Crooked Trails and Straight by William MacLeod Raine (top business books of all time .txt) 📕
The redheaded boy rolled another cigarette despondently. "Sho! I've cooked my goose. She'll not look at me--even if they don't send me to the pen." In a moment he added huskily, staring into the deepening darkness: "And she's the best ever. Her name's Myra Anderson."
Abruptly Mac got up and disappeared in the night, muttering something about looking after the horses. His partner understood well enough what was the matter. The redheaded puncher was in a stress of emotion, and like the boy he was he did not want Curly to know it.
Flandrau pretended to be asleep when Mac returned half an hour later.
They slept under a live oak with the soundness of healthy youth. For the time they forgot their troubles. Neither of them knew that as the hours slipped away red tragedy was galloping closer to them.
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“That’s how I remember it.”
“Same here, my notion is.”
“Both gray hats?” Curly cut in.
His uncle looked helplessly at the other man. “Can’t be sure of that. Luck’s was gray all right.”
“Cass wore a gray hat too, seems to me,” Mackenzie contributed, scratching his gray hair.
“Did Father hesitate at all about which one to take?”
“No-o. I don’t reckon he did. He had turned to ask me if I was coming—wasn’t looking at the hats at all.”
Curly looked at Kate and nodded. “I reckon we know how Cass got Mr. Cullison’s hat. It was left on the rack.”
“How do you mean?” his uncle asked.
“Don’t you see?” the girl explained, her eyes shining with excitement. “Father took the wrong hat. You know how absent-minded he is sometimes.”
Mackenzie slapped his knee. “I’ll bet a stack of blues you’ve guessed it.”
“There’s a way to make sure,” Curly said.
“I don’t get you.”
“Fendrick couldn’t wear Mr. Cullison’s hat around without the risk of someone remembering it later. What would he do then?”
Kate beamed. “Buy another at the nearest store.”
“That would be my guess. And the nearest store is the New York Emporium. We’ve got to find out whether he did buy one there on Tuesday some time after nine o’clock in the morning.”
The girl’s eyes were sparkling. She bustled with businesslike energy. “I’ll go and ask right away.”
“Don’t you think we’d better let Uncle Alec find out? He’s not so likely to stir up curiosity,” Curly suggested.
“That’s right. Let me earn my board and keep,” the owner of the Map of Texas volunteered.
Within a quarter of an hour Alec Flandrau joined the others at the hotel. He was beaming like a schoolboy who has been given an unexpected holiday.
“You kids are right at the head of the class in the detective game. Cass bought a brown hat, about 9:30 in the mo’ning. Paid five dollars for it. Wouldn’t let them deliver the old one but took it with him in a paper sack.”
With her lieutenants flanking her Kate went straight to the office of the sheriff. Bolt heard the story out and considered it thoughtfully.
“You win, Miss Cullison. You haven’t proved Fendrick caused your father’s disappearance by foul play, and you haven’t proved he committed the robbery. Point of fact I don’t think he did either one. But it certainly looks like he may possibly have manufactured evidence.”
Curly snorted scornfully. “You’re letting your friend down easy, Mr. Bolt. By his own story he was on the ground a minute after the robbery took place. How do we know he wasn’t there a minute before? For if he didn’t know the hold-up was going to occur why did he bring Mr. Cullison’s hat with him punctured so neatly with bullet holes?”
“I’ll bet a thousand dollars he is at the bottom of this whole thing,” Mackenzie added angrily.
The sheriff flushed. “You gentlemen are entitled to your opinions just as I’m entitled to mine. You haven’t even proved he took Mr. Cullison’s hat; you’ve merely showed he may have done it.”
“We’ve given you a motive and some evidence. How much more do you want?” Curly demanded.
“Hold your hawses a while, Flandrau, and look at this thing reasonable. You’re all prejudiced for Cullison and against Fendrick. Talk about evidence! There’s ten times as much against your friend as there is against Cass.”
“Then you’ll not arrest Fendrick?”
“When you give me good reason to do it,” Bolt returned doggedly.
“That’s all right, Mr. Sheriff. Now we know where you stand,” Flandrau, Senior, said stiffly.
The harassed official mopped his face with a bandanna. “Sho! You all make me tired. I’m not Fendrick’s friend while I’m in this office any more than I’m Luck’s, But I’ve got to use my judgment, ain’t I?”
The four adjourned to meet at the Del Mar for a discussion of ways and means.
“We’ll keep a watch on Fendrick—see where he goes, who he talks to, what he does. Maybe he’ll make a break and give himself away,” Curly said hopefully.
