Stan Walker interrupted.
“It has been my experience in detective work that it’s pretty hard to place a man simply from his appearance. You should have got his name and found out definitely what he was doing here.”
“Yes,” I said, with mock meekness, “I was under a disadvantage when I was talking with him.”
“How was that?” asked Walker.
“I forgot that there was a murder intended, and didn’t know you’d want all those facts. Otherwise I’d have had them.”
He clamped his mouth the more firmly. There wasn’t any use trying to reason with that hombre, or trying to be sarcastic either. He pursued the even tenor of his ways and figured he was the biggest man in town. Watching him that night, I was reminded of the description of him a mining engineer had given after he’d talked with the deputy.
“Ten inches taller than God,” he’d said.
And the description fit.
We went to the hotel. Walker routed out Bill Fincher, who ran the joint, and asked him if he’d rented a room to a man of about forty-five years of age with black eyes, dark hair, a scar over his right eye.
Fincher scowled thoughtfully.
“Fellow who looked like a gambler, Bill,” I said.
Fincher grunted and remarked:
“Oh, that guy! His name’s Madison, and he comes from El Paso.”
Walker said:
“Shut up, Zane, I’m asking the questions.”
I didn’t say anything.
Fincher went on:
“He’s a funny cuss. He sneaked out a couple of hours ago, and we haven’t seen him since. He acted as though he didn’t want anybody to ask any questions, and—”
“What’s his room?” asked Walker.
“Come on,” said Bill.
He took us down the corridor, paused in front of a door. He knocked. It was a typical mining camp hotel, a long barnlike structure with a single corridor and rooms on either side. It was made of boards thrown up on frames and strips of batten covering the spaces between the boards. In summer it was hot. In winter it was cold. And it was the best the town afforded.
There was no answer.
Bill tried the door. It was locked.
He took a pass key and we went in.
The gambler had unpacked his suitcase and had the contents scattered over the bed. There was the usual assortment of things that a man uses when he’s living out of a suitcase. There was a heavy cowhide telescope bag in the corner. It was strapped. Stan Walker unpacked it.
Halfway down in it he found three buckskin bags. They were glazed with dirt and empty. He opened them carefully. With a magnifying glass we could see the bits of gold that adhered to the seams.
Walker was excited now. He explored around and found a money belt that had also contained gold, and which was now empty. And then he gave an exclamation as his hand pulled something else from the tangle of stuff that he’d thrown out of the telescope bag.
Nell Hastings gave an exclamation of horror.
It was a sheath knife, and the red horror of it told only too well what it had been used for.
Walker straightened.
A key sounded in the door. The door opened. The gambler stood there on the threshold. He stared at us with an impassive countenance. Whatever his emotions were, we couldn’t read them. Walker dropped the knife and his hand streaked for his gun. He was quick with a gun.
But the gambler was just as quick, if not quicker.
I flung myself against him and grabbed the wrist.
“The law,” I said.
I held the gun where he couldn’t use it. Stan Walker came forward, the gun boring into the gambler’s middle.
“Drop that gun,” he said, “or I’ll blow your stomach out.”
The gun thudded to the floor. The gambler’s face remained impassive. I released my hold on his wrist.
“I arrest you, in the name of the law,” said Stan Walker, “for the murder of an unidentified man, and maybe there’ll be a charge of grand larceny, too. I ain’t sure how they handle that. But I’m warning you that anything you say will be used against you.”
“You’re crazy!” said the gambler.
“Maybe,” said Walker. “Put handcuffs on him, Bob, and keep out of the line of fire when you do it.”
He handed me handcuffs.
“Put out your wrists,” I told the gambler.
He held them out. His face was the color of chalk, but there wasn’t any expression on it. I felt him wince as the handcuffs went around his wrists and clicked home. I was willing to bet it wasn’t the first pair of handcuffs that had been on his wrists, but I wasn’t saying anything. It was Walker’s show. He could run it to suit himself.
“Where was you about an hour ago?” asked Walker.
The gambler smiled. His face was white as desert chalk, but his eyes were steady.
“I’m answering no questions,” he said.
Walker shrugged.
“I’m goin’ to take him down to the county seat,” he told me. “There’ll be a lynching sure if he’s left here.”
“Better look up Pedro Gonzales,” I told him. “You want to check up on all four of us, you know.”
He acted just a little embarrassed.
“No hard feelings,” he said. “But I had to be impartial. Now that we got the evidence on this hombre, I can treat you unofficial like. But I couldn’t play favorites.”
Bill Fincher spoke up and said:
“Pedro Gonzales left with Pete Blaine to take the trip through Jawbone Cañon. They left before dark.”
Walker turned to Nell.
“Was this murder done after dark, Nell?”
“Yes. I was talking with the old man after eight o’clock.”
Walker nodded.
“That lets Pedro out,” he said. “We got the guilty man, all right; and I’m going to get him down to the county seat. Bob Zane, I’m going to draft you to take us there. There’s only one way we can make it in time to get back here with the sheriff and take charge of the case, and that’s to drive through Jawbone Cañon. I want somebody that knows the desert to do the driving. You’re hereby appointed a special deputy to see that I get to the jail with this prisoner.”
I shrugged my shoulders. Not that I wanted the job, but I figured it’d be a lot better to get down and get the sheriff on the job than to let Walker mess around with it; and he was right when he said that there was some danger of lynch law.
“When do we start?” I asked.
“Now,” he said. “We’ll go in my car.”
The Jawbone Cañon road is a short-cut, all right. It saves over forty-one miles of desert road. It’s only a matter of sixty-four miles to the county seat over the Jawbone Cañon road. But it’s tough going.
There used to be some mines in Jawbone Cañon that kept the road up. The mines were abandoned, and the road got in bad repair. But it was a road, and a good driver could get over it with a light car. None of those shiny finished boulevard cars could make it, but a rough and ready desert rattletrap could.
Down below Jawbone Cañon where the road struck the flat desert was a place of shifting sand and hard pulling, but it was pretty much on the level. Jawbone Cañon was rough and twisting. At that a man could make time over the road if he was in enough of a hurry. But cars mostly went the long way around. It was easier.
Stan Walker appointed Bill Fincher as a deputy to take charge of the body and see that it wasn’t disturbed until we could get back with the sheriff. He got his car filled up with oil and gas, and we started.
I’m more at home with burros than with a car, but I guess I know every foot of the desert as well as the next man. I know it well enough to respect it without being afraid of it, to love it without taking chances with it.
We jolted along the plateau road until we topped the big barren ridge of colored mountains and started winding down Jawbone Cañon.