“You’re crazy!” yelled Atwood. “You can’t prove a word of what you say.”
“No, I’m not crazy,” I told him. “If you’d known the desert a little bit better you’d have known that you were betraying yourself. The paper showed on its face it was a forgery.”
“How do you mean?” he demanded.
I told him: “Paper that’s been in the desert gets so dry it hasn’t any tensile strength at all. You should have been in the desert long enough to know that. You try to put stuff in a paper bag, and at the least jar the paper bag will rip open. You can take paper and tear it easily. Paper that’s been in a moist climate is hard to tear. When you sealed that forged agreement in the glass jar, you didn’t do it in the desert at all, but you did it somewhere out on the coast. The jar was hermetically sealed, and when the paper was taken out, it still retained the moisture that had been in it when it was on the coast.
“Paper crinkles differently in the desert than it does on the coast. The sheriff noticed it, and I noticed it. As soon as I saw the way that paper lay on the table, I knew that there was too much moisture in it for it to have been written in the desert and sealed in a jar here. That paper was written somewhere out on the coast, and sealed in the jar.
“In short, Atwood, you’re the one that’s been the head of this gang of thugs that has been preying on the mine and the payroll shipments. Knowing exactly when they were coming, why you knew exactly how to play your hold-ups. But the game’s up now!”
He pushed back from me, staring with a white face.
“Sheriff,” he said, “the man’s gone crazy! He’s accusing me of crime.”
Sheriff Hostler said, slowly: “He’s right, Atwood. As soon as I felt of that paper, I knew it hadn’t been signed here in the desert.”
Atwood’s eyes held a glint of desperation. Suddenly I saw that glint change into a stare of triumph.
I jumped to one side, and as I jumped, a gun crashed from the corridor of the office building, and a bullet thudded into the wall.
I whirled. There was another shot as I whirled.
Sheriff Hostler staggered and spun half around. Ted Sproul, his lips drawn back from his teeth, eyes glinting with the light of a killer, flung up his gun for a shot at me.
I fired from the hip, and at the shot he was blasted backwards as though he had been jerked by some invisible hand.
I sensed motion behind me and knew that Atwood had made a grab for the revolver I had taken from him.
I swung around and lashed out with the barrel of my six-gun. The blow caught him on the side of the head, just as he had the gun in his hand ready to fire.
He fired, but the bullet went wild.
Two more men came rushing into the corridor, shooting as they came, and I sent bullets down the corridor, firing rapidly.
Sheriff Hostler sat down on the table, blood pouring from a shoulder, but his eyes were steady and calm.
He said to me: “I’m afraid they got me hard. I’ve combed the hill country pretty thoroughly, and I’m satisfied that they bring their stuff here to the mine some place and store it right on the premises. If I pass out be sure and look around.”
Atwood lay on the floor moaning. Ted Sproul was motionless on the floor of the corridor. The other men who had fired at us had stepped back out of sight.
I went over to the corner and picked up the rifle. Then I reached up to the gasoline lantern and turned it down. The flame flickered for a few minutes. Then darkness descended on the office.
“Can you make it out of here?” I asked the sheriff. “I’m afraid they may dynamite the place.”
“I’m going to be all right,” he said. “It was the shock. They got me in the shoulder, and the bone’s pretty well splintered.”
I supported him, and cased him down the passageway.
We had gone about half way when I heard the sound of whispered voices, and men came shuffling into the corridor.
“Stop where you are!” I said.
The motion stopped. Then a voice said: “What’s the trouble?”
I said: “We’ve found the bandits who have been looting the mine. Who are you?”
A voice said: “It’s all right. I’m Harry. I’ve got some of father’s friends. There’s a dead man out here, and another man got on a horse and galloped away as we came in. I think he was wounded.”
Sheriff Hostler said: “It’s all right, now, Zane. You can trust these men,” and suddenly became a dead weight on me.
Back of us in the office somebody moaned, and I could hear the sound of a body crawling along the floor.
“Better get a light,” I said, “and see what’s happening in there.”
Somebody brought up a light from one of the other rooms in the office. I could see a crowd of desert men, hardbitten miners who were the type who wouldn’t stand for funny business.
Then as they raised the light so that they could see into the interior of the office, I saw something else.
Ted Sproul had managed to crawl into the office. He had a knife in his hand, and he had groped his way to Frank Atwood. I looked at what had happened, and my soul felt sick.
Sproul leered at us.
“All right,” he said, “I’m ready to go now. Bring on the rope. He was the one that got me into it.”
I heard the men make restless motions behind me, and knew that my time was short. I pushed my way toward him.
“Where’s the girl, Sproul?” I asked.
His eyes were feverish, and his face was the color of desert sand. His voice was so weak I could hardly hear.
“The old mine had a drift over by the old shaft house,” he said. “It’s abandoned. We used that as a storeroom for the stuff we took. The girl ran on us to-night and tried to avenge her father. We had to take her along. She got one of the men in the leg — a pretty bad wound. We knew she was wise. Some of the men wanted to kill her. I didn’t want to until after we’d seen Atwood. I thought it was time to clean out.”
He swayed drunkenly, sitting there on the floor.
I heard shuffling steps behind me, as of men moving purposefully. I turned and saw a body of miners filing down the corridor. They had a rope, and in the end of the rope was a noose with a hangman’s knot.
Ted Sproul looked past me and saw the men and the rope.
Law had come to Greasewood — the law of the rope!
I camped the next night in a little depression between the mountains, down in the desert country, pretty well down the trail. Bess Drake was with me.
We had ridden until late. The horses were picketed, the packs on the ground, the ashes of the little camp fire on which we had cooked our meal were blowing fitfully in the desert breeze.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” she asked, “that you knew who was the head of the gang?”
“Why didn’t you tell me,” I countered, “that you were going to try and ambush them when they held up the pack train?”
She said simply: “I wasn’t sure that I could trust you then, Bob Zane.”
I said nothing, and we sat for a while in silence, the little circle of golden coals paling and glowing, as the wind swept over it.
“And you knew it all?” she asked, “as soon as you took that paper from the jar?”
“I knew,” I told her, “that the paper had never been sealed in that jar in the desert country. I knew that it had been put in the jar where the air was moist.”
She waited for a few minutes without saying anything. The wind freshened, and the first faint sounds of the sand whispers commenced to come to our ears.
“Bob Zane,” she said, softly, “do you ever feel that the desert is alive? Do you ever feel that there’s something about it that demands justice — something that betrays men who are dishonest?”