“But my father—we must rescue him first.”
“As soon as we find where he is. Me, I’m right hopeful all’s well with him. Killing him wouldn’t help Cass any, because you and Sam would prove up on the claim. But if he could hold your father a prisoner and get him to sign a relinquishment to him he would be in a fine position.”
“But Father wouldn’t sign. He ought to know that.”
“Not through fear your father wouldn’t. But if Fendrick could get at him some way he might put down his John Hancock. With this trouble of Sam still unsettled and the Tin Cup hold-up to be pulled off he might sign.”
“If we could only have Fendrick arrested—”
“What good would that do? If he’s guilty he wouldn’t talk. And if he is holding your father somewhere in the hills it would only be serving notice that we were getting warm. No, I’m for a still hunt. Let Cass ride around and meet his partners in this deal. We’ll keep an eye on him all right.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Kate admitted with a sigh.
Sheriff Bolt, though a politician, was an honest man. It troubled him that Cullison’s friends believed him to be a partisan in a matter of this sort. For which reason he met more than half way Curly’s overtures. Young Flandrau was in the office of the sheriff a good deal, because he wanted to be kept informed of any new developments in the W. & S. robbery case.
It was on one of those occasions that Bolt tossed across to him a letter he had just opened.
“I’ve been getting letters from the village cut-up or from some crank, I don’t know which. Here’s a sample.”
The envelope, addressed evidently in a disguised hand, contained one sheet of paper. Upon this was lettered roughly,
“Play the Jack of Hearts.”
Flandrau looked up with a suggestion of eagerness in his eyes.
“What do you reckon it means?” he asked.
“Search me. Like as not it don’t mean a thing. The others had just as much sense as that one.”
“Let’s see the others.”
“I chucked them into the waste paper basket. One came by the morning mail yesterday and one by the afternoon. I’m no mind reader, and I’ve got no time to guess fool puzzles.”
Curly observed that the waste paper basket was full. Evidently it had not been emptied for two or three days.
“Mind if I look for the others?” he asked.
Bolt waved permission. “Go to it.”
The young man emptied the basket on the floor and went over its contents carefully. He found three communications from the unknown writer. Each of them was printed by hand on a sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a scratch pad. He smoothed them out and put them side by side on the table. This was what he read:
HEARTS ARE TRUMPS
WHEN IN DOUBT PLAY TRUMPS
PLAY TRUMPS NOW
There was only the one line to each message, and all of them were plainly in the same hand. He could make out only one thing, that someone was trying to give the sheriff information in a guarded way.
He was still puzzling over the thing when a boy came with a special delivery letter for the sheriff. Bolt glanced at it and handed the note to Curly.
“Another billy doo from my anxious friend.”
This time the sender had been in too much of a hurry to print the words. They were written in a stiff hand by some uneducated person.
The Jack of Trumps, to-day
“Mind if I keep these?” Curly asked.
“Take ’em along.”
Flandrau walked out to the grandstand at the fair grounds and sat down by himself there to think out what connection, if any, these singular warnings might have with the vanishing of Cullison or the robbery of the W. & S. He wasted three precious hours without any result. Dusk was falling before he returned.
“Guess I’ll take them to my little partner and give her a whack at the puzzle,” he decided.
Curly strolled back to town along El Molino street and down Main. He had just crossed the old Spanish plaza when his absorbed gaze fell on a sign that brought him up short. In front of a cigar store stretched across the sidewalk a painted picture of a jack of hearts. The same name was on the window.
Fifty yards behind him was the Silver Dollar saloon, where Luck Cullison had last been seen on his way to the Del Mar one hundred and fifty yards in front of him. Somewhere within that distance of two hundred yards the owner of the Circle C had vanished from the sight of men. The evidence showed he had not reached the hotel, for a cattle buyer had been waiting there to talk with him. His testimony, as well as that of the hotel clerk, was positive.
Could this little store, the Jack of Hearts, be the central point of the mystery? In his search for information Curly had already been in it, had bought a cigar, and had stopped to talk with Mrs. Wylie, the proprietor. She was a washed-out little woman who had once been pretty. Habitually she wore a depressed, hopeless look, the air of pathetic timidity that comes to some women who have found life too hard for them. It had been easy to alarm her. His first question had evidently set her heart a-flutter, but Flandrau had reassured her cheerfully. She had protested with absurd earnestness that she had seen nothing of Mr. Cullison. A single glance had been enough to dismiss her from any possible suspicion.
Now Curly stepped in a second time. The frightened gaze of Mrs. Wylