THE FIRST CLEW

“Let’s see!” Trowbridge reined in his horse and meditated, when he and Dorothy had covered several miles of their ride back to Crawling Water. “Jensen was shot around here somewhere, wasn’t he?”

“I think it was over there.” She pointed with her quirt in the direction of a distant clump of jack-pines. “Why?”

“Suppose we ride over and take a look at the spot.” He smiled at her little shudder of repugnance. “We haven’t any Sherlock Holmes in this country, and maybe we need one. I’ll have a try at it. Come on!”

In response to the pressure of his knees, the trained cow-pony whirled toward the jack-pines, and Dorothy followed, laughing at the idea that so ingenuous a man as Lem Trowbridge might possess the analytical gift of the trained detective.

“You!” she said mockingly, when she had caught up with him. “You’re as transparent as glass; not that it isn’t nice to be that way, but still you are. Besides, the rain we’ve had must have washed all tracks away.”

“No doubt, but we’ll have a look anyhow. It won’t do any harm. Seriously, though, the ways of criminals have always interested me. I’d rather read a good detective story than any other sort of yarn.”

“I shouldn’t think that you had any gift that way.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” he laughed. “It’s always like that. Haven’t you noticed how nearly every man thinks he’s missed his calling; that if he’d only gone in for something else he’d have been a rattling genius at it? Just to show you! I’ve got a hand over at the ranch, a fellow named Barry, who can tie down a steer in pretty close to the record. He’s a born cowman, if I ever saw one, but do you suppose he thinks that’s his line?”

“Doesn’t he?” she asked politely. One of the secrets of her popularity lay in her willingness to feed a story along with deft little interjections of interest.

“He does not. Poetry! Shakespeare! That’s his ‘forty’! At night he gets out a book and reads Hamlet to the rest of the boys. Thinks that if he’d ever hit Broadway with a show, he’d set the town on fire.”

When Dorothy laughed heartily, as she now did, the sound of it was worth going miles to hear. There are all shades of temperament and character in laughter, which is the one thing of which we are least self-conscious; hers revealed not only a sense of humor, rare in her sex, but a blithe, happy nature, which made allies at once of those upon whose ears her merriment fell. Trowbridge’s eyes sparkled with his appreciation of it.

“Well, maybe he would,” she said, finally.

“Maybe I’ll make good along with Sherlock Holmes.” He winked at her as he slipped from his horse’s back, on the edge of a rocky knoll, fronting the jack-pines. “This is the place, I reckon.” His quick eyes had caught a dark stain on a flat rock, which the rain had failed to cleanse entirely of the dead herders’ blood.

When Dorothy saw it, too, her mirth subsided. To her mind, the thought of death was most horrible, and especially so in the case of a murderous death, such as had befallen the sheep men. Not only was the thing horrible in itself, but still more so in its suggestion of the dangers which threatened her friends.

“Do hurry!” she begged. “There can’t be anything here.”

“Just a minute or two.” Struck by the note of appeal in her voice, so unlike its lilt of the moment before, he added: “Ride on if you want to.”

“No,” she shuddered. “I’ll wait, but please be quick.”

It was well for her companion that she did wait, or at least that she was with him for, when he had inspected the immediate vicinity of the shooting, he stepped backward from the top of the knoll into a little, brush-filled hollow, in which lay a rattlesnake. Deeply interested in his search, he did not hear the warning rattle, and Dorothy might not have noticed it either had not her pony raised its head, with a start and a snort. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the snake and called out sharply.

“Look out, behind you, Lem!”

There are men, calling themselves conjurors, who perform prodigies of agility with coins, playing-cards, and other articles of legerdemain, but they are not so quick as was Trowbridge in springing sidewise from the menacing snake. In still quicker movement, the heavy Colt at his side leaped from its holster. The next second the rattle had ceased forever, for the snake’s head had been neatly cut from its body.

“Close call! Thanks!” Trowbridge slid his weapon back into its resting place and smiled up at her.

So close, indeed, had the call been that, coming upon the dreadful associations of the spot, Dorothy was unnerved. Her skin turned a sickly white and her lips were trembling, but not more so than were the flanks of the horses, which seemed to be in an agony of fear. When the girl saw Trowbridge pick up a withered stick and coolly explore the recesses of a small hole near which the snake had been coiled, she rebelled.

“I’m not going to stay here another minute,” she declared hotly.

“Just a second. There may be another one.... Oh, all right, go on, then,” he called out, as she whirled her pony and started off. “I’ll catch you. Ride slow!”

He looked after her with a smile of amusement, before renewing his efforts with the stick, holding his bridle reins with one hand so that his horse could not follow hers. To his disappointment there seemed to be nothing in the hole, but his prodding suddenly developed an amazing fact. He was on the point of dropping the stick and mounting his horse, when he noticed a small piece of metal in the leaves and grass at the mouth of the hole. It was an empty cartridge shell.

“By Glory!” he exclaimed, as he examined it. “A clew, or I’m a sinner!”

Swinging into his saddle, he raced after Dorothy, shouting to her as he rode. In her pique, she would not answer his hail, or turn in her saddle; but he was too exultant to care. He was concerned only with overtaking her that he might tell her what he had found.

“For the love of Mike!” he said, when by a liberal use of his spurs he caught up with her. “What do you think this is, a circus?”

“You can keep up, can’t you?” she retorted banteringly.

“Sure, I can keep up, all right.” He reached out and caught her bridle rein, pulling her pony down to a walk in spite of her protests. “I want to show you something. You can’t see it riding like a jockey. Look here!” He handed her the shell. “You see, if I had come when you wanted me to, I wouldn’t have found it. That’s what’s called the detective instinct, I reckon,” he added, with a grin. “Guess I’m some little Sherlock, after all.”

“Whose is it?” She turned the shell over in her palm a trifle gingerly.

“Look!” He took it from her and pointed out where it had been dented by the firing-pin. “I reckon you wouldn’t know, not being up in fire-arms. The hammer that struck this shell didn’t hit true; not so far off as to miss fire, you understand, but it ain’t in line exactly. That tells me a lot.”

“What does it tell you?” She looked up at him quickly.

“Well,” he spoke slowly, “there ain’t but one gun in Crawling Water that has that peculiarity, that I know of, and that one belongs, or did belong, to Tug Bailey.”

She caught at his arm impulsively so that both horses were brought to a standstill.

“Then he shot Jensen, Lem?”

Her voice was tremulous with eagerness, for although she had never doubted Wade or Santry; had never thought for a moment that either man could have committed the crime, or have planned it, she wanted them cleared of the doubt in the eyes of the world. Her disappointment was acute when she saw that Trowbridge did not deem the shell to be convincing proof of Bailey’s guilt.

“Don’t go too fast now, Dorothy,” he cautioned. “This shell proves that Bailey’s gun was fired, but it doesn’t prove that Bailey’s finger pulled the trigger, or that the gun was aimed at Jensen. Bailey might have loaned the rifle to somebody, or he might have fired at a snake, like I did a few minutes ago.”

“Oh, he might have done anything, of course. But the shell is some evidence, isn’t it? It casts the doubt on Tug Bailey, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does that, all right. It casts it further than him.” The cattleman spoke positively. “It’s a clew, that’s what it is. We’ve got a clew and we’ve got a motive, and we didn’t have either of them yesterday.”

“How do you suppose that shell got where you found it?” she asked, her voice full of hope.

“Bailey must have levered it out of his rifle, after the shooting, and it fell into that hole. You see,” he could not resist making the triumphant point once more, “if I hadn’t stopped to look for another rattler, I never would have found it. Just that chance just a little chance like that throws the biggest criminals. Funny, ain’t it?” But she was too preoccupied with the importance of the discovery to dwell on his gifts as a sleuth.

“What can we do about it, Lem?” She gave her pony her head and they began to move slowly. “What ought we to do?”

“I’ll find this fellow, Bailey, and wring the truth out of him,” he answered grimly; and her eyes sparkled. “If I’m not greatly mistaken, though, he was only the tool.”

“Meaning that Moran....”

“And Rexhill,” Trowbridge snapped. “They are the men higher up, and the game we’re really gunning for. They hired Bailey to shoot Jensen so that the crime might be fastened on to Gordon. I believe that as fully as I’m alive this minute; the point is to prove it.”

“Then we’ve no time to waste,” she said, touching her pony with the quirt. “We mustn’t loiter here. Suppose Bailey has been sent away?”

The thought of this caused them to urge their tired horses along at speed. Many times during the ride which followed Trowbridge looked admiringly at his companion as she rode on, untiringly, side by side with him. A single man himself, he had come to feel very tenderly toward her, but he had no hope of winning her. She had never been more than good friends with him, and he realized her feeling for Wade, but this knowledge did not make him less keen in his admiration of her.

“Good luck to you, Lem,” she said, giving him her hand, as they paused at the head of Crawling Water’s main street. “Let me know what you do as soon as you can. I’ll be anxious.”

He nodded.

“I know about where to find him, if he’s in town. Oh, we’re slowly getting it on them, Dorothy. We’ll be ready to ‘call’ them pretty soon. Good-by!”

Tug Bailey, however, was not in town, as the cattleman learned at Monte Joe’s dance-hall, piled high with tables and chairs and reeking with the stench, left over from the previous night, of whiskey fumes and stale tobacco smoke. Monte Joe professed not to know where the puncher had gone, but as Trowbridge pressed him for information the voice of a woman, as shrill as the squawk of a parrot, floated down from the floor above.

“Wait a minute.”

Trowbridge waited and the woman came down to him. He knew her by ill-repute, as did every man in the town, for she was Pansy Madder, one of the dance-hall habitues, good-looking enough by night to the inflamed fancy, but repulsive by day, with her sodden skin and hard eyes.

“You want to know where Tug is?” she demanded.

“Yes, where is he?”

“He’s headed for Sheridan, I reckon. If he ain’t headed there, he’ll strike the railroad at some other point; him and that Nellie Lewis, that he’s skipped with.” Her lusterless eyes were fired by the only thing that could fire them: her bitter jealousy.

“You’re sure?” Trowbridge persisted, a little doubtfully.

“Sure? Of course, I’m sure. Say,” she clutched at his arm as he turned away, “if he’s wanted for anything, bring him back here, will you? Promise me that! Let me” her pale lips were twisted by an ugly smile “get my hands on him!”

From the dance-hall, Trowbridge hastened to the jail to swear out a warrant for Bailey’s arrest and to demand that Sheriff Thomas telegraph to Sheridan and to the two points above and below, Ranchester and Clearmont, to head off the fugitive there. Not knowing how far the Sheriff might be under the dominance of the Rexhill faction, the cattleman was not sure that he could count upon assistance from the official. He meant, if he saw signs of indecision, to do the telegraphing himself and to sign at the bottom of the message the name of every ranch owner in the district. That should be enough to awaken the law along the railroad without help from Thomas, and Trowbridge knew that such action would be backed up by his associates.

He had no trouble on this score, however, for Sheriff Thomas was away on the trail of a horse-thief, and the deputy in charge of the jail was of sturdier character than his chief.

“Will I help you, Lem?” he exclaimed. “Say, will a cat drink milk? You bet I’ll help you. Between you and me, I’ve been so damned ashamed of what’s been doing in this here office lately that I’m aching for a chance to square myself. I’ll send them wires off immediate.”

“I reckon you’re due to be the next Sheriff in this county, Steve,” Trowbridge responded gratefully. “There’s going to be a change here before long.”

“That so? Well, I ain’t sayin’ that I’d refuse, but I ain’t doin’ this as no favor, either, you understand. I’m doin’ it because it’s the law, the good old-fashioned, honest to Gawd, s’help me die, law!”

“That’s the kind we want here that, or no kind. So long, Steve!”

With a nod of relief, Trowbridge left the jail, well-satisfied that he had done a good turn for Wade, and pleased with himself for having lived so well up to the standards set by the detectives of popular fiction. Since Bailey had not had time to reach the railroad, his arrest was now almost a certainty, and once he was back in Crawling Water, a bucket of hot tar and a bundle of feathers, with a promise of immunity for himself, would doubtless be sufficient to extract a confession from him which would implicate Rexhill and Moran.

Feeling that he had earned the refreshment of a drink, the cattleman was about to enter the hotel when, to his consternation, he saw tearing madly down the street toward him Bill Santry, on a horse that had evidently been ridden to the very last spurt of endurance. He ran forward at once, for the appearance of the old man in Crawling Water, with a warrant for murder hanging over his head, could only mean that some tragedy had happened at the ranch.

“Hello, Lem!” Santry greeted him. “You’re just the man I’m lookin’ for.”

“What’s the trouble?” Trowbridge demanded.

“The boy!” The old plainsman slid from his horse, which could hardly keep its feet, but was scarcely more spent in body than its rider was in nerve. His face was twitching in a way that might have been ludicrous but for its significance. “They’ve ambushed him, I reckon. I come straight in after you, knowin’ that you’d have a cooler head for this here thing than than I have.”

“My God!” The exclamation shot from Trowbridge like the crack of a gun. “How did it happen?”

Santry explained the details, in so far as he knew them, in a few breathless sentences. The old man was clearly almost beside himself with grief and rage, and past the capacity to act intelligently upon his own initiative. He had not been satisfied, he said, to remain behind at the ranch and let Wade go to the timber tract alone, and so after a period of indecision he had followed him. Near the edge of the timber he had come upon Wade’s riderless horse, trailing broken bridle reins. He had followed the animal’s tracks back to the point of the assault, but there was no sign of Wade, which fact indicated that he had been carried away by those who had overcome him.

“I could see by the tracks that there was a number of ’em; as many as five or six,” the old man summed up. “I followed their sign as far as I could, but I lost it at the creek. Then I went back to the house and sent some of the boys out to scout around before I come down here after you.”

“Where do you suppose they could have taken him?” Trowbridge asked. “They’d never dare bring him to town.”

“Gawd knows, Lem! There’s more pockets and drifts up in them hills than there is jack-rabbits. ’Tain’t likely the boys’ll find any new sign, leastways not in time; not before that of a Moran it was him did it, damn him! I know it was. Lem, for Gawd’s sake, what are we goin’ to do?”

“The first thing to do, Bill, is to get you out of this town, before Thomas shows up and jumps you.”

“I don’t keer for myself. I’ll shoot the....”

“Luckily, he’s away just now,” Trowbridge went on, ignoring the interruption. “Come with me!” He led the way into the hotel. “Frank,” he said to the red-headed proprietor, “is Moran in town to-day?”

“Nope.” The Irishman regarded Santry with interest. “He went out this morning with four or five men.”

“Rexhill’s here, ain’t he?” Trowbridge asked then. “Tell him there’s two gentlemen here to see him. Needn’t mention any names. He doesn’t know me.”

When Santry, with the instinct of his breed, hitched his revolver to a more convenient position on his hip, Trowbridge reached out and took it away from him. He dared not trust the old man in his present mood. He intended to question the Senator, to probe him, perhaps to threaten him; but the time had not come to shoot him.

“I’ll keep this for you, Bill,” he said soothingly, and dropped the weapon into his coat pocket. “I’m going to take you up with me, for the sake of the effect of that face of yours, looking the way it does right now. But I’ll do the talking, mind! It won’t take long. We’re going to act some, too.”

Their visit had no visible effect upon Rexhill, however, who was too much master of himself to be caught off his guard in a game which had reached the point of constant surprise. His manner was not conciliatory, for the meeting was frankly hostile, but he did not appear to be perturbed by it. He had not supposed that the extremes he had sanctioned could be carried through without difficulty, and he was prepared to meet any attack that might be offered by the enemy.

