all this surprise, this fear, this cringing to the weight of overwhelming dread of circumstances.

“Jim! Jim!” she heard her father's low and agonized voice. “I—I can't—Jim! You do it!”

So Jim Cook took the papers and dragged his scraping feet around the sheriff to where the girl stood, tapping her on the arm from force of habit. She turned to look up into his face, as rough and blotchy as turtle hide now, but his eyes determined and keen.

She swayed, her head shaking, and then leaned against the deputy's arm to go outside where he requisitioned a buckboard to carry her to the new jail—it's second prisoner.

CHAPTER III

Rankin's Big Story

DECK RANKIN sat with his notes of the killing raid on the Tivle Dance Hall, considering the dénouement in the arrest of the sheriff's daughter, Emma Dolind, on the charge of committing the crimes of robbery and murder. He had been a first class metropolitian newspaper reporter until one day he blew up at the futility of the daily grind and the unimportance of his anonymity as a newspaper man in the big organization of New York news collection. He had left all that he might have become to wander a year and a day in North American byways, with the result that he had discovered Sun Pasture County, Raining Sands and another newspaper man, an editor-publisher, who was as anxious to leave the wide deserts as Rankin had been to escape Manhattan Island.

Accordingly, the lure of the news reporting caught the wanderer again. He took hold of the dusty old shop and was circulating in six counties before he knew it, subscribers making him independent. Now and again a wide hatted bully had come sauntering into the office to lay down the rules of the wide open spaces. Somehow, Rankin had evaded any serious difficulty; a genial smile and a ready wit baffled those who could not quite comprehend his high ideals and unflinching sense of duty.

Rankin had little sympathy for the local politicians. They had repeatedly tried to force him either to ignore what he knew was first class news to which the public was entitled, or they had tried, through various artifices of their kind, to beguile him into publication of what was decidedly untrue. He had been obliged to adopt the rule of receiving from three different sources every news feature within the scope of the Sun Pasture County political, and even public, affairs, because the spirit of local affairs was to think it funny to persuade a newspaper to print a lie.

Now Rankin recognized the sheriff's tremendous sacrifice on the altar of what he conceived to be his duty. Old Dolind was big, burly, one of the crowd and a political politician of the wide desert country. He loved his daughter. His fellow officials had sought to protect him from even knowing that his daughter was suspected, had even been recognized without question, as a killing holdup. The official was instinctively a good police officer; and, when he felt the smothering blanket of evidence being held out, he had thrown off the network of obscurity and forced those who were most reluctant to see him hurt to reveal how far they had seen his daughter's wild pranks and reckless freedom carry her.

There was honor and greatness in the sheriff's bullheaded performance of his duty. His associates had found him easygoing, friendly and generally manageable. In party councils and the routine of official affairs he had given and taken, eased up here on a mortgage sale and overlooked there some trivial offense involving a cowboy on a toot. But horse thieves, cattle rustlers, desperadoes and outlaws—the criminals against whom the region's code of honor had drawn in self-defense a deadly, relentless edict ... Well, when the clear cut issue had been raised, here was Sheriff Dolind, shaken with personal grief, forcing the issue against even his own pretty and careless daughter.

“He could do a lot to me—after that!” Rankin thought to himself as he marshaled the facts of his biggest human interest story, adding, “Lordy, if I could only write it!”

Surmising that he could easily outrun the opportunity, slopping over, he held himself to the bare recital of the facts: How Sheriff Dolind had found his associates holding something out on him, how he brushed aside their efforts to hide from his ken the tragedy in his own family. And then the editor told the way the spirit of public duty surged uppermost in the father's heart and soul, refusing to protect even his own daughter if she had committed a major, unforgivable crime of the county which had chosen him as its chief executive. And so, far and away better than he knew. Deck Rankin gave full sway to the facts and held his emotions in iron bonds of restraint. When his flash of the story went to the news association, the great dailies demanded a complete account, so Rankin put his own proofs on the wire. Raining Sands thereafter had its date line on the big news circuits.

RANKIN went to the new county jail. Deputy Jim Cook had removed Jerry Macon from the main corridor to the bull pen, a huge cage with steel floors, welded with crossbarred gratings through which even a boy could not squeeze. The girl prisoner was sitting in a small rocking chair, the sunshine from a large, grated window falling upon a little pile of socks and shirts. She was darning a hole in one of the woolens. Cook had let her go into her father's apartment upstairs and gather up these things which needed tending to. She did not notice the quiet approach of the reporter and deputy. Rankin watched two or three minutes, having checked the officer's impulse immediately to introduce him to the young woman.

He was a good reporter at his best. He saw that she worked swiftly, her long needle threading expertly over and under in those crossbars of yarn, not unlike the welded steel which confined her. She could not have been so swift and sure without much practice. Grimly, with deliberate concentration, she kept her undivided attention on that task. Yet after a few minutes, she lifted her wrist quickly to her eyes, wiping them on the bend of the carpals. Her daddy had put her there. Still, she loved to serve him! She was struggling to retain her nerve. And then her figure grew tense and she looked up and around, discovering the men.

“It's Mister Rankin,” Cook called to her. “He wants to talk with you.”

She let her hands fall on her lap for an instant, hesitating. She whitened around the faint artificial tinge of pink on her cheeks. Then she mustered her resources of calm and with a characteristic little huddling up she hopped to her feet and came, with her heels clicking lightly on the hard floor, to stand with a brave smile, her head cocked to one side to greet the man she so lately had scolded in his own den.

“Really,” she shrugged her shoulders, “I'm sorry I can't invite you in. I'd like to—lots.”

Rankin gasped, and both men burst into laughter. Her innuendo was overwhelming in its implication. She, too, laughed—but only bravely. In her eyes was tragic astonishment, fear of the inexplicable. Rankin had never before really given the girl any particular attention. He had regarded her as just young, unimportant, beyond his own realm and scope. He saw that she was older than he had realized—twenty-three or so. She was pretty, too, her eyes unconsciously direct and filled with the crystalline reflections of desert sapphire, as well as luster of intermingled pearl.

The trained reporter, so thoroughly accustomed to noting the shades and flashes of self-betrayal, marveled at her insouciance and sang-froid—while she seethed within. She was carrying a tremendous load. He wondered if it really was one of guilt?

Deputy Jim Cook threw open the inner gate. Emma turned to one of the score of cells to bring out another rocking chair like her own. Rankin instantly stepped to assist her, taking the seat away to place it near her own, with the pile of sewing to be done on another plain stool.

“You like to sew, don't you?” the visitor suggested.

“Only for da—for father,” she replied, her voice low.

“You've done lots of it, though,” he said. “I wonder if you don't make a good many of your own clothes?”

“Why—yes!” She stared at him, puzzled.

“The other day, you had an attractive waist, when you came to see me.”

“Was anything about me attractive that day?” she asked.

“I liked you for sticking up for your father,” he replied.

“Oh—he's good!” She choked. “You've no idea——”

“Oh yes I have,” he replied.

She burst into sobs against which she struggled, at last successfully. She drew a tiny mirror and a little round box, lifted her chin, lowered her eyelids, dabbed away the marks of her tears and came back again magnificently impudent in her smile and gesture. Her courage tugged at Rankin's heart. Somewhat of a sentimentalist, he was obliged to make a fight of his own not to show the emotional admiration which caught him, brightening his eyes.

AS THEY sat there he felt a low, humming vibration, persistent, obscure and throbbing. The quivering sound bothered him, beginning to rasp his nerves as he looked around to trace its source. His glance discovered the origin. At the top of the two story corridor at the end of the building was ventilator fan four feet across at least, whirling around. In the monotony of the jail with its empty cells and its bare vacancies the sound waxed and waned.

“Doesn't that bother you?” he asked her.

“At night, when it's cooler, Jim turns it off,” she replied. “If he didn't, I'd go crazy. I couldn't sleep a wink with that going.”

“Would you like some books or magazines to read? I've quite a working library at home and in my office, both. You like to read—what?”

“Oh, everything. I'm always reading.”

“Books?”

“Yes. I haven't many, though——”

“Where did you go to school?”

“I was born in Marietta, Ohio. You know, they had the first library west of the Appalachians in the Mississippi Basin. Marietta grew up a book town. The settlers were educated, so they gave the town an impress it never lost. My mother was a teacher and a beautiful woman. Oh, she was lovely!”

“I can believe that!”

“You mean that—from me?” she gasped.

“What else could I believe?” he evaded.

“When she died, it broke daddy. Oh, I couldn't stand it! We ran away ... By and by we came here. You wouldn't understand.”

“Sure?” he asked. “I was a pretty good reporter in New York City. Something happened. And I, too, came to the desert.”

“Your—your wife died?”

“I never had a wife,” he replied bruskly. And then gently, “But one time I wanted very much to have one. It doesn't matter——”

“Oh, but it does!” she gasped. “I'm sorry—really. It explains—I mean——”

“Explains?” he puzzled.

“Yes,” she nodded. “Yes. The column of bitter Blisters.”

He caught his breath. What was she doing here, accused of murder and highway robbery, diverting her sympathetic understanding to him? He blinked. He stared at her. She had really forgotten her own predicament as she went back to her own mother and then to the girl he most wanted to forget of all his branded memories.

“Emma,” he exclaimed, “you didn't raid the Tivle!”

“Of course not!” she cried, under her breath.

“But how in the world—” He checked short.

“I know,” she nodded. “I ran wolf wild. I couldn't help it. I had to do something—anything to fill my time. What was there for me to do?”

“Where'd you go Saturday night? Who were you with?”

“I rode alone.”

“When'd you start?”

“Late candle light. I rode down across the new irrigation district——”

“Remember just where?”

“Why ... I was dreaming, you know, loving the bright stars, hoping the new alfalfa fields' evaporation wouldn't dim their sparkling brilliance. I went to the Unsurveyed, crossed the valley and came up the east side.”

“To the lower Unsurveyed?”

“Yes. Where the valley narrows into the Pinnacles.”

“That's nearly forty miles around. What time did you come home?”

“Don't tell daddy. It was 'most daylight, when I climbed in.”

“Climbed?”

She laughed lightly.

“Yes. I'll show you— Oh!”

She had forgotten she was locked up. She shut her eyes to hold back the tears.

“You mean you climbed up the outside into your room?”

“Yes,” she told him. “Up the corner, along the blocks.”

“I see. On the north side?”

“My room's on the northwest corner. Dad's is on the southwest corner of the building. The front's all ornamented with blocks and cast concrete scrolls. I talked them out of having just bare, blank walls in front. I wanted them pretty; so it wouldn't look so hateful and ugly for the poor devils.”

“Didn't you meet anyone away down there?”

“No. I went the byway lanes, so I shouldn't find people.”

“I've a map of the project. Would you mind going over the route you took so I can prove your alibi?”

“You—you'd help me, Mister Rankin, after the way I——”

“You don't suppose a newspaper man would allow a lot of politicians to convict an innocent woman, do you?”

“Scoundrel politicians. But—but, my daddy——”

“Didn't I tell you so?” he demanded, with mock ferocity.

“His heart is broken. You'd save his life if you could prove it,” she gasped. “I didn't suppose it was any use.”

“Just that academic Marietta unpractical education,” he declared, banteringly.

“I'll be indebted to you for life!”

“I'll probably come around collecting the interest,” he said lightly, rising to his feet. “You ought to have told what happened.”

“I didn't know,” she replied. “When Jim came with the warrant, I was asleep. They've all taken it for granted I was guilty. You know—my clothes.”

“That's right. How did it happen? Were they your clothes?”

“Everybody said so. I've lots and lots of things.”

“But your riding clothes?”

“I love to sew them, embroider them, emboss the leather with a mallet and stamps——”

“You made your belts and chaps and leather skirts!”

“Yes,” she nodded. “I've tried out lots of designs and patterns.”

“We've overlooked a big bet!” Rankin exclaimed. “You wont mind if I look over your things?”

“Oh—not mind!” she gasped. “A man going through my clothes!”

“You must let me,” he urged. “You have quite a few riding skirts, boots and the rest that look pretty much alike?”

“Why, not so much.” She shook her head. “You don't make two dresses alike, you know.”

“Now what did you wear that night you rode down through the big project?”

“Why, my pearl gray waist, the smoke tan, calfskin chap skirt with blue and red Sioux beading.”

“Boots?”

“They matched, of course. Soft calfskin, with top cuffs.”

“Hat?”

“No. It was night, so I wore an army model calfskin. It's lined with red satin.”

“Anything else?”

“Why—” She colored as she hesitated. “Orange silk bloomer-knickers.”

“All right.” He put away his notepaper. “I'll ask your father. Things aren't locked up?”

“Oh, no.” And then, with a flashing smile she added, “Don't muss my things all up, please.”

“I can't promise,” he replied. “But I'll promise you one thing: I'm going to muss up the ideas of the whole blamed Sun Pasture County administration, sheriff's and all.”

“And if you do, there's nothing in the world daddy wouldn't give you.”

“No?” he stared at her, with the utmost gravity.

She bit her lip, clicked her teeth and then, with trembling chin, replied to his quick, confident nod of departure, as he rattled the big iron gate gong to summon Deputy Jim.

CHAPTER IV

Cinching the Proofs

SHERIFF DOLIND went grimly about the performance of his daily routine tasks. He had recovered his equipoise and his face was set with sunken wrinkles, his lips compressed to a narrow line, and his eyes were gray and icy as they glittered through the narrowed lids when he responded to the greeting of Deck Rankin in the dobe courthouse office.

“Sheriff, you're on the wrong track about that Tivle raid,” the newspaper man began.

“Yes?” Dolind lifted his upper lip angrily.

“The raid was just after eleven o'clock, wasn't it?”

“Just about.”

“Your daughter rode down through the irrigation project to the southern Unsurveyed—about eighteen miles by the angles of the roads. She left here about eight o'clock——”

“I know.”

“She came back toward four o'clock in the morning.”

“Yes. She told something of the kind to Jim Cook.”

“But, Sheriff—my God, man! You don't mean——”

“I reckon I know my duty, Rankin,” the sheriff said bitterly. “You've been trying to tell it to me for years. You said the old jail was a coarse crook sieve. We've built the best jail in the Colorado Great Salt Lake Basin, and now you say we grafted on it. You can pound us, you can bullyrag us—because we're hogtied and helpless. I've even got to sit here and listen to your idees and keep my hands off you, when you air your fool notions. About my family affairs, though, you keep your damned mouth shut. They're none of your business—outside the news interests and values you're always talking about. You've made yourself the judge of what the public wants to know; but remember that there's a limit to what a man has to take from a skunk editor, even though an official hasn't any recourse but to grin and bear maligning and insults.”

Rankin stared at the father who had been tried almost beyond endurance. Emma Dolind had worried him, and now, as sheriff, he was paying the penalties of misunderstanding gay spirits and inexplicable carelessness of appearances. His love had conflicted with his manhood's ideals of public duty. One had to break; and it hadn't been his wish to perform service as an official of the Government. After the terrible conflict of emotion with honor, the father's reaction to his daughter's predicament had given way to the stern and uncompromising determination to see his duty through to the end, his anger against the one who had put him into this dilemma enabling him to perform the legal tasks.

“I tell you, Emma didn't do that murder and robbery,” Rankin declared.

“Like hell she didn't!”

“Well, I'm going to prove it, Dolind,” Rankin said, rising to his feet. “You won't stand in my way, will you?”

“Stand in the way of your proving my daughter innocent?” the sheriff repeated, his mind turning the curious proposition over for a moment. “No. But—well, it can't be done.”

“I want to examine Emma's wardrobe.”

“What?”

“Her clothes.”

“What's the use!”

“It means the difference between conviction and acquittal.”

“So she's blind-staggered you, now?” the old man sniffed.

Rankin saw that it was no use to meet the slurs.

“I just want to go through her riding clothes, Mister Dolind. I asked her about some of those things. I just want the truth, that's all. I've struck a trail. I was afraid she was guilty when I went to see her. I believed what she had intended to be a mere prank had run away from her. Will you let me go to her room and examine her clothes presses?”

“Yes, Rankin,” Dolind replied, “go ahead. You can't do any harm, as I can see. You've done all you could to hurt me, anyhow.”

“Look here—well, some other time I'll tell you a few.”

So Rankin, with ill feelings, parted from the stern sheriff whose sense of duty was making him famous and unbalancing his judgment. When the reporter returned to the jail, Deputy Jim Cook, who was unwillingly serving as jailer, listened to the request to visit the girl's room. He went to ask Emma about it, and she said she had given Rankin permission.

“What's the idea, Rankin?” Cook demanded.

“Emma didn't do that raiding,” the reporter replied.

“Old boy, if you could prove it—but, Hades, you can't! Why, everyone saw her!”

“No they didn't, Jim,” Rankin replied. “They saw her skirt, her blouse waist, her boots, and her wide brimmed hat.”

SO THE two men, the lanky, weathered, awkward deputy sheriff and the far more widely experienced and capable reporter, went up to the girl's room. They found it exactly as she had left it, the bed not yet made up and her riding suit laid out on the back and seat of a large leather rocking chair near the window. Her orange knickers were hung over one of the thick, pillowy arms. Sitting back in that chair its occupant could look through the north or west window far across the desert, and now as the two men glanced they saw to the north the mirage mountains of a vast and deceptive land.

The pale tan leathers of the pretty raiment were soft and fanciful, belts of gay beads and scrolls of burnt figures giving the two memorable pictures in their imaginations. Deputy Jim went to the head of the wide bed and drew a revolver from the holster dangling there. It was a beautiful weapon, with pearl handles, engraved silver frame and a long, slim, blued barrel. He broke it in two, tipped up the chamber to look at it, and as be did so, two empty shells fell from the ejector, the four other cartridges, all loaded, remaining in place.

“Now you've done it, Rankin!” the deputy sheriff turned on his fellow searcher. “.45's, two shots. One for Dickers and one making a culvert through Wakeful's filled in nose bridge.”

Neither smiled. There was the weapon with which the holdup, the murder and the felonious assault had been committed.

“By gosh, Rankin!” Jim Cook turned angrily on the reporter whose nosing had developed this most convincing fact of all, the use of the girl's own revolver in the crimes. “By gosh. Rankin, yo' got to forget this! I'm goin' to clean it. Give her a chanct.”

Rankin sat down. Jim sagged against the wall at the head of the bed. First rip, they had made the State's case against Emma Dolind invulnerable. Another trap of the Law's blind sets had closed unshakably upon her. Jim tucked the weapon back into the holster and began to curse with the fluent, unconscious mutterings and murmurings of a man thoroughly disgusted with everybody, reporters especially and himself in particular.

The newspaper man, with the memory of the young woman darning her implacable father's socks as she rocked in the prison cell chair, cringed as from bodily blows, writhing and shivering. Despite all his fine sense of honor, and in spite of his years accustomed to the tragedies of human error and wilfulness, he knew he could not go on the witness stand and tell the frantic truth he had uncovered. Emma Dolind was a pretty girl, gifted with the appearance of innocence.

“Oh, damn it to Hades!” he cried, and made odd, choking sounds of resentment.

“Doggone!” Jim snorted. “I know why they ain't no jury goin' to convict a purty woman.”

“Dickers wasn't any good,” Rankin declared. “Nothing but a gambling joint lookout.”

“Wakeful never used his good looks for any decent idees,” Jim added. “That face needed spoilin'.”

Then both chuckled shortly, resenting their own soft-heartedness, finding excuses for a lively, wild young woman whose pranks had turned to tragedy.

“She had no business—” Jim declared angrily, ripping out into a main track of rounded oaths, glaring at the handsome weapon.

There had been a rodeo down at the railroad the previous autumn. Riders, ranchers, homesteaders, miners, shepherds of flocks, and all kinds of regional features had contributed to the contests and competitions of the week. Emma Dolind had come down with the others, riding for a second prize, and then shooting her way with her old solid frame .38-40 to the revolver championships at 10, 15, 25, 50 and 75 yard ranges. One of her trophies was that $125 revolver, and with it she had shot off a tie in the speed and all-angles tests, winning against Jim Cook himself, and rattling Wakeful Sam Lucern so badly that he came in seventh when normally he should have won by a margin of several points.

“She beat Wakeful for fun,” Cook remarked. “An' then she busted him up for fair. He always was hanging around sheep-eying her, you know.”

“She detested him.”

“Yeh,” Jim assented. “He was more scairt of what she'd do'n he was of havin' her sent up—squealing to Dolind!”

Thus the two grumbled, groaned, cursed and tried for Emma's sake to wriggle around into some legal excuse for her messing things up thataway.

“Anyhow, they won't never hang her for killing Dickers,” Jim urged stoutly. “Why, dadblast it! Yo' couldn't execute a yeller dog fer killing a worthless scoundrel like him.”

Rankin didn't know. He was numb, staring at that pale tan riding suit. Jim looked around till he saw a pencil on the girl's desk. He tore off a corner of his handkerchief as he headed for the stick. But when he glanced into the open drawer of the desk he saw a piece of cord. Then in a corner of the room he discovered a gun cabinet, containing rifles, shotguns and plenty of ammunition, firearm oils and greases and Emma's old .38-40 in its well worn but fanciful heavy duty sheath and wide cartridge belt.

JIM began methodically to clean the pretty prize revolver. He did a thorough job, going over all the filigree work, inside and out. Then he put two loaded shells into the cylinders to make six, and replaced the weapon.

“Rankin,” he said as he turned to face the reporter, “I want to tell yo' one thing. You mean well, course, but that ain't no sign yo're going to testify to anything what yo' learnt here today. 'Tain't my business, an' I'm depity sher'f. So 'cordin', 'tain't none of your'n, not much, 'tain't. You get me straight on that, partner.”

The reporter nodded.

“I might feel different about it, Jim,” Rankin replied, “but when her own father went back on her, I couldn't figure that's an even break. If she'd had different bringing up ... He should take the consequences of what she did, if she did——”

“If she did?” Jim repeated, staring. “Say, mister! When I'm tried fer shootin' yo' fer witnessin' contrary to the things you know, I sho' want yo' fer a juryman.”

“Eh?” Rankin asked, as though awakening from a reverie.

“Yo' said if she did them murderings and things. You ain't got no doubts—not now, have you?”

“Jim,” the reporter shook his head angrily, “she didn't do it. I know she didn't.”

“Huh! E-yeoow! Yer goin' to be took as a juryman to sit on her,” Jim declared enthusiastically. “I know I can fix it with the county clerk, for the drawing, an' the lawyers'll be okay. And if yo' plead occupational immunity from doin' yo' public duties, yo' better not let the sun set on yo' head another night.”

The two shrank away from the contacts of that room. Cosmetics had given it an atmosphere; feminine love of colors had given it cheery hues. And yet, there were the hard facts of the two empty shells in Deputy Jim's pocket. Rankin stared at the discarded suit.

“Jim!” he exclaimed. “We can't quit, Jim! We only just begun to prove her innocence——”

“Don't! For the love o' cactus, don't!” Jim swore with angry fervency. “The next thing, you'll have her hung, plumb sartin!”

But Rankin surged back into the room from which unconsciously in his dismay he had been retreating, driven forth by the overwhelming conviction in the evidence of the twice fired revolver. He had not Completed his search. He shrank from the possibilities of what further investigation might reveal. Still, he reflected, nothing could more completely cinch the truth than what he now knew.

He turned to the east wall of the room, where a door ajar showed the tile of the bathroom and another door suggested the clothes closet he had vowed to examine. He opened wide the door, and, there, in two crowded rows, hung the varied garments of a woman's wardrobe.

Rankin stepped back, dismayed by the mass of materials for examination. They were all just so, too, at first glance. He raised his hands to take hold of something, but hesitated what to seize first. And as he stood there, doubtfully, his senses suddenly became alert.

There was a difference, a jarring something in this clothes hoard. Jim Cook came across the room to stand gazing at the evidences of a young woman's variety of raiment. As he drew alongside, Rankin turned to look at him, for the deputy sheriff brought an aroma of burned nicotine in his breath and dried tobacco in his clothes. The reporter concentrated his attention on this odd surprise in his speculations.

Rankin discovered a certain orderliness in that close compacted array of clothes. He couldn't figure out the system of it, but there were layers of skirts and layers of waists, and a certain homogeneity of relationships, as though, he surmised, she had hung dresses to wear with jackets, waists with appropriate skirts, and the like. And at one point he saw an ill balanced hanger, tiptilted and put into place hastily, without much care.

“I wouldn't manhandle that dry goods store fer a farm,” Jim declared. “My gosh, how does a woman do it? An' I bet Emma's plumb certain there ain't nothin' to wear if somethin' special come along——”

The deputy sheriff choked off. A special occasion was duly approaching: examinations, grand jury action, trial, and whatever. Rankin started to close the closet door, opened it again to scrutinize the dangling garments and then gently pressed the knob shut. Cook had not discovered anything. The two walked softly to the door to take their departure. They gazed back at the room for a minute. Then Rankin shut this door, too.

Deputy Jim burst into low and volleyed oaths. He had added perjury to his other sins. He was adding perjury, too, he was sure, to the sins of his companion. He promised, with reiterated indignation, to scatter the remains of Rankin up and down the landscape, and would jubilantly die for his crime, because any dadblimped, mis'rable scoundrel who added unnecessary evidence to testimony already only too convincing oughta die with untold suffering.

“Y'understand?” Jim demanded, hardly able to control his feelings.

“Jim, I'll tell you something,” Rankin said. “I mean if you'll just let everybody know it.”

“Yeh. What's 'at?”

“Emma Dolind didn't raid the Tivle.”

“Oh, yo' dadblamed, forsaken, rat-tailed jack!” Jim exploded, slamming the jail's outer gates with a terrific clang in the newspaper man's face.

Rankin laughed and headed away down the street, on his way to the sheriff's courthouse office.

“Sheriff,” he asked, “does your daughter smoke cigarets?”

“No!”

“Sure?”

“I never saw her.”

“That won't do.” Rankin shook his head and returned to the jail. Jim came in response to his ring.

“I want to ask Miss Dolind one question,” he remarked.

“Going to use it against her?” the deputy demanded. “I'm goin' to warn her not to talk.”

“Don't. Let her lawyer—say, Jim, who is her attorney?”

“They've sent to the capital for Linman, Burke and Henry.”

“They'll do. Best in the State!”

WHEN the two came to the big cell corridor, the accused was lying in her cell on the cot, her face on her elbow. At the hail she answered listlessly. Jim, with instinctive politeness and recognition of Rankin's peculiar status of detective for the defense went out to the jail office, while the two talked through the gate grating.

“I want to ask an impertinent question,” Rankin said.

“You've been in my room?”

“Yes.”

“Find anything?”

“Decidedly more than one thing. I'm going to ask you something. I've an idea. When did you shoot the prize revolver last?”

“You mean the one on the bedpost?”

“Yes.”

“Why, I don't remember. It's so pretty I never use it, you know. Those tip-ups are wonderfully well-machined, you know, but they don't stand rough usage like the old reliable solid frames. I practiced with the one in the cabinet.”

“Always clean your gun after using it?”

“Of course! I never leave them dirty. Ruins a good barrel.”

“Do you smoke?”

“Why—no! I have—but not lately. Oh, I guess it doesn't matter what I did, what I didn't do!”

Her tone of helpless and hopeless dejection ended in a dry little choke.

“You had no cigarets with you Saturday night?”

“No! I never liked tobacco—the smell of it!”

“Never used it for moths in your furs?”

“No. I had the closets lined with cedar and the drawers made of cedar,” she declared, adding with a touch of malice, “It made the jail I'm in more expensive, you know.”

“Please don't. I'm sorry,” he begged. “They've stopped the ventilator fan?”

“It was just abrading my nerves till they ached,” she said.”

“Eh, Jim ... You'll let me go to your room again?”

“I don't care what you do!” she turned listlessly away.

When the deputy sheriff heard Rankin wanted to go to the room upstairs he refused to accompany him.

“What you testify to I'll deny!” Jim warned as he turned over the key. Rankin went to the clothes closet. He sniffed along the rows of clothes.

He had grown accustomed to the array. His eyes noted the care with which the shoulders of garments had been draped over their hangers, and then he saw how distinctly one of the protrusions did not match the orderly precision with which all the others had been put away.

This was a dark riding habit with a bluish gray waist, and leather skirt chaps had been tucked into the tightly pressed lines of garments. He brought it out, and he saw how badly the shoulders of the waist had been hung over the wooden hanger. The skirt had been pulled through the spreader in any old way. A pair of boots fell to the floor, dust fluffing out of the wrinkles at the ankles.

The chaparejos skirt had a sewed in, protected belt and two small pockets below the line where a wide ammunition belt would come. Rankin, with some feelings of embarrassment, spread out the resilient mass of clothes, looking for stockings and knickers. There were none. He looked into the tops of the boots, feeling down to the toes. No stockings in them!

He sniffed at the blouse and wrinkled his nose. He had found the inspiration for his inquiry if Emma Dolind smoked. He had detected that foreign aroma. In the left hand pocket of the disordered skirt he found the crumpled container of a package of cigarets—with three of the bent paper sticks. They were Dixies, of which he had seen none anywhere in the West; and, in fact, none since he had left New York.

“How come?” he exclaimed, rubbing his hand across his brow. “That's something. What in the world does it mean? That's the answer.”

He stared into the closet again, looking over the tops of the two poles on which the lines of clothes hung in that five-foot wide, spacious storage room. Back in the corner he saw a gray, wide brimmed hat. When he brought it out to look into it, be saw something. A single black hair less than two inches long!

“Why, good gracious!” he gasped. And then with a yell he summoned Jim, who came up the iron stairway from the lobby three steps at a jump.

“Jim, Jim! Look!” Rankin pointed. “Look at that!”

The deputy sheriff came and squinted at the new clue.

“I got black hair,” he sniffed. “I've wore that hat myse'f.”

CHAPTER V

Food Headquarters Opens

THREE men and a woman arrived on the galloping four horse stage from the railroad spur over the range to the westward, alighting at Raining Sands to glance around with sharp little eyes set in hard, wedge shaped faces. The woman was slim and small, hardly more than ninety-five or a hundred pounds in weight—a mere girl to look at her from behind but distinctly older and grimmer than any girl should ever grow to be in the harsh extravagance of her cosmetics.

Four leather suitcases, one of which the woman handled with extreme gentleness, rested at the feet of the four as they surveyed this heart center of the famed Sun Pasture County. Evidently, they were accustomed to size up the places in which they arrived, for they noted the lead of the streets, into the compass points. They allowed their eyes to turn and their gaze to linger on the dobe courthouse in the plaza. They seemed interested in everything.

Presently the feminine member of the quartette nudged the fellow who looked so much like an animal of prey that he was called “Snapper” and spoke under her breath.

“Look't!”

All four turned to gaze covertly toward the northward, where up a street they saw the glistening gray front of the bright, new county jail, with its largeness of ornament and strikingly significant architecture. For a half minute the building held their attention, but with another nudge the woman diverted the attention of her companions to the Crystal Land Bank on the near corner opposite the Tivle Dance Hall. The financial institution had large front windows, walls of sheet metal stamped into the semblance of stone; it had been dusted over with coarse sand laid on some kind of cement to give it the appearance of substantial blocks of stone. But gales carrying crystals of quartz and cloud bursts of carbonic acid in rains had already washed away patches of the cheap imitation, and it stood now a curious witness to the foibles of human desire to appear to be something more than it was.

The four caught up their suitcases and headed across the plaza toward the Gemland Hotel. They lined up before the hotel ledger, over which smirked a shining haired, pointed mustached, grimacing personage of dapper aspirations. The woman picked up the pen, gazed at the tip with disgust and brought out her own fountain pen with which she wrote swiftly and in bold, accustomed script:

 

Mr. and Mrs. Arturo Romans, New York City
Gerald Wapman,“ “ “
Rupert Jasper,“ “ “

 

“Theatrical people?” the clerk of the hotel inquired, admiringly.

“Yes,” Mrs. Romans replied, with level eyed gaze. “We put on a big show, but we're taking a vacation, ourselves.”

“A beautiful country to rest in, from the fatigues of histrionic—ah—enterprises,” the grinning clerk suggested. “Magnificent!”

“Grand!” the patron admitted. “Where do we wash and where do we eat?”

The clerk gulped and called the bellhop.

In the evening the four newcomers appeared at the Tivle, in which the disfigured proprietor glided about, his eyes surly and sharp, giving an atmosphere of unrest and gloom to the crowd. Lucern's angry dismay at his marred features rebuffed his best customers, who missed the genial air of welcome and good fellowship which they desired. And so, to the proprietor's loss of all his ready money in the holdup, was added the fact of a rapidly diminishing income. And, unable to explain this, he blamed and cursed his staff, from waiters and bartenders to the girls who danced on commission and the gamblers who represented the house at the wheels and tables. Wild Gertie, Handy Frank, several of the most popular of his attractions, took their time and departed.

Raining Sands changed from a lively, jubilant trading center into a morose, anxious, suspicious community, where those who went along the streets at night scurried and darted, and paused around corners to watch back along the walks to see if they were being followed. The tragic accusation against the sheriff's daughter affected the town with dread and depression: for Emma Dolind had been popular and had set a swift pace among the young people who had more or less followed her lead and lived according to her spirit.

MRS. ROMANS went on the floor, dancing with her husband. Wapman and Jasper went mixing around, taking here and there a man to drink. Then one of the house staff introduced Wapman to Staley Keeds, teller in the Crystal Land Bank, and a few minutes later Keeds was dancing with Mrs. Romans, talking with vivacity and rather flirtatious incaution. Keeds, dapper, soft eyed and rather resplendent looking, anxious to shine as something of a sporting man, was charmed by the woman who confessed that she just was fascinated by the West which she was seeing on a touring quest of amusement, novelty and experience. She was anxious, she said, to meet the heroic figures of the wild, open spaces.

Keeds assumed a considerable swagger, where heretofore he had been rather prancy and sniffy, and found himself rapidly presenting a figure of just what she said she had anticipated when she crossed the Mississippi. On her return to her husband, to stroll away to the hotel with Wapman and Jasper, she assured them that he was the juiciest sap she had ever had the bad necessity and good luck to run up against.

Jasper had also been fortunate. He had run through two or three strings of pool with City Marshal Searls, following up with a midnight snack at the Kennel Ovens Lunch, where, over the coffee, Searls had unbosomed himself of the woes of Raining Sands. Dickers had been killed, the handsome Wakeful Sam had a real bridge in his nose, and Emma Dolind, the pretty daughter of the sheriff, was in the new jail, its second prisoner.

“Who you bet's the first?” Jasper inquired.

“Eh—who?” the three demanded at his jeering, knowing tone.

“Yeh!” Romans exclaimed. “You mean the Black Weasel?”

“Who but!” Jasper grinned.

“But how long's the stretch?” Romans asked.

“Forty less one,” Jasper chuckled. “Three weeks today.”

“What for?”

“Vag.”

“Aw—that right?” Mrs. Romans inquired. “What's his game?”

“Le's inspect the new jail and find out,” Wapman suggested.

They circled around the blocks, strolling. From a deep shadow nearly opposite they looked over the front, whose windows and doors were unbarred, while the upstairs southwest corner ones were illuminated. They could see a burly figure rocking back and forth in front of one of these, a smooth shaven and huddled up man on whose left shoulder suspender shone a yellow shield. As they stared, a lanky, striding man came into the room and stood with his arms akimbo, his full lips working, his teeth showing and his head bobbing. After a half minute the newcomer came over and jerked the windows curtains down.

“Telling the sheriff he's a fool, setting in a light, an easy mark for anybody,” Mrs. Romans whispered. “He's thinking about his girl.”

“Looks good to me,” Wapman declared. “Better work fast. See Weasel, though. Find out what in blazes he's in for. Soused, likely! Aw, don't he make ye sick?”

“Not me,” the woman replied cheerfully. “He's there on purpose.”

They withdrew along shadowy bypaths, Wapman and Jasper spreading out to circle around in alleys and along the streets, finding the dark ways which even starlight failed to illumine. In the morning they ate breakfast just before eight o'clock. When the bank opened at ten o'clock, Mrs. Romans was quite the first to approach the teller's window, to inquire about opening an account, presenting a draft of one thousand dollars on the Keyburn Savings Bank of Mandrive, Massachusetts.

“How long before you'll be able to verify this—normally?” she inquired.

“Why, Mrs. Romans, it'll be all right to draw against it immediately,” Keeds was sure.

“We don't need any small change,” she replied. “The boys are just set on staying here to look things over. There's only one lunch room, and just the Tivle restaurant. Mr. Romans was formerly outside manager for Delmonico's, and Wapman is the Russian-French chef. I was a professional hostess for a long time——”

“Impossible!” Keeds declared enthusiastically, for indeed she looked quite young this morning. She smiled with appreciative coyness.

JUST behind the bank, toward the north along the Dappled Plateau road, was a large, rectangular wooden building which had formerly been a restaurant; but the Tivle had run it out with free lunches. The old equipment was in it, dusty but hardly worn at all. Even the copper beverage tanks still shone untarnished. The Friday edition of the Sun Foundry carried a quarter page announcement of the grand opening of the Food Headquarters on Saturday evening.

The four newcomers were industrious and proficient. They served excellent coffee, fine meats, ample vegetables; the cooking was remarkable. The place was so crowded that Mrs. Romans, who was cashier, was obliged to rustle three waiters and an assistant for Wapman. They had not anticipated any such rush of business.

On Sunday their special game dinner, including desert vension, rushed them for nearly two hundred seventy-five cent meals. That night it was after eleven o'clock before the proprietors could close up.

“How the Hades we goin' to work, rushin' us like this?” Wapman growled, slumping into the easiest chair upstairs over the restaurant where living quarters had been provided by the terms of their lease with the bank which had been obliged to take over the restaurant on mortgage.

“'Twon't last,” Mrs. Romans declared. “We can go easy a while, anyhow. My gravy, I'm plumb wore out handling change!”

But even under normal weekday patronage the Food Headquarters kept the four busy from seven o'clock in the morning till late evening hours. They had been so occupied that it was Wednesday before Mrs. Romans found time to go over to the new jail. Instead of being a mere caller, however, she went after business. She struck Sheriff Dolind himself.

“We've just opened the Food Headquarters.”

“I've eaten there. Fine place!” the sheriff nodded.

“We're hoping to specialize on carried out meals,” she went on. “Figured we might make a dicker with you; plain wholesome food, so much a meal. Anybody in the jail who wants extras can have 'em.”

Dolind shook his head. The jail had its own cook. Nobody in the jail would want extras, he was sure. Just a hobo—the restaurant's only chance.

“I don't pass up any bets, Sheriff,” she said. “I'd like to see the bull pen bird, anyhow.”

“All right. Jim'll let you in.”

Deputy Jim didn't mind showing off his lone vagabond prisoner.

“Hey, Jerry!” he summoned the man from his hammock.

Macon came over the steel plates with surly and lowering gaze. When his glance fell on the keeper's companion he stopped short, staring.

“She wants to know if you'd like to send out for special eatin's,” Jim explained. “I told her prob'ly not. She's just opened up the new restaurant Food Headquarters. Prob'ly noticed it in the paper.”

“Yeh. I noticed. What you got to eat, lady?”

“Anything you want!”

“You took my money off me,” Macon turned to Jim. “Six or seven wheels. You'll pay her?”

“Sure.”

“I want a meat pie, baked, no vegetables in it, but just gravy. And a quart of brown gravy, on the side. You got a good line of eats, Jim, but I just want a pie for a change.”

“Tha's all right,” Jim replied. “Feller wants his own kind o' stuff, once in a while, nat'chly. Don't reckon the jail cook'll pisen you, bein' moderate thataway. She mout, course, if you ate reg'lar off these here new grub programs.”

Accordingly, just after noon, a boy delivered a hot meat pie with a pail of gravy. It was delicious. And Macon tarried long over its lean meat, its smooth gravy and its elegant crust. There were other things in it, which the prisoner removed after Jim went to carry a tray of dinner to his other charge. And presently the boy removed the restaurant dishes, all bundled up in the asbestos, heat retaining basket carrier. He gave them to Mrs. Romans who put them under the cashier's desk, for the nonce; and when she had removed sundry papers from the lining of the carrying basket, she sent the things into the kitchen.

There was no explanation as to why Jerry Macon had allowed himself to get into this jam. He had done well in his lookout report. He could just as easily have hung around in the hotel and whiled away his time in the Tivle. Casual inquiry elicited the fact that Macon had hung along the curb, and when someone asked him sociably if it wasn't a pleasant day, he had retorted that it was a blamed good one to mind one's own business. This had led to recriminations, which do a stranger no good when his antagonist happens to be a city marshal or a deputy sheriff.

“He's one rich puddinghead!” Mrs. Romans assured her three companions. “But we sure are right where we wanted to be.”

THE storage and supplies of the restaurant were under the building in a cellar. The space was hardly eight by twelve feet. This was not large enough, so in spare times, a partition was built across one end of the bare, caked walls, and from behind this Romans brought out buckets of earth to be hoisted on a dumbwaiter to the kitchen level and emptied into the garbage cans. Apparently he needed the exercise, for the restaurant was making good money. He not only labored at odd times during the day, but frequently at night, after the restaurant closed, he pursued his activities, not infrequently assisted by one or another of his staff fellows, even Wapman the chef assisting the economical practice. They hired help for dishwashing, for waiting, for kitchen chores, but not for digging out the enlargement in the cellar. For one thing, the digging was far from difficult. A tiny stream of water under pressure from a hose dissolved the salts in the sandy clay and they could bail up the muck with a sugar scoop.

Every few days Jerry Macon, the prisoner in the county jail, would squander some of his scanty funds on a special dish or two from the Food Headquarters. To him went more hidden curses and sneers than condolences. From him returned snarls and suggestions. He knew what he was about, he declared. As they would know if he had bad luck and they had a good turn.

“What's the Black Weasel mean by that?” Romans asked his fellow restaurateurs.

“What's the diff?” Mrs. Romans inquired, a hard bit of glitter in her eyes. “He always was a double-crossing grafter!”

“What's 'at?” Wapman demanded.

“Look't! He's sittin' pretty. Come we pull this'n and he'll come out to whack in on the loot, won't he? He takes no chanct, he does no work, an' we're ditchin' an' diggin', ain't we?”

“Yeh!” the others assented to the woman's shrewd suggestion.

“We'll fool 'im!” one adding angrily.

“Yeh. An' what'll he do if we double-cross him?” Jasper whined. “He's black, he's a weasel, an' he bites yer throat!”

And so, worried, angry, successful purveyors to the appetites of Raining Sands, the cunning yeggman band burrowed from their cellar till they were under the old-fashioned, hastily constructed vault of the rich Sun Pasture County bank, the only financial institution in the region. And with sly appearance of trepidation, Mrs Romans gave Staley Keeds the bank teller the flirtation of a lifetime.

“We must be careful!” she assured Keeds. “Arturo can be so violent when he's angry.”

“That's all right,” Keeds assured her. “All I care is if you're friendly. I'm so charmed——”

“I know I'm awful!” she declared nervously. “But you are such a man! I never met anyone like you before. You must have terrible responsibilities there in the bank—all that money. There must be ten thousand dollars, sometimes.”

“Ten thousand!” he chuckled snortily. “We always have twenty-five thou' in cash. Got to, you know. Take it like next week, now, when we cash in ready for cattle transactions, and we'll have better than sixty thousand for that. And, don't say anything about it, but the Gullingade interests on Thursday are going to buy the Lowder prospect. Lowder's a queer old jigger, a real old-time prospector. He demands cash in hand, fifty thousand. We'll get it Tuesday morning. Special buckboard express through the Short Cañon trail. So all next week I'll be accounting for practically two hundred thousand dollars. But I can take care of it, all right.”

Just to show their good nature toward the jailed patron, the Food Headquarters sent Jerry Macon a special apple pie for his Sunday dinner, nearly two inches thick, flavored with pure cinnamon, plenty of sugar, full of juice—and with a scathing note which told him of the special buckboard express through the Short Cañon trail to be deposited till Thursday right over the open vault trapdoor plate.

 

We're all set. Been inside the box.
An nex week prob'ly less'n sixty
grand, instead of two hundred.

 

Romans, not his good spelling wife wrote the note. It was true. They had cut all the rivets in the vault floor, under one plate. All they needed was to help themselves—and go. But their chief was in jail!

CHAPTER VI

Clues

EDITOR DECK RANKIN'S first impulse was to carry his cigaret evidence to the sheriff. Dolind curtly refused over the telephone to see him. Under a veil of anger the father was hiding his hurt. The rebuff caused Rankin to go around to all the places which sold cigars or tobacco in any form, asking for Dixie cigarets.

“That's the second time anybody's asked for them,” Rosy Lou. in the Tivle cigar, candy and magazine stand, remarked.

“Who else?” Rankin inquired.

“Deputy Jim Cook.”

“What!”

“Do you think I'm lying!” the pretty girl demanded indignantly.

“Oh, no. I'm just surprised that Jim smokes coffin nails.”

Rankin went off to think by himself. He had struck a snag not without precedent when investigating the activities of clandestine crimes. There were feuds in political circles, not always open or suspected. Jim had found the two empty shells in Emma's prize revolver. He had assumed the air of protecting the girl by covering up the evidence; yet he had revealed that convincing and damning proof. And Jim Cook had been able at any time to go into the girl's room.

Somewhere, among Cook's associates, might be the holdup who had killed the gambling den guard, robbing Wakeful of the cash resources. The proprietor was fighting close, now, pinching down at the games. And for the first time since Rankin began printing in the town, the Tivle bills for menus, dodgers, advertising and other work were slow pay, and mounting on the books of the Sun Foundry jobbing.

With Deputy Jim for an ally it had been an easy matter to double-cross the blame for the raid onto the sheriff's daughter. Rankin was instantly aware of the changed aspect of affairs. After all, the whole case was really mysterious, with strange ramifications. He had assumed too quickly that the raider worked alone. A gang was scattering under the surface of the Raining Sands social fabric. He felt his cheeks warm to think how nicely, thoroughly and cunningly Deputy Sheriff Jim Cook had, while pretending to be Emma Dolind's friend, given Rankin overwhelming indications of her guilt. The chance of the Dixie cigaret clue might, or might not, be significant. That, too, could be diverted against the girl in any one of a dozen ways.

Rankin had been to the new Food Headquarters only once or twice. He generally lunched at the Tivle Lunch, or went home for his meals. He saw someone coming out of the new restaurant lighting a cigaret. He had, in his searching, missed this place. He entered and, as he passed the cigar case, he saw that one end of the sales counter was taken up with varieties of cigarets. And there was an open carton of Dixies, from which several packages had been removed! He ate lunch, and, when he paid his ticket, he turned to the cashier to question her about the Dixie cigaret. But as he looked at her sharp nose, scooping, pointed chin and the narrowness of her eyes as she turned to take his sixty cents, he restrained his impulse. He had recognized a metropolitan poise. And the waiter who had served him had spoken in the suave tones of a real restaurant staff man.

The newspaper man, whose skill in gathering facts and uniting them in a story had won him a place in the New York tradition, was now really alert. He had been taking things for granted. He had overlooked a hundred possibilities. He had not anticipated finding here, in this little cluster of a village, the complications and evasions of really clever criminals. He had, in fact, failed to eliminate a single man or woman in town. These four newcomers, industrious and successful from the first jump ... Well, they handled Dixie cigarets, and the cashier had the tempered hardness of other women he had seen as a reporter. And she was flirting around with Teller Staley Keeds. This was, of course, a woman's prerogative, necessity or whimsy, as the case might be; but he knew by practiced observation as a professional spectator that she was not one to pass up an opportunity.

THAT evening Rankin went to the Food Headquarters for a milk toast. It was delicious; good for forty cents, at least, but it cost only a quarter. He went around to the Tivle and sat down to look the throng over from a new view point—one of deep suspicion. He saw Lucern going around in his angry, slithering way, conscious of the bandage mask that covered his permanent disfigurement. He saw Deputy Jim come in for a drink—alone. Then Keeds, the bank teller, hurried in and retreated to one of the stalls. A few minutes later the not unattractive Food Headquarters cashier came walking in, stepping in the light, quick way of those who click the pavements of a metropolis with their heels. Her bearing was swagger, and yet there was a certain birdlike watchfulness in her glancing about.

Rankin found the atmosphere suffocating. He was hemmed in. He felt the resentment of some of the lesser politicians and there was a curt nod in the passing of those who objected to his frankness in his column of Blisters. He presently slipped out to stroll along the streets. Carbon arcs glared down at the plaza corners and along the crossed main trails which led north, east, south and west, with the court square, the Tivle, the bank and the big general store opposite one another at the junction. He went out into the outskirts. He circled around on a wagon road that meandered over the desert, and so he approached the big jail on the edge of town. He thought he saw a light in the window of Emma's room. Just a flash.

The next instant he saw it again, a faint glow within the room too steady for a match. He stopped short against the dissolving ruins of an old dobe house. The light disappeared. He could not see the south wall of the jail, and because the night was bright and clear, he did not dare go across the open lot to where he could watch both sides of the room, from the outside. The light vanished and though he watched a long time, nearly an hour, he did not see it again.

Then presently he saw Deputy Sheriff Cook coming up out of town. The grade was heavy for him, as he shambled, stumbling and swaying along. Happily, Rankin thought, Dolind was in his room with the curtains down, and the lights turned on. Cook was a good man, everyone said, but Rankin disliked the idea of a jailer being intoxicated, especially the one over Emma Dolind. The deputy went into his own bunkroom, downstairs, handy to the doorway, ready to let in any prisoner or answer any summons.

Rankin went back downtown and saw Keeds and his snuggling companion taking a walk of their own.

“Wonder how much she'll hook him for?” Rankin grinned to himself. He was amused by the idea, for Keeds delighted to show an ornery newspaper editor-publisher how much more important a bank teller was than a journalist. The reporter added. “It'll sure make a good story when she does her trimming,”

He stopped in at the Tivle again on his way home. As he came in. Prong Lowder the old desert rat prosjiector, came over to greet him.

“Howdy, Rankin,” the whiskered, sparkling eyed miner said in his soft, low voice. “I'm selling my true fissure vein, fifty thousand dollars. Buyers signed the option, putting a thousand down to show their good faith. Cash is being shipped in, by express delivery Thursday. By hanging on I could have had more, but I want to feel some real money, after the years I've picked and shoveled.”

“Fine, Prong. I'm glad of it. You've earned more'n you'll ever get. Hang onto it.”

“I shall. I don't gamble, except prospecting. That got me. You're the first man I've told. The bank's handling it for me. But I asked for cash. I'm—well, kinda silly, you know. I wanted to see it, heft it in my hands. A thousand in tens is an awful wad! It's coming in hundreds.”

“Not a word! Don't blame you for wanting to see the cash. Invest it in dividend bonds and preferred stocks.”

“Yes, sir, Rankin. I've a list. I've good relatives back East. Brother of mine's a broker. He's kept me posted.”

As in a dream the old prospector wandered around blinking at the stars, snuffling the stinging dry night wind, watching the mirage off to the north shift and change, one minute a city of sparkling lights and another the marching of dancing figures going west. Rankin went home to bed. It had been a day of revelations, beginning really to belong to the community of Raining Sands. Heretofore he had only touched the surface, not knowing there were depths. Now he was in the catacombs of human desert underworlds, seeing the complications of the race of mankind, who are never simple and never easy really to read.

RANKIN went to see Emma Dolind in the morning. He had dropped in daily. Despite the going to press that afternoon, he tarried an hour with the girl. She was glum, disconsolate and timid. She talked in a low voice about everything but her predicament. Casually, he asked her about the routine, and learned, for the first time, that somebody brought some special extra eats from the Food Headquarters for the vagabond over in the bull pen, of whom Rankin had not thought.

“I had a funny dream last night,” she said. “I thought I awakened and went to stand in the doorway of my cell. You know, Jim doesn't lock that one. But it's horrible, when he slams the main grating shut! You hear the clang, the crash of metals, the ringing of the hard steel. Then for a long time there's the humming of vibrations running around and around, up and down through the bars and plates. I looked around but I couldn't see anything at first. Then a shadow went creeping along the corridor up there, like a black cougar. It went up the wall, climbing and edging along, out through the ventilator. Do you know,” she laughed lightly, “when I went back to bed I kind of dozed along and began to wonder if I couldn't go climbing up the gratings and walls, and go out through the ventilator. Wouldn't it be dreadful if I escaped that way?”

“I'd like to see you escape any way you want to,” he replied. “If you want me to, I'll help you—any time.”

His tone was bantering, for he had the feeling she would face the music, no matter what happened. At the same time, now she had grown alert, cheered by the feeling of the loophole in her prison.

“I knew you would,” she chuckled softly. “Well, would you mind taking a little walk with me this evening, say about eleven o'clock?”

“Would I!” he laughed, adding in a low tone. “You know, I haven't taken a walk with a girl in—oh, ages!”

“Shame on you!” she exclaimed. “Imagine you keeping all such talents and wit and wisdom to yourself, when—when some of us need you so much. Oh, Deck! In my misery, what haven't you meant to me! I couldn't stand it—but for you.”

She leaned against him, her face in his shoulder, panting with sobs. Then she laughed her tears away as he assured her everything was sure to be all right. She kissed him like a bird snatching a seed, yet with something of abandon in her gesture.

“You see,” she read his thought, “to be a prisoner I must be dreadfully bad. There's something about it grips you. If I'd done those things, I could not but realize the justice of it. But, honest, Deck, I wasn't bad. I just had to run 'around. What else did I have to do? Nothing! And what you've written about me in the paper, just exactly what it is all about, the papers, the testimony, the talk around—all the time, between the lines, you leave the gates wide open so the truth'll come riding home. Then everybody'll see—and understand. You'll forgive me ever saying you were mean—hitting people who couldn't hit back?”

“Well, they hit me first.”

“Yes ... Tonight, then?”

“Where?”

“Well—um-m—over by that old tumbledown dobe pack train station.”

“Was that the original corral and cabins?”

“Didn't you know? It is! They say there's hidden treasure there. Maybe I'll be there.”

“Don't fall and break your neck.”

“I probably shan't,” she whispered. “I've climbed all over this horrid old shack, you know.”

So that night he skirted the edge of town to find she had really taken advantage of the spacious aisle through the ventilator between the blades of the fan. She had slipped along the cornice and dropped down the north wall right past her father's window, but he had gone out to serve jury notices on outlying ranches and was not to be home for two days. He had not once been to see her.

As Rankin caught her in his arms, he breathed the sweet fragrance of her favorite perfume, the Mountain Flower. It permeated her room. The alien odor of tobacco had attracted his attention, like a blotch on white paper. He noticed, but did not mention, that she had put on a woolen blouse, a brimmed gray felt hat and a dark, short walking skirt. Her heavy laced boots crunched in the small gravel and sand as they strolled out across the open desert. Ascending a knoll and sitting on a petrified stump, they gazed down into the county court of Raining Sands, with the vast irrigated land squares extending southward for miles and miles beyond—sheer desert astonished by ample supplies of water.

Off to the right, in the west, were the Fading Hope Mountains, with a deep gap pass to the northwest, and the sharp, deep notch known as the Short Cañon high against the sky in the southwest. In the keen night breeze, with the sky full of colored brilliance, what could be easier than being fond and talking the sweet wisdom which lovers understand? What matter if she was for the hour an escaped prisoner? And what more delighted boon than his captive heart?

“Now you are a filcher of treasures,” she rebuked him mockingly. “Oh, if I were bad, still your theft would make me good, dear trusty.”

“I know you're the sweetest girl to love there is in all the world,” he assured her.

“Really? Have you then loved so many girls as that?”

“I loved one once,” he brashly admitted. “Your affection heals the wound.”

“Then you really trust me? You know I'm innocent?”

“Of course you are. I can almost prove it in court now.”

“But they say I'm the only shooter in the country who could have cut an arch in Wakeful Sam's nose!”

“Lucern told me it was a left hand throw from the elbow. You're right-handed.”

“Then you've been watching me—for evidence?” she demanded.

He wrapped his arms around her waist as she sat on his lap. He noticed for the first time that she wore a cartridge belt for a girdle, and when he rested his hand on the holster he recognized the feel of an embossed leather flap. With his forefinger he confirmed his surmise. She had on her prize revolver, one of her championship trophies. He kissed her to forget the taunting voice that mocked his trust, his second venture in loving, and all the faintly supporting theories which he was with great pains building up, trying to be sure she was as innocent as he wanted her to be.

He accompanied her back to the shadow of the jail and from a farewell embrace, she turned and went swiftly and diagonally up the ornate wall of the office and living quarters of the county jail. She entered her own room, remained five or six minutes. Then, with simian reaching and clambering, she quickly made the circuit around the cornice, and high above the 16-foot jail yard wall she swung hand over hand till she reached the ventilator shaft. There she squirmed through out of sight.

Rankin stared in amazement. No one had ever thought of the ventilator whirling fan blades as ever stopping. When running, the metal would have cut any prisoner in two, but at night the switch was thrown off and the hole in the wall was an invitation for any agile prisoner to make his getaway. Even the daring girl had used the opportunity thus presented. He headed away downtown, the fragrance of kisses on his lips and a fierce struggle in his mind, his heart all on one side and his experienced intelligence on the other.

“Well, anyhow,” he grumbled to himself, “I can't begrudge myself the satisfaction of having been a blamed fool with a mighty attractive and interesting girl. Why, she can climb all over the place, anywhere!”

WHEN he had organized the day's work of the Sun Foundry for the day, he sauntered up to the county jail as usual. He found Deputy Jim suffering from a second day headache and Emma very quiet, indeed. She greeted him distantly and gravely. To his eager inquiry she returned a perfectly evasive answer.

“No,” she replied. “There's nothing at all the matter.”

“I didn't hurt you?”

“Oh, no.”

“Won't you please tell me——”

“There's nothing to tell.”

“There is!” he declared angrily. “I want to know.”

“I tell you there's nothing at all,” she said with emphasis.

“I'll be waiting for you tonight.”

She looked at him as though wondering what he was talking about. He had long felt that he was a pretty wise reporter, broad, deep and competent, with his share, at least, of all around ability. But he didn't know a reaction when he saw it. In something of a panic he did the wrong thing, expressed the worst ideas and made the most disastrous comments. She allowed him to walk to the end of the big corridor alone; and before Deputy Jim had shaken the building with the clangor of the main gate's echoes, she had gone into her cell down at the other end, distinctly turning her back on him.

Then he was sorry he had said some of those things and also because he hadn't said others. He went to the office and wrote some Blisters for his column. He went over to the Tivle and collected his bills there, $197.69. He crossed over to the county courthouse, and gathered some good anti-administration rumors.

“If I was only a drinking man,” he grumbled to himself as he headed for the Food Headquarters.

He ate a slab of red roast beef, with mashed potatoes and other trimmings and took two cups of coffee. Then, as the cashier smiled on him, her chin resting on the sag of her interlaced hands, he paused.

“You're the editor, aren't you?” she inquired.

“Oh, yes!”

“You know,” she mused, rolling her large, if narrow set, eyes, “I always did wish I could write. I've met reporters—lots of 'em. Remember Dan Battisen?”

“Dan? You know Dan?” he exclaimed.

“Oh, yes. Friend of mine. Um-m—he wrote some pieces about me. I was in vaudeville, Proctor's, and we had a short run circuit. I made quite a hit. But you know girls! I married....”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“So you knew Dan? Must have met Joe Larkey and Fenwood?”

“We had a party one night—Larkey and Dan. Lauraine Marsh——”

“Lauraine? You mean the girl the textile man, Carbrey, married?”

“Sure I do! Wasn't she lucky? Twelve grand alimony monthly and on the dot! Carbrey's a good sport, all right. Say, I want to talk with you. Tomorrow night? I got that case of Keeds on my hands tonight. My Gawd! Don't a jay get you, Rankin?”

“Yes. Where I laugh,” he chuckled. “Tomorrow night. What time?”

“Call it nine thirty. 'Magine! That's later here'n it'd be at daybreak back home where we b'long, wouldn't it?”

He nodded cheerfully as he strolled away, feeling a good deal better. If that girl in jail thought she could treat him that way—huh! He went to the Tivle and stole in two or three dances with Mrs. Romans while Keeds glowered to think she had found an old New York friend in the editor who had only just lately managed to get his plant paid for. The night was wonderful. Tuesday always had been his lucky time. He rolled out of bed in the morning, stretched and was the first out for breakfast.

As Rankin sat before his morning's work, shortly after seven o'clock, he heard a horseman coming down the grade out of the westward. Just east of the plant the Short Cañon short cut trail came into the main roadway. Rankin looked over his shoulder and saw that the rider was bareback, with long reins coiled up in his hands. He was a good horseman. He flung himself off the animal after riding across the courthouse plaza.

“Something important,” Rankin remarked, going up to get the news fresh.

“Yessir, she stuck us up!” he heard a continuation of a breathless recital to the sheriff. “Girl in a wide hat 'n' short skirt. Covered us, an', when Darnell made a motion to lift his sawed-off, she knocked him cold.”

“Killed him?” Dolind added sharply.

“Yeh. Got it through the lungs.”

“Revolver?” Rankin asked. “Which hand?”

“Left hand. Nickel—fer I seen it shine,” the man gasped. “Backed me over against the rock wall and grabbed the satchel. Fifty thousand cold!”

CHAPTER VII

Another Killing

RANKIN rode out with Sheriff Dolind and his posse, the coroner and Prosecuting Attorney Curlew. With them went George Perland, the driver of the buckboard which was carrying $50,000 through the Short Cañon pass when the desperate holdup shot the messenger guard, Darnell, and made away with the five hundred $100 treasury certificates.

They found the victim lying on the ground beside the buckboard. Perland could come faster on horseback than driving the buckboard. Besides, he wanted to leave everything for the authorities to examine. The distance from Raining Sands was just over sixteen miles, and the robbery had occurred at the first false dawn.

The Westerners, familiar with the scenes of tragedy of the desert trails, stood back to survey the spectacle presented to their eyes. Less than seven hours before, murderous robbery had been done there. The heavy, hard voiced Perland told his story in detail.

“We'd had a good ride,” he said, “and kinda eased up as we crossed the summit turnin' down the grade. We'd packed a lot of stuff thataway and never lost a dollar. Darnell looked along the dark wall an' up the broken slope on the north side the narrows. 'All right, George,' he said. 'Theh's Raining Sands!' Jes' like that! I was drivin' pretty rough down the rolling rock. We hit this bench an' both the horses snorted, throwin' up their heads. 'Cougar I bet,' Darnell said.

“I wa'n't so sure. That sorrel lifted his head with a jerk—dif'rent from a cat snuffle. But I was holdin' 'em. Darnell seen somethin', throwin' his sawed-off. But whang! The red fire of semi-smokeless, right alongside, between those halves of the big split boulder.

“'Up!' a shrill, mockin' lady's voice said.

“I had the reins around both fists. George lopped down, paralyzed. Yo' know what a standard .45 slug does to a man! His gun slid down—theh 'tis! I expected it, myself, but my arms was out, straight holding the reins. She reached an' lifted the satchel—dark yellow grip, heavy leather it was—an' that was all the baggage on board. She shook it. I could hear the packages lumpin' around inside, rustling. If you've handled money yo'd know the sound.

“Then the horses threw themselves up, turned an' tangled theirselves. That danged girl give a laugh, cacklin' an' backed up. Next minute she was gone ... Right in theh, Sher'f! I seen her shadow. I had quite a snarl on my hands, but calmed the team down, though they was over the traces headin' the wrong way to the buckboard. I staked 'em to that lone juniper theh an' went to Darnell. I raised him, lifted him like a baby to where he lies. He wa'n't but a sizable runt, anyhow, around a hundred an' forty.

