“Now you are meaning my father, Mr. Witheral?”
“Yes, but only if these charges are proved false.”
“It’s a dirty shame! My father—”
But that line would get nowhere. Bart Stollard became slow, plodding, his usual self.
“How much,” he asked, tense about the lips, “would be required to balance the bank’s cash?”
His father was able to tell him. Eleven thousand, six hundred and eighty-five dollars. That amount exactly the robber had taken from the vault. Methodically Bart noted down the amount.
“Since the bank is closed and I’m not needed here,” he said, “I’ll be taking the rest of the day off.”
“I suppose,” said Mr. Trawl, “that you are going to catch the thief?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Ah, yes, and you’ll be sure to count his buttons, won’t you?”
“Oh, let up, Trawl,” said the other director wearily. “The boy knows the robber has got to be caught. All right, Bart, take the afternoon off.”
Bart felt a hand on his shoulder, his father’s hand.
“Thanks, Bart,” said his father.
Bart hurried to the garage where he kept his roadster and drove straight to the highway and turned south. “A man can’t just disappear,” he said to himself. That was all he had to go on.
He stopped and questioned the drivers of the few cars he met. He got plenty of interested comment, but no information. He made the same inquiry at the filling stations at Mesquite and Date Grove. No one had seen a grayish-green motor cycle. They had been on the lookout too, ever since hearing of the robbery over the telephone.
At every culvert bridging an arroyo or washout, Bart stopped. His thoroughness as to detail, which had often earned him chilled reprimands from Mr. Trawl, would not permit him to pass any possible hiding place. At last, under a culvert some twelve miles south of Date Grove, he found the motor cycle. Nor was that all. Here also the man had left his clothes, or such of his clothes as might form a part of the description broadcast by Mr. Trawl. There were the faded chambray shirt, the soiled checkered cap, the laced boots, one with a raised sole, the gaberdine riding breeches, and the gray felt mask, evidently cut from an old hat.
“About everything except the money,” Bart said to himself. He took up the garments one by one and set his faculties to work to read signs on them. Finally he rolled them up into a bundle and took them with him. The motor cycle he had to leave. He looked for its serial number, but found that it had been chiseled off.
A question filled his mind as he drove on. How was the robber traveling now? Bart put on all speed to the next little oasis of adobes and palms, and here at Golconda Wells he telephoned north and south that the robber was no longer on his motor cycle and that the previous description as to his clothes no longer applied. After leaving Golconda Wells he overtook a seed salesman that he knew, who was bowling leisurely along in his work-a-day coupe. The compartment in the back of the coupe was open and filled, as usual, with sacks of alfalfa seed, the “real genuine hairy Peruvian” which the energetic Mr. Weerts boosted endlessly up and down the valley.
Only recently Bart and his father had bought an experimental assortment of budded avocados of him. That putty-colored coupe with its sacks of alfalfa seed and the spry, slim nurseryman in his linen suit at the wheel had been a familiar sight on the highway and county roads for more than a year past. As Bart came alongside he saw that the coupe was carrying a passenger, a thick-set man in overalls slumped forward, inert, his head on his hand. Bart honked, slowed down, and both cars stopped.
“Suppose you’ve heard about the robbery, Mr. Weerts?” Bart began.
“Been hearing about it all morning,” the salesman replied. He had a keen, kidding way about him usually, but he was serious and genuinely concerned now. “Say, that’s too bad. Caught the fellow yet?”
“I was wondering,” said Bart, “if you haven’t got him there now,” and he nodded at the figure besides Weerts. “Where did you pick him up?”
“Back at Barlow’s,” said Weerts. Barlow’s was on a county road twenty miles off the highway. “They tell me he is a dare-devil broncho buster, but,” said Weerts, his lean face twisting into an ironic grin, “look what a tractor plow did to him this morning.”
He tilted up the man’s head and Bert saw that one eye was bandaged and that one forearm was in splints.
“They did what they could for him seeing Barlow has no telephone and they couldn’t get a doctor, and when I happened along, they asked would I deliver him to the hospital down at El Metropole.”
“And can’t we be getting there?” complained the man.
“Sure,” said Bart hastily. “Sorry I stopped you, but—”
“Don’t mention it,” said Weerts, starting his car.
III
Bart smiled feebly and speeded ahead. The floor of the valley widened on either side as he rode. The mountain ranges receded into the orange haze of late afternoon. Out over the vastness were flecks of silver — mesquite in the lowering sun. More and more the dunes gave way to irrigated fields. Now and again Bart Stollard felt a lesser dryness in the air, as if there had been a shower of rain, and he did not need to look to know that he was passing between long stretches of growing alfalfa. Canneries, icing plants, cotton gins, refrigerator cars on sidings, began to mingle with the clumps of greasewood. He had reached El Metropole.
He turned into the wide paved main street flanked by long blocks of covered sidewalks and shops of stucco, one and two stories high. He kept on to the plaza and got out at the town hall. He found the police station inside, and the chief of police in his office. He was a moist, sodden man in a swivel chair. His eyes regarded the intruder without moving. He listened unblinking to Bart’s story and Bart’s appeal for aid. Then he removed the loose dead cigar from between his lips and said:
“Are you Bart Stollard? Uh-huh, I’ve been hearing about you.”
“You have? Who from?”
“From the Southwest National. A guy in your bank phoned them. Guy named — Crawl.”
“Trawl.”
“All right, Trawl. He mentioned you’d be rampaging down here, telling us how to catch the robber.”
“Not at all,” said Bart, “I’m asking for help.”
“Yeah, but the Trawl gink warned us we wasn’t to take you as any way representing the bank, wherefore you’ll kindly bear in mind that thief catching is my business and I would like to attend to it myself.”
Bart departed. So that was what Mr. Trawl had done for him. Mr. Trawl did not want the robber caught. He could not afford to have his charges proved false.
At the Hotel Metropole across the way in the privacy of the room assigned him, Bart called up his home over long distance.
“Oh, Bart — your father!”
It was his mother’s voice.
“He needs you, Bart. People are saying things. The bank must have cash or it can’t open in the morning. Mr. Trawl telephoned to the Southwest National for money and they refused. Things are serious and your father — oh, Bart, it would kill him!”