“Mother, you don’t mean—”
“Yes, Bart, I do. I’m afraid — I’m afraid he will be arrested if — if nothing worse.”
Bart Stollard was white to the lips, saying what he could as his mother hung up the receiver.
He sat down, but he couldn’t think. He got up. He went out and drove around in the twilight. He passed an empty sand truck, and recognized the driver. Bart had passed him during the afternoon after leaving Weerts and the thick-set man. His truck was empty now. He had dumped his load and was going home for the night.
The sand bunkers were here in El Metropole. Bart remembered shaking sand from the garments he had found under the culvert, and it was not entirely the yellow sand of the dunes. Part of it was bluish-black, like black loam, very fine. It was a rare sand, and came only from the Witheral pits north of Nopal. It had one peculiarity. It adhered tightly when wet and kept its form, so that it was in demand by foundries for making molds. Bart remembered also that there were grains of it embedded in the grease-caked hubs of the motorcycle under the culvert. His thoughts were racing now. He drove to the railroad, to the sand bunkers from which the molding sand was shipped to San Diego and Los Angeles. The man in charge was leaving for the day — a red-headed man cursing under his breath.
“Trouble?” Bart inquired.
“It’s that dumb buzzard that just pulled out,” grumbled the red-headed man. “If his truck body leaks, why don’t he get it mended ’stead of patching it with junk? What do you reckon I just got through snaking out of the bunker?”
“Was it a box?”
The red-headed man regarded Bart with respect.
“They was boards, with the nails still in them! Might have been a box at that, only it busted when he dumped it along with the sand.” Evidently the man believed Bart belonged to his company. “I wouldn’t say nothing to keep you from firing him, boss. He’s a mean buzzard.”
“I can’t promise,” Bart told him, “but I’m beginning to think that he may be relieved of his job for quite a long spell. Now show me those planks.”
The man showed him the planks. Some were five feet long, others four feet. They would have made a large packing case about three feet high, except that the boards for one side were missing.
“You are sure you got them all out?” Bart asked.
“Every last one. I tromped around in that sand until I got them all.”
“Good work,” said Bart. “Now if you want to get rid of that driver, you keep your mouth shut.”
“Trust me, boss, I’m saying nothing at all.”
Bart drove back into town and put up his car in the hotel garage. “A man can’t just disappear,” he was saying to himself. A packing case five by four by three under a load of sand would hide a man and a motorcycle. Let down the tail gate of the truck, and if the box were there, its open side facing out, the robber could climb into the box and there would still be room for the driver to stow the motorcycle in after him. Then close the end gate and back the truck, and who would guess that the fleeing bandit was hidden under tons of sand in a truck that he had overtaken and passed? It was pretty shrewd stuff.
Disconsolate at the thought of trying to outsmart such an adversary, Bart went on, reconstructing the rest of it. At the first culvert where there were no observers the robber had left the truck, taking the motorcycle with him under the culvert where he had changed his outer clothes. There would be a second confederate — one in a car who had whisked him away. The approach of other cars may have prevented the truck driver from ridding himself of the box as well. Nevertheless the robber had vanished more completely than ever. Bart gloomily returned to the hotel, after putting up his car in the hotel garage next door.
At the cigar stand in the lobby, Weerts, the seed salesman, was buying cigarettes. He looked cool and slim in fresh linens after coming in and scrubbing off his day’s journeying among the desert ranchers. He looked fit and humorously content as his small keen eyes regarded Bart from under the snap brim of his crisp white Panama. He waved a hand.
“Smoke?”
“Thanks. Haven’t had supper yet.”
“Me neither. Got your robber yet?”
“No. Guess he’s gone for good.”
“Say, that’s too bad.” Weerts pulled a bill from his billfold and tossed it on the showcase for his cigarettes.
The girl behind the counter picked up the bill and a grain of sand dropped from it upon the plate glass. Bart stared.
“Yes, yes, certainly too bad,” he agreed hastily with Weerts. “Guess I’d better go up and wash.”
He left Weerts. He could not be mistaken. The grain of sand had dropped from Weerts’s bill upon the show case. It was fine and black, with a dark bluish gleam. It was like no sand in all the valley except that which came from the Witheral pit above Nopal. How had it got into Weerts’s billfold? Though a man might change his clothes, and change them yet again, he would not change his billfold. Was it, Weerts who had lain concealed in the box in the truck? Grains of sand so fine would sift through the cracks in the box. One grain told the story. Was it enough? Could he ask the police to arrest a respectable and well known man because he had seen a grain of sand on a show case?
No, officers of the law would investigate first. They would trace the motorcycle back to its former owner. They would shadow or question the truck driver. Bart couldn’t wait.
He recalled seeing Weerts’s coupe in the hotel garage. Weerts had strolled into the dining room. Bart glanced in and saw him at a table facing the door. He himself continued down the lobby to the street entrance.
IV
In the garage, which was large and dimly lighted, he told the attendant that he wished to get something out of his car, and went direct to Weerts’s coupe where it was parked behind other cars against the rear wall. He hoped for time to do what he had come to do. Using his pocket knife he slashed the binder twine with which the bags of alfalfa seed in the rear compartment of the car were sewed. He thrust his arm to the shoulder into the seed of one sack. His fingers touched bottom. He tried a second sack, a third, and in the third his fingers came on a woolen softness. He pulled out a heavy sweater, a sprinkling of seed coming with it. He reached in again, and brought forth a pair of golfing knickerbockers and a second sweater.
“Small wonder the robber was swimming in perspiration,” thought Bart.
He held up each garment in turn, and noticed that each sweater was torn in the back, each in the same place. Then the door of Weerts’s coupe opened and a man half stumbled out, evidently just aroused from a nap, but he rushed at Bart Stollard. Bart recognized him as the thick-set man he had seen in Weerts’s coupe, though no patch covered his eye and neither arm was in a sling. He was able-bodied in every particular. Bart struck him as he came on. He slumped, at the same time yelling:
“Weerts... Weerts!”
The garage attendant ran to them.
“Get Weerts! Get Weerts!”
Bart did some quick thinking. Had Weerts picked up this man at the culvert, or had he picked Weerts up? He could drive, all right. The bandages were only a blind. He was thick-set, like the robber — but no, that meant nothing. He had no club foot. Neither had Weerts. That required thought. But Weerts came. The thick-set man had lapsed into the deep shadows. Weerts turned to the garage man.
“Jerry, ask the hotel manager to step here. We’ll see, Mr. Stollard, how far a man can go prying into another’s private and personal effects.”
Bart waited. It gave him more time to think. The hotel manager appeared, looking very serious. Weerts said:
“Mr. Monroe, this young man is the teller of the bank at Nopal that was robbed this morning. It seems to have turned his head. Look what he has been doing, rummaging through my alfalfa seed.”