“'That yo', George?' he asked. 'Kinda dark, old boy—gettin' darker. My sun's goin' down, George.'”

Shaken with emotion, the big driver fought with his feelings. He held them a minute, as he must have held the wild team of horses, and continued:

“We kinda talked along, him choking an' me wipin' the foam from his lips. I'd seen too many go to make any mistake. He wa'n't big, boys, jes' a little feller, but livin' he was all there. Dyin'—dyin', he didn't begrudge it. She didn't give him a show in the world. One of them new women, I expect. Theh was quiet. Away yonder come an echo, the running of a horse in the gravel, then hittin' hardpan, boomin'. Darnell kinda eased hisself, his breath kinda fluttered, an' he said:

“'All right, George, let's go.'

“An' so he went. Right theh where he lies now.

“I kinda puttered around a minute. One of the traces was broke. The buckboard was sprung around. I snapped the sorrel out the harness an' shaped over the reins an' come ridin'.”

“Which way'd you say you heard the running, George?” Dolind asked in a hard voice.

“It come echoin' in the cañon here,” the driver replied. “Course it was over north, though, on the back. She didn't go up this south red wall.”

On foot, four of the posse spread up the slope among the huge, broken boulders. Rankin accompanied these, taking a lesson in the art of reading trails from the superb wildcrafters of the desert. The men went angling along, circling, stretching their necks, feeling the ground where they found tracks in the sand, leaning to get the sun's reflection on the places where there had been passing cattle, passing horses. And a yell took them to a soft place where someone with a small, narrow foot, flattish heels and a short stride, had stepped. A few yards beyond was where the horse had been tied to a low, gnarled juniper.

Here the men checked Rankin's too close approach while they examined the details. They noticed the horse had cribbed the rank cedar leaves, that a bent nail head was in one shoe, that the beast had rubbed dark brown hair on one jagged point, and that one of its tail hairs, twisted on a prong, was nearly black. Then the four men studied each other brassily, nodding and making odd, unrecognizable sounds as they audibly sorted out the things they had discovered, while Rankin waited patiently with the outside feeling of a bright man listening to savants discoursing in a learned tongue.

Presently they worked along the track by which the horseman had approached this place. The tracks were plain. Quarter of a mile away they found the juncture with the trail leading into Short Cañon pass.

“Yo' wouldn't think she'd be such a fool as that, would yo'?” one of the men, a red haired, hawk shouldered, freckled faced cowboy known as Speckles, exclaimed.

The others made no comment.

“Why in Hades didn't she circle out?” Speckles demanded. “Goin's jes' as good.”

“'Fraid o' gettin' lost!” somebody grumbled sarcastically.

Then the disgusted desert men turned to stare down across the bottoms where a vast rectangle had been turned over and ditched along the boundaries and across the quarter section lines to make an irrigation project successful. And when they went to look where the murdering holdup had ridden, they found the tracks, as plain as could be, heading straight for Raining Sands, down the alluvial fan and across the sand and alkali.

WHEN they reported to the sheriff and prosecuting attorney, they found the buckboard harnessed up, the dead man roped to the planks and covered with a blanket. With two of the men on the seat, the others rode ahead, jogging along, a grim, funereal procession kicking up the dust back to the Sun Pasture county court.

“She had on a pale skirt. I see'd it flap,” Perland added details. “She held her gun in her left hand and reached with her right to take the bag. I could smell the perfume an' cigarets, she was that clost; but I had a .45 gun muzzle ag'in my ribs ... Le's see. Kinda feels sore. We'll look.”

They looked, and there in the white, soft, clean skin of the man, on his left side, was the plain round mark of the revolver muzzle with a black and blue spot encircling the ring.

“She sure poked yo' good, George,” Tucker remarked when the posse had all examined the spot. “I bet yo' grunted.”

“I don't remember,” Perland declared. “I was thinkin' of Darnell. I was thinkin' it was the first time we'd eveh been really trapped.”

As they came to the tin can dump which always marks the approach to a desert community desirious of indicating its chief food supply, first one and then another of the possemen stiffened and looked to the northward. They could see, over near the old pack train station's dissolving dobe walls, a horse poking around, pawing the dust uneasily. Speckles, Tucker and Rankin rode over there a quarter of a mile. The animal was saddled and its reins were dangling. The hair was dark bay and the beast's tail was so dark it looked black.

“Would yo' believe a woman could be such a danged fool, Tucker?” the reddish cowboy inquired in complete disgust.

Speckles caught the horse by the dangling bridle and led it down the street to the corner of the plaza, where they joined the posse heading for the undertaking establishment of the Sunshine Furniture Company. The others gave a stare at the saddle horse, but Dolind merely glanced at the beast, huddling up where he sat on the buckboard seat, gazing with hard moroseness at the wagon tongue ahead of him between the horses of the team. The gasping, exclamatory noises of the spectators thronging along the sidewalk ceased in the dead quiet of a stunned, disconsolate crowd.

Rankin cut across, circled and went back to the big gray jail. Jim Cook had been working around, cleaning and picking things up. Rankin told him a little of what he had seen, and asked:

“Let's go look at that blamed room again, will you Jim?”

“Sure,” Jim nodded. “Jes' as though the noose wa'n't tight enough on her neck now!”

The pale, tawny buckskin skirt was thrown up on the hangers in the closet. The prize revolver was dangling over the head bedpost; one cylinder was empty, but the barrel had been wiped out.

“Yo' saw me clean it, Rankin?” Jim asked. “Look through.”

In the glistening, clean surface were streaks and even three or four little black balls of smut. The rubbing out had been hastily done.

“My Gawd,” Jim muttered mostly to himself. “She's crazy!”

“Just soon I'd go hear her rave, Jim?”

“Yo' must hate that girl, Rankin,” Jim turned on him. “Yo' an' me've got so danged much perjury on our souls, now, 'at we oughta be hung, too.”

“Jim—you'd cover this up for her?”

“Yeh. I'm cleanin' this gun, yo'll notice,” Jim replied grimly. “Much obliged for givin' me fair warnin' it was needed.”

“You'd protect her, Jim?”

“I've gone so far. I'm goin' the whole danged hog,” the deputy sheriff declared with outraged sense of duty. “My Gawd, man, if she's hung I got to tie the knot! I got to spring the trap!”

Rankin stared at him. As long as he lived he would never forget the deputy sheriff's expression. Rankin dragged the pair of laced boots from under the hanging clothes in the closet. They were a dark tan and now were dusty with alkali—but more than dusty. Jim caught one of them up and examined the top of the foot. A round, dark muddy stain in a star point splash was on the toe. It had been rubbed a little in a stirrup but the blotch was unmistakable.

“Yeh,” Jim sneered, drawing his big red handkerchief, “now I got to be a bootblack, ain't I?”

“Hold on, Jim,” Rankin checked the wiping out of the new evidence. “Sit down. Don't, I tell you! Emma Dolind isn't the only slim little woman in town.”

“What's 'at?”

“Built the way this danged jail is, anybody could climb into this window and plant this evidence. Don't you see that?” Rankin asked.

“Eh? But—shoot like her? Where's the woman—” Jim gulped. “Besides——”

“You've got her locked in. She couldn't possibly——”

“Locked in, hell!” Jim snarled. “That's jes' what I was going to say. Besides, she ain't! Did yo' eveh notice nothin'? I jes' rattled the key in the lock. I jes' slammed the gates. That's all. She ain't been locked in! Climb in that window? Naw! This jail's been open as the desert for her. I even hinted she should take to the mountangs. She pretended not to understand. Now yo' know what I know. Likely she thinks I didn't know I hadn't locked these danged nonpickable locks. First along, we had a devil of a time, workin' 'em. They're so special we couldn't open 'em ourselves; had to have the factory man come twict to show us how to work the bull cage levers.”

Rankin laughed.

“Grin, yo' blamed blue shank lobo!” Jim snorted, his tongue rolling away in incoherent profanity.

Rankin went over to the south side of the girl's large room, threw up the window and looked at the ledge without.

“Come here, Jim,” he beckoned. “According to this she's left an alibi for you.”

Cook came to look. There, in the inevitable dust of the desert, were the scrapes and prints of dragging skirts and handfalls.

“She must think a lot of you—according to that,” Rankin went on. “She didn't want anyone to suspect you of leaving everything wide open for her, so she made it look as though she didn't come through the gates and doors.”

Jim nodded.

“She's bright, ain't she?” he accepted the irony for sincerity.

Rankin felt an inkling of suspicion beginning to gleam like a true sunbeam through the black mass of evidence. He had seen Emma Dolind go through the ventilator fan blades. She had given no hint that she knew her corridor main gate was never locked. He wondered if she knew it, if she had ever tried the fastenings?

He knew everyone in town by sight, at least. There were not a dozen mature women as small as Emma Dolind. He could dismiss most of these from his suspicions. He did not know many women in town who could shoot a revolver without shutting both eyes and looking over their shoulders. She had won prizes for deadly accuracy and swift draw marksmanship.

Feeling the way he did, he just couldn't bring himself to go in and interview her as usual that day. In his heart and soul he felt she must be innocent, but not in his mind. Besides, he was provoked to think she had treated him so tartly after having been so kind with her lips on the previous night. He had kept tryst with the prisoner, strolling over the desert by her side, holding her cuddling figure in his arms with the glowing, starlit world at their feet. And because he was vexed, he recalled his rendezvous with Mrs. Romans that evening.

HE WENT to his office to write the account of what had happened. The story was “big.” He put five hundred words on the wire for the big time news circuits. Promptly he received a request for a complete account; so he just shoved his four thousand words in the proofs to the telegraph office, just as he had written it. He had, heretofore, protected Emma Dolind the best he could; but now her name was familiar in the Raining Sands holdup mystery. He brought in the discovery of the saddled and bridled horse, left near the dissolving dobe pack train station. He did not say that was within two hundred yards of the new jail in which the daughter of the sheriff was locked up. Neither did he say that all that afternoon of the fifty thousand dollar buckboard holdup murder most of the populace of Raining Sands went for a walk and circled around the new Sun Pasture County jail, staring at the high walls, at the shapely and ornamented front and sides, standing in front of the building to look up under the broad, wide entrance with its heavy gates.

No one said out loud that the sheriff's daughter had been allowed to slip away to do murder and robbery—again!—with her prison cell alibi. Yet the belief was whispered up and down that day. Fear lent wings to the flight of hate.

Rankin was alone in the Sun Foundry office, pawing over his written notes, trying to penetrate the obscurity veiling this clear cut, crystalline case, unable even to discover a drift of dust in the matter despite his confidence that he was not mistaken about the girl. Then Jim Cook came clumping along, his footsteps audible on the caked alkali pathway. He strode into the office with its one electric light turned on over the editor's mussy desk. Without a word Jim skipped an envelope, sealed, in front of Rankin and would have turned to leave, only the newspaper man checked him with a word.

“Wait!”

Opening the envelope Rankin read:

 

Dear Friend:

Why didn't you come today? Did you take seriously my mean treatment of you? Don't you know, after all, that my heart, all that I am or ever shall be, is yours? Please, please don't desert me in my misery I beg of you. Tonight at the dark nook by the dobe walls. Oh, I do love you!

Emma

 

He froze at those tender, breaking words. Through them he felt the frantic, terrible anguish of a worried sweetheart. He started to flip the sheet of paper to Jim, but couldn't. It was too sacred, too beautiful, too intimate to show another.

“Jim,” he stood up, glaring at the deputy sheriff, “did you tell her about the holdup—Darnell's killing?”

“Hell, no!” Jim snorted. “Twittin' her might make her nervous. She's asked two-three times about you—when you were comin'. I told her presently. Tonight I reckoned yo'd prob'ly forgot, been too busy, an' she kinda snuffled, just like she'd sorta melt my feelin's. An' she begged me to take that to yo'. I brung her the writin' paper.”

“She's locked in, Jim?”

“You bet! If I can keep that gal out o' mischief I'm goin' to. Theh's a limit to this here prankin', yep.”

Rankin cackled a distraught chuckle. He scratched four words on a sheet of paper:

 

I shall be there.

 

Then he sealed it in an envelope and handed it to Jim.

The deputy clumped on his way back to the jail. Rankin looked at his watch, saw that it was time to be going, and within twenty minutes was keeping tryst with Mrs. Romans, though with quite different feelings than those with which he had made the engagement.

She was tense, nervous, absent-minded. When he spoke to her she would turn and her white teeth would flash in the dark like a cat's. He felt the glance of her eyes like the sting of a needle dragging across his sensations.

“Feeling bad?” he inquired. “What's wrong?”

“You know about being double-crossed!” she said angrily. “How it makes you feel?”

Rankin nodded. He knew sorely how it made one feel.

There was venom in her spirit that night. She drew him skulking along the alleys and byways, by short cuts he had not known, around to the office of the Sun Foundry, which was all dark.

“Nobody here?” she demanded.

“No. It's shut up. Boys all home.”

She took him to the door, where he had no recourse but to unlock it with his key. She paused a time in the shadow, looking around, listening. She went inside and watched at the windows a moment to see if there were living shadows along their trail.

Then without ceremony she thrust him into his big office chair and curled herself up in his lap, sputtering, hissing, cursing in low, crisp oaths as she fondly draped her arms around his neck. He knew that hot flow of melting, searing language. It made him feel homesick. She had learned to talk where cursing is a casual conversational mood, expressive of anger or of joy, the lingo of lovers and the warnings of enemies.

“You're the only scoundrel I can talk to,” she sighed. “Ain't it purgatory, though? I just had to let go into somebody's ear. You don't mind? A lady has to do her squealing or she'll bust up and go crazy.”

“What's the matter?” he inquired.

“That stickup!” she clicked her teeth.

“You didn't——”

“Course not!” she laughed shortly. “Fifty grand, that easy? Aw, ferget it! I've said too much already. This ain't fer publication, you know. I was just so mad I wanted to say it. Now I have. What ails you? I can't stay but a minute. Ouch! That's all right! Darn near broke me in two—that cinch. See? Ain't I the West, though! That cinch?”

She laughed. She wriggled deliciously. Flirting was as natural for her as, for an apple blossom to blow perfume. She changed her mood in a flash, palavered him a minute, expressed her gratitude that he had let her talk—safely. Demanded to know the time and decided that she wasn't late enough. But a few minutes later she sprang from his lap to scurry on her way—to meet Keeds.

Rankin wondered how bad she really was. And then with a shock he realized that here was a gangster girl from the East who could have worn Emma Dolind's boots and clothes. He was sorry. Wild as she was, Mrs. Romans was attractive in her careless vivacity.

He dragged his feet to the other tryst in the gloom of the pack train station dobe walls, glum to see two such interesting women so deeply involved in the wretched desert crimes.

CHAPTER VIII

Caught

DECK RANKIN waited in the gloomy shadow of the old dobe pack train station with feelings of exasperation and doubt. This wasn't newspaper work, either in motive or practice; he was being drawn more and more deeply into the actual affairs about which he was supposed to render fair and impartial reports to the readers who trusted what they read in the columns of such papers as the Sun Foundry and in the big circuit of periodicals which he represented in this territory.

He had arrived earlier than the trysting hour—eleven o'clock. Emma Dolind was a little late in arriving. She greeted him affectionately, saying she had gone to her room for a minute. He sat on a flat topped lump of fallen wall and she cuddled into his lap, all curled up.

“Deck,” she whispered, “I waited all day long for you, and you didn't come. You didn't feel bad. Nothing happened?”

She was intense. He played for time to think. He thought she could not help but know of the holdup, the robbery of the fifty thousand dollars cash express shipment and the killing. At the same time her pleading tone contained no quaver of subtlety or trickery. Raining Sands was seething with the mystery of the holdup—a lone feminine figure, masked and as deadly as a serpent.

She felt or surmised his doubt, his evasion, and pressed him for an explanation.

“There's nothing. I was busy,” he declared, but was as unsuccessful in beguiling her.

“What is it?” she demanded. “You're distant.”

He wasn't. He had his arms around her. They were cheek to cheek. She was curled up on his lap, her knees drawn up. He had never been closer to her in his life. She read his distraught attention, penetrated his uneasy doubts and demanded an explanation with sweet anxiety. She had held him off the night but one before. Now he was, even against his own desire, unable to offer an explanation or relax his barriers.

“Don't you know what happened last night—early this morning?”

“Why—what did happen?”

If she was acting she was superb. He did not, could not bring himself to tell her. He passed the matter off, despite her insistent demand. He knew she wasn't putting on. He knew beyond all shadow of a doubt that she was innocent. Instantly she knew the passing of whatever had disturbed him, relaxing herself into calm and satisfaction. He told her of the holdup but did not describe the bandit, And presently she told him he was tired, had been working too hard, and that he must go home.

Accordingly, with reluctance, he accompanied her to the foot of the jail wall and watched her swiftly run up to the encircling handholds and go around to crawl through the fan of the ventilator back into the jail cell. When she had waved her hand he skulked slowly back downtown in the deep shadows. As he aproached the dark Food Headquarters, strolling slowly, he heard low, staccato, clipped voices—a manner and tone he had not heard since he left the East Side of Manhattan. He could not distinguish a word, but the sharpness—that stirred memories echoing. He stopped short.

Through the alley approached quiet figures. At the street corner stood two feminine figures, petite, erect, chic. Shrinking back into one of the frequent niches, Rankin stood watching. He was sure of them both; Mrs. Romans, the flirt, and Emma Dolind! Emma's wide brimmed hat, her skirt, her blouse, her very boots were rich in the particulars of which he had grown fond and suspicious, sure and miserable. All those things which happen to a man who, whatever his desire in the matter, falls willynilly in love.

Still he could not hear what they were saying—the low, slurring, clipped and sharp expressions. Then Mrs. Romans opened a cigaret case with a low click. Her companion took one of the papers, she took another, and then Mrs. Romans struck a match on the sole of her boot, cupping the flame for the other to light the smoke.

“She's masked—Emma's masked!” the observer noticed, and as the two went on across the street into the next alley to go in the dimmest way toward the jail, Rankin turned and scurried back as he had come. He thumbed the button of the jailer's night bell. Jim appeared within a minute, a revolver in hand, ready to accept any desperate charge.

“Call Emma!” the visitor demanded. “If she's there, start the ventilator fan. Hustle!”

Jim was no lackwit. He rushed back into the big corridor and from the gate hailed:

“Emma!”

“Yes?” a voice instantly replied.

Rankin wiped the sweat from his brow at that familiar sound, and saw the girl standing in her white nightgown, wondering at an inquiry at such an hour. It was two in the morning.

“It's all right,” Jim said. Then he hurried to the big jail switchboard and he pulled the handle down.

Rankin and Jim went over to the big bull pen, then, and the hammock of Jerry Macon, hobo, sagged empty in the big, open cage. They had no time to find which bars had been sawed off with the cutting edges of hair spring blades which had come from the Food Headquarters in the pies and breads and meats of which Macon had had his constant supply.

The two went up to the girl's room, where the deputy sheriff stood by the southside easternmost window, a sawed-off shotgun in his hands. The reporter, with his own revolver ready by the grip, stood over at the electric light plug, with his thumb against the pearl marker.

WITHIN ten minutes a shadow darkened the window, lifting back the copper fly screen to crawl into the room through the open window. The black, skirted figure tossed a cigaret butt out into the open air, dropped the wide brimmed hat on the bed and lifted the gauze mask from over the head.

“Hands up!” Jim growled and the room filled with electric light.

With a double barreled shotgun muzzle prodding his spinal column, the prisoner, Jerry Macon, hesitated. Fight was utterly hopeless, however. His hands, small and white, went up above his head, and Jim deftly reached to pick the ornate prize revolver from its holster on the belt around the fellow's slim waist.

“Why—the Black Weasel!” gasped Deck Rankin. “How the devil——”

The beady eyes, the pointed snout, the overshadowed chisel chin, and the buldging brows under the low, sloping forehead—the old New York reporter would have remembered that ferocious countenance if only for the fellow's terrific record. He had just happened not to see the metropolitan gangster whose looks had been so bad as to make him a suspicious person in the estimation of the Raining Sands officials. He was wearing Emma Dolind's clothes and he reeked of Dixie cigarets.

Deputy Sheriff Jim ordered the fellow to take off the profaned feminine garments. Deck Rankin called Sheriff Dolind and brought him to the scene just as the wretched masquerader stepped out of the skirt, standing in the girl's embossed leather boots, into the tops of which he had tucked his own long trousers.

Dolind stared, puzzled and taken aback. He recognized the prisoner, caught the significance of the leveled shotgun and the immediate details.

“Was he getting away?” the sheriff asked.

“Nope,” Jim replied. “Just coming home——”

“What!” Dolind shouted, his voice rising. “He'd been going in and out. My God, boys! She didn't—then she didn't....”

Rankin and Jim seemed to be watching Macon with concentration, but when the wretch swerved to plunge through the window regardless of the high drop, a wipe of the shotgun barrel lifted him staggering, with his head cut open for three inches along the left side through the hair.

“Hold on!” Jim said in a grim voice. “We want you.”

And then they put handcuffs on the prisoner and locked him up in one of the big corridor cells, after stripping him of every rag that might contain a steel edge. They found Lucern's missing derringer. In the big bull pen Jim and Rankin found the crisscross of five-by-four squares through which the scoundrel had made his way to the open ventilator shaft with its now whirring blades of sheet metal.

Sheriff Dolind had gone to his daughter's cell, sobbing. He had lost faith in the one most important person in all the world to him. Neither Jim nor Rankin wanted to see nor hear what would take place there—a curious let-down in a newspaper man's general code of practice.

After the sheriff had taken his daughter upstairs, Jim shaved the scalp of the wounded bandit, drew the lips of the cut on his head together with stitches and then plastered the injury over with tape. The fellow didn't even wince; he was thinking of other things.

“Where's the loot,” Jim demanded.

“Find it!” the Black Weasel answered, snarling.

They left him with his two wrists handcuffed to the rings, which had, for that particular purpose, been placed in the cell for the violent, the dangerous and the desperate. Then the two went upstairs and joined the sheriff, who had put on a big bathrobe. The three sat in the girl's room, where she curled up in a big chair.

Rankin told them about the cigarets, the dozen or so other clues he had found. He told about the four at the Food Headquarters and of the Black Weasel, alias Jerry Macon, talking with Mrs. Romans.

“Something went wrong among them,” Rankin declared. “She said she was double-crossed. What was it?”

“We'll pick them all up,” Dolind declared. “Better do it tonight.”

They talked that phase over. A raid on the mob of gunmen at night would be more dangerous than taking them all by surprise in the restaurant in the morning. They hardly knew what had taken place in the jail that night, the sheriff surmised. Now they knew who held up the Tivle, who robbed Lucern, who killed Dickers and who had held up the express special shipment, killing Darnell.

For hours they talked, and when the sun came up, Rankin left the contrite, happy sheriff with his jubilant, brilliant eyed daughter to go downtown. Jim Rankin went along to find the city marshal and pick up a posse with whom to round up the four pals of the killer desperado. The Food Headquarters usually opened around seven o'clock. Just before eight Jim drifted around to the place. He found it locked. The other members of the posse raiders immediately came hurrying to surround the place. They broke down the front door, rushed back to the stairway and up to the living rooms. They were empty, and everything in disorder.

“Jim,” Rankin exclaimed, “I'm a blamed fool! So are you. I told you Mrs. Romans was coming up the back way with the Black Weasel. She stood outside there and watched us catch him.”

“Well, by gabbersnabber!” Jim cried, with comical self-disgust. “Come on, boys. Find out which way they went. I'll go to the stable and see what horses were taken.”

WITHIN half an hour they knew the woman had gone to the livery corral to hire a team with a buckboard. A message, she said, had come notifying her her mother had just died. She had driven away alone, but the tracks showed she had tied the horses in the alley between the bank and the Food Headquarters, where they had trampled around uneasily. And here, as Jim circled, looking for the direction his quarry had gone, his foot went down, as if into a badger hole. For a minute the deputy stood gaping at the cave-in, and then Rankin leaned over to look more carefully.

“Better call the bank staff,” Rankin suggested. “Their tunnel has caved in.”

Two or three spectators ran to look into the bank's plate glass windows, but they could see nothing save the usual counters and vault front. The arrival of the teller, Staley Keeds, to open up found him perfectly debonair as usual.

“Sure, everything's all right,” he declared, going to open the vault door.

There sat Gerald Wapman and Rupert Jasper, covered with dirt and in their overalls and undershirts.

“Wh—what——” Keeds began.

“Hello, boys,” Jim Cook inquired cheerfully. “What happened?”

“Don't know.” They shook their heads.

They had heard, or perhaps felt, the coming of a hurrying team of horses. It had stopped over the tunnel in the alley behind the bank. Then the hole began to crumble down, and fell in. Wapman had tried to paw out, but a fall had buried him, nearly suffocating him under three or four feet of crumbling, sandy clay earth. All they dared do was wait for release when the vault was opened. And they hadn't taken a dollar from the vault.

“That oughta count in our favor, hadn't it?” Jasper asked anxiously.

“Yeh.” Jim nodded. “Instead of givin' you life, they'll make it only fifty [years.] Robbin' banks is a poor business proposition 'round here. So yer friend (illegible text) Staley?”

The teller grimaced and gulped. The two Romans, Arturo and his wife, had six or eight hours start and ten or twelve highways to choose for their escape. They made a good choice, too. They vanished.

“How about the Tivle and the fifty thousand dollars loot?” Rankin demanded of the two tunneleers who had been caught in their own hole.

“The Black Weasel double-crossed us,” Wapman declared angrily. “He always did hold out on us——”

“Shut up!” Jasper growled shrilly.

Rankin and the deputy sheriff went back to the jail. Father and daughter were still making up, still readjusting themselves to the fact of her innocence.

“More than sixty-five thousand is all that's missing,” Rankin said, when Dolind had been informed of the capture of the bank raiders.

“We'll give Macon a chance to talk,” Dolind suggested.

The pseudo hobo just sneered at the desert yaps who thought he would let go of his leverage of cash in dickering with the authorities for a light sentence. Frankly, he told them, he wasn't in a talking mood. In his story of the whole affair Rankin described the undergrown wretch's defiance and snarling pride in his crimes. Even hanging seemed to have no terrors for this criminal.

“I can pay for law talk,” he said and laughed in the faces of the authorities. And sure enough, two days later Hon. Jason Bargone arrived to look into the case, having been retained, it appeared, by “wealthy relatives of the accused.”

Bargone had never had a client hanged, and only old ones had ever died in prison, though he defended in these days only the most desperate of violators, with ample funds to pay for his services. He protested when he found his client in chains. He regarded with interest the network of steel which was being put over the ventilator fan shaft through the thick prison wall. He expressed the utmost confidence in his ability to prove that the so called Jerry Macon was a victim merely of extraordinary appearances.

Leaning over the bar in the Tivle, talking genially with the crowd, he expressed [surprise at] having such good liquor [in such a re]mote locality. He listened to the gossip about what had taken place. Obviously he was mixing, getting acquainted, his shrewd little eyes measuring the jury material and estimating the regional frame of mind. Rankin came sauntering in to see the great attorney. Already the attorney had met him, knew much more about him than the reporter supposed the man could possibly remember. Back in New York Rankin had seen the lawyer in action and knew his surface and some of his subterranean methods.

“My good old friend, the greatest newspaper man who ever covered a murder case or exposed a criminal's record!” Bargone smiled mockingly. “I suppose you'll be witness against my client, eh?”

“Very likely,” Rankin replied.

“Suppose I put you on the stand for us?”

Rankin looked at him. Behind that cool, hard eyed inquiry he felt the subtle menace of confused issues, tricked testimony, the exposure of his meetings with the girl who was supposed to be locked tightly in the new Sun Pasture County jail. Bargone was already informed of this. The wretched, undersized killer had laid out a cunning alibi, a possibility of defeating justice by taking advantage of the fact that the girl also used that ventilator fan exit from the supposedly tight cells. Bargone was just a little tipsy, just a trifle loose tongued.

“Better not,” Rankin answered him and shrugged his shoulders, his tone a taunt.

“So you can protect your lady friends, eh?”

Rankin saw the point. Mrs. Romans had told the lawyer about their meeting, probably had gone to engage him on her passing by into oblivion. Bargone was going to use that subtle, undercover influence. He would use legal strategy to soften, to keep out testimony against his client. He could do that in some regions. He could get away with it against some kinds of witnesses, anywhere.

For answer Rankin sprang with the full force of his one hundred and eighty pound of weight and drove his right fist into the stomach of the rather pursy attorney, who sagged with a loose hanging jaw and glazing eyes, falling forward into a straightening left hook followed by a smashing right. Three terrific blows: and the attorney slid down from against the bar into a kneeling, prostrate heap on the foot rail,

“He's trying to mix Emma Dolind in this case again,” Rankin turned and told the startled and delighted spectators. “He's going to clear that dirty killer by throwing suspicion on her. I say she's had enough trouble from that scoundrel's crimes.”

“You bet!” someone shouted. “Yer right!”

Rankin left the Tivle. He went home to his little dobe cabin and turned in to sleep. He had been in deep slumber, he could not tell how long, when someone caught him by the shoulder.

“Hey, Rankin! Wake up!” a voice cried. “A mob's hanging that killer—the Black Weasel.”

CHAPTER IX

On Hating Jails

THE Raining Sands populace had the feeling it was standing more than it ought to from the wretches who had attacked its bank, murdered and robbed, and insulted the community as well as the region. When Rankin knocked the sneering, crafty criminal attorney senseless in the hot way of an impulsive Westerner, his explanation made it plain and won the complete approval of every listener.

“They'd all oughta be hung,” someone suggested. “Them toughs!”

Ten minutes later somebody said:

“Let's go hang those black rascals!”

The suggestion was popular. Everyone agreed it would be a good thing. Someone remarked that it would save the tax payers a lot of money, too, swinging the Eastern crooks by their necks. The group in the Tivle surged out into the street, and magically the community was aroused. Men came scurrying down the streets, buttoning up their clothes or even dressing as they came.

They were milling around in the courthouse plaza. No one knew just exactly what to do. Suggestions were called back and forth. Somebody wanted to hang the lawyer first, to be on the safe side. Nobody had a rope for a while, and then three cowboys raised their lariats in the air and said they had 'em.

“Come on, boys!” a heavy voice ordered. “Right wheel, there. March!”

The three cowmen rode around the corner and headed up the street toward the new county jail at the north end of town. The throng stopped milling and straightened out into a kind of formation of lines, scores skipping and hopping, trying to catch step with the others. The street was narrow, and funneling into it, the mob's march straightened out into a long line of angry men, five or six hundred at least.

They didn't shout, they didn't sing, and even their talk lowered to the whisperings and breathings of determined, suppressed excitement.

“Keep still, boys. We'll go ahead an' git the keys,” someone said, and the word was carried back down the line which began to mark time. Three men ran on ahead and they rang the doorbell. Deputy Sheriff Jim Cook came to the front barred gate, recognized two men with a third held by the collar, his hands apparently bound.

“Rewarded!” one said. “Wantche to keep 'im.”

“A'right, Jack,” Jim replied, slipping the catch. And as the iron grate opened, three revolvers prodded the deputy.

“We gotcha, Jim,” one said. “It's a hanging. Them damned city toughs can't squander us around the way they has.”

“But 'tain't legal!” Jim wailed, as the keys on their piece of broom handle and heavy iron ring were snatched from his hand.

“Tell 'em all right,” one of the trio ordered. Another ran out on the front steps.

“Hurrah, boys! We got the keys,” he yelled.

The mob heard the good luck in silence, and then growled their satisfaction, the rumbling mouthing of deadly and murderous intention. They came surging, jog-trotting up the gravel and sand of the street end and whipped around to crowd into the big hallway of concrete and metal, checked by the seven foot wide opening through the solid construction of steel fence.

Rapidly the throng pressed, scurrying from the entrance toward the second barrier, the great cell cage straight ahead. On one side, the right, a flight of steel stairs with a steel railing ascended to a platform ten feet above the corridor floor. This led up around the corner to the sheriff's living rooms upstairs.

A shrill, terrible shriek of terror came from the cells. The three prisoners heard the mob coming and understood what it intended to do. The cries of fear but made the mob growl the harder, beginning the nervous chant:

“We'll hang 'em! We'll hang 'em!”

The cry was taken up till it throbbed through the whole structure, booming, and the throng outside added their voices to the rising uproar. And then there was a crash that choked every sound in every throat, checked every man where he stood, and stopped every motion as their eyes glanced around, startled, to see who had fired that revolver shot.

Clad in pink laceries, thin and small, the bottom of her gown dragging all around her, they saw Emma Dolind, at the top of the first stairway, standing on the cold grating of the landing. In her right hand she had a revolver which everyone present recognized—the prize she had won for marksmanship. But it was the old blue barreled .38-40 weapon in her left hand which was smoking, after the shot she had fired to command attention. They heard, in the instant silence of that boom, the fall of the flattened lead slug where it thumped on the floor opposite her, having hit the wall high up.

“You men get out!” she ordered.

“We're going to hang those——”

The muzzle of the prettiest revolver in all the country, with two men killed and another one scarred for life in its record, dropped into perfect alignment with the angry eyes of Tom Dakin who had begun to tell what they were going to do. He froze and the words died in his throat. She was the best shot in the country—barring, perhaps, the Black Weasel whom they sought to hang.

“Nothing of the kind!” she retorted sharply. “You're going to hang nobody. Stand back from that lock, you. Leave the keys in it. Get back.”

They obeyed.

“I'm here, Emmy,” the voice of Jim Cook bellowed. “Shall I rake 'em?”

“Give them till I count ten to get out, Jim ... One—two—three....”

Those in the hallway dodged about uneasily, and then there was a rush toward the entrance through which the rest of the mob had stopped crowding, and from which in fact the nearest had already begun to back away.

“... Four—five—six ...” the girl's voice counted rapidly and clearly.

“My God, lemme out!” someone fairly screamed.

The man's yelp of fear carried the increasing conviction that never in the world could they all get out before the furious and eager young woman, the deadliest pistol shot in the country, was through counting ten. They jammed and burst outward like slugs through the muzzle of a full choke bore shotgun. Yells, cries and gasps of effort drowned the sound of the girl's voice. Those who glanced back saw Sheriff Dolind arrive just behind his daughter with a repeating sawed-off shotgun in his two hands, also ready. She slowed her counting, and the last man to leave tripped, fell forward and slid out, crawling frantically.

THE deputy sheriff clanged the gates behind the last of the crowd. As he stepped back, a man sprang forward into the light—Rankin.

“All right, Jim?” the newcomer asked, “I just heard about it.”

“All right, sure 'nough,” the deputy nodded, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder.

There stood Emma, and behind her, a head taller, was Sheriff Dolind. Jim opened the gate to let the newspaper man come in, and, after shutting it, went over to pick up the flattened bullet which rested on the floor like a broken rivet.

“They were running when I met them,” Rankin laughed. “But I was afraid something had happened.”

“It had happened, all right,” Jim declared. “She sure punctuated her talk with emphasis.”

“And I've got to write all this story for tomorrow's paper. And add a page extra at that.”

“What were you thinking about when you faced them?” Rankin interviewed the sheriff's daughter.

“Why—” She bit her lip, embarassed. “I was barefooted and I was thinking if they didn't hurry up I'd catch my death of cold.”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her. That's just exactly what she would be thinking, and he thanked her for it.

“I want you always to be thinking about taking care of my sweetheart,” he declared. “Where do you guess that loot is, Emma?”

“Eh—you know!” She stared, her eyes bulging. “Why—I believe—I saw a woman. I thought it was a girl ... Wait'll I put on my boots!”

She returned in no time, bringing a lantern from the office. Then she and Rankin together went in the dark of the night to the old dobe pack train station.

“I was out—alone!” she exclaimed. “I saw somebody riding up. I just thought of it. He came in here. I thought it was a girl meeting somebody—an awful, bold bad girl I was sure, you know. Who else would meet anyone out here in the middle of the night!”

He kissed her. Her voice was terribly sincere.

“I heard something while I was hiding,” she declared, holding the lantern so that the light fell on the wall of the collapsing dobe building.

Over in the corner he saw a number of chunks piled up, and the flat side of one of them was dark, freshly crumbled off. Rankin pulled it over, and then pulled over five or six other chunks; and there was revealed the handle and part of the top of a satchel, with two dark stains on the leather. Under it was a cracker tin from the dump heaps and in this was stuffed the loot from the Tivle.

“There. I told you the place has traditions of buried treasure,” she reminded Rankin.

“All right. Good,” Rankin said grimly. “I'm going down and interview Bargone again. I'm going to tell him you showed me where it is.”

“A11 right. I'll go with you,” she replied.

And so they went down to the hotel to which the unconscious attorney had been carried. They turned the money over to City Marshal Searls to guard, and he in turn summoned Keeds of the bank and two deputy sheriffs. Bargone was just recovering his senses. He held his hands over his badly bruised stomach, rocking as he rubbed.

“How you feeling?” Rankin demanded.

“Go to——”

“Hold on,” Rankin said. “I'm going to stay right here. I came to tell you that Miss Dolind, my fiancée, saw the Black Weasel hiding something out in the dobe pack train station ruins. We went there and we found the Tivle and the express messenger holdup loot. We'll let you stay in Raining Sands on one——”

“You say you found the swag?”

“Yes.”

“I don't want to stay. I'm through. No justice in this——”

“Oh yes there is. And you'll stay,” Rankin laughed mockingly. “I'm charging you with conspiracy to receive stolen goods, old boy. And everybody here heard your question. And your decision to depart when you learned the Black Weasel didn't have the swag any more.”

“What? Why, you can't—” Bargone gasped, and then groaned with pain, largely mental.

“Good, snappy work,” Prosecuting Attorney Curlew said and laughed. He had come to see what was happening. “That'll hold him, all right. I'm afraid the sheriff's going to have another legal hanging job, though.”

“The Black Weasel?” Rankin asked. Then he added, “If he's human he won't mind. I'll write the story of it—if we're back from our honeymoon!”

“Well, we won't be. Not if I have anything to say about it!” the bride-to-be declared, with asperity. “Oh, but I hate jails and punishments and crimes!”