“Senator Rexhill,” Trowbridge introduced himself, “you’ve never met me. I’m from the Piah Creek country. My name is Trowbridge.”

“Yes,” the Senator nodded. “I’ve heard of you. I know your friend there by sight.” He lingered slightly over the word “friend” as he glanced toward Santry, “There’s a warrant out for him, I believe.”

“Yes. There’s a warrant out for one of your friends, too, Tug Bailey,” Trowbridge retorted dryly, hoping that something would eventuate from his repartee; but nothing did. If the news surprised Rexhill, as it must have, he did not show it. “I’ve just sworn it out,” the rancher continued, “but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to tell you that Gordon Wade, whom you know, has been kidnaped.”

Santry stifled an exclamation of rage in answer to a quick look from his friend.

“Kidnaped from his own range in broad daylight,” the latter went on. “I represent his friends, who mean to find him right away, and it has occurred to me that you may be able to assist us in our search.”

“Just why has that idea occurred to you?” Rexhill asked calmly, as though out of mere curiosity. “I’d like to know.”

A bit baffled by this attitude of composure, Trowbridge hesitated, for it was not at all what he had expected to combat. If the Senator had flown into a passion, the cattleman would have responded with equal heat; now he was less sure of himself and his ground. It was barely possible, after all, that Tug Bailey had shot Jensen out of personal spite; or, at the worst, had been the tool of Moran alone. One could hardly associate the thought of murder with the very prosperous looking gentleman, who so calmly faced them and twirled his eyeglasses between his fingers.

“Why should that idea have occurred to you?” the Senator asked again. “So far as I am informed, Wade is also liable to arrest for complicity in the Jensen murder; in addition to which he has effected a jail delivery and burglarized my office. It seems to me, if he has been kidnaped as you say, that I am the last person to have any interest in his welfare, or his whereabouts. Why do you come to me?”

This was too much for Santry’s self-restraint.

“What’s the use of talkin’ to him?” he demanded. “If he ain’t done it himself, don’t we know that Moran done it for him? To hell with talkin’!” He shook a gnarled fist at Rexhill, who paid no attention whatever to him, but deliberately looked in another direction.

“That is why we are here,” said Trowbridge, when he had quieted Santry once more. “Because we have good reason to believe that, if these acts do not proceed from you, they do proceed from your agent, and you’re responsible for what he does, if I know anything about law. This man Moran has carried things with a high hand in this community, but now he’s come to the end of his rope, and he’s going to be punished. That means that you’ll get yours, too, if he’s acted under your orders.” The cattleman was getting into his stride now that the first moments of his embarrassment were passed. His voice rang with authority, which the Senator was quick to recognize, although he gave no evidence that he was impressed. “Has Moran been acting for you, that’s what we want to know?”

“My dear fellow,” Rexhill laughed rumblingly, “if you’ll only stop for an instant to think, you’ll see how absurd this is.”

“A frank answer to a frank question,” Trowbridge persisted. “Has he been acting for you? Do you, at this moment, know what has become of Wade, or where he is?”

“That’s the stuff!” growled Santry, whose temples were throbbing under the effort he put forth to hold himself within bounds.

“I do not!” the Senator said, bluntly. “And I’ll say freely that I would not tell you if I did.”

Santry’s hands opened and shut convulsively. He was in the act of springing upon Rexhill when Trowbridge seized him.

“You’re a liar!” he roared, struggling in his friend’s grasp. “Let me at him. By the great horned toad, I’ll make him tell!”

“Put that man out of this room!” Rexhill had arisen in all of his ponderous majesty, roused to wrath at last. His pudgy finger shook as he pointed to the door, and his fat face was congested. “I’m not here to be insulted by a jail-bird. Put him out!”

Trowbridge’s eyes gleamed exultantly, although he still kept a tight hold on Santry, for this was the sort of thing he had expected to meet. He had not thought that Rexhill would confess complicity in the kidnaping this early in the game; but he had looked for an outburst of anger which would give him the chance he wanted to free his own mind of the hate that was in it. He had wanted the chance to make Rexhill feel that his hour of atonement was close at hand, and getting nearer every minute.

“Easy, now!” he admonished. “We’re going, both of us, but we won’t be put out. You’ve said just what I looked for you to say. You’ve denied knowledge of this thing. I think with Santry here that you’re a liar, a God-forsaken liar.” He drew closer to the Senator, who seemed about to burst with passion, and held him with a gaze his fury could not daunt. “May Heaven help you, Senator, when we’re ready to prove all this against you. If you’re in Crawling Water then, we’ll ride you to hell on a rail.”

“Now,” Trowbridge said to Santry, when they were downstairs again, “you get out of town hot-foot. Ride to my place. Take this!” He scribbled a few lines on the back of an envelope. “Give it to my foreman. Tell him to meet me with the boys where the trail divides. We’ll find Wade, if we have to trade our beds for lanterns and kill every horse in the valley.”

The two men shook hands, and Santry’s eyes were fired with a new hope. The old man was grateful for one thing, at least: the time for action had arrived. He had spent his youth on the plains in the days when every man was a law unto himself, and the years had not lessened his spirit.

“I’ll be right after you, Bill,” Trowbridge concluded. “I’m going first to break the news to Miss Purnell. She’d hear it anyway and be anxious. She’d better get it straight from me.”

Lem Trowbridge had seen only one woman faint, but the recollection was indelibly impressed upon his mind. It had happened in his boyhood, at the ranch where he still lived, when a messenger had arrived with word of the death of the elder Trowbridge, whose horse had stepped into a prairie-dog hole and fallen with his rider. The picture of his mother’s collapse he could never forget, or his own horrible thought that she, too, had passed away, leaving him parentless. For months afterwards he had awakened at night, crying out that she was dead.

The whole scene recurred to him when he told Dorothy of Wade’s disappearance, and saw her face flush and then pale, as his mother’s had done. The girl did not actually faint, for she was young and wonderfully strong, but she came so near to it that he was obliged to support her with his arm to keep her on her feet. That was cruel, too, for he loved her. But presently she recovered, and swept from his mind all thought of himself by her piteous appeal to him to go instantly in search of Wade.

“We’ll find him, Dorothy, don’t you worry,” he declared, with an appearance of confidence he was far from feeling. “I came around to tell you myself because I wanted you to know that we are right on the job.”

“But how can you find him in all those mountains, Lem? You don’t even know which side of the range they’ve hidden him on.”

He reminded her that he had been born in Crawling Water Valley, and that he knew every draw and canyon in the mountains; but in his heart he realized that to search all these places would take half a lifetime. He could only hope that chance, or good fortune, might lead them promptly to the spot they sought.

“Do you think that Senator Rexhill knows where Gordon is?” she asked. “Is he in this, too?”

“I don’t know for sure,” he answered. “I believe Moran is acting under Rexhill’s orders, but I don’t know how much Rexhill knows of the details. If I knew that, it would be fairly easy. I’d....” His strong hands gripped the back of a chair until his knuckles showed white under their tan. “I’d choke it out of him!”

“Oh, if there was only something I could do!” Dorothy wailed helplessly. “A woman never can do anything in a crisis but wait!” Her distress was so pitiable to witness that Trowbridge averted his gaze.

“We’ll do all that can be done, Dorothy,” he assured her. “Trust me for that. Besides ” A thought had just flashed into his head which might relieve her sense of helplessness. “Besides, we’re going to need you here in town to keep us informed of what goes on.”

“If I learn anything, how can I get word to you?” she asked, her face brightening somewhat. “You’ll be up in the hills.”

“I’ll try to keep a man at the big pine all the time. If you find out anything send word to him.”

“Oh, yes, I will, I will. That’ll be something anyhow.” Her eyes sparkling with tears, she gave him both her hands. “Good-by, Lem!”

“Good-by, Dorothy,” he said solemnly, wringing her hands. “I know just how it is. We’ll find him for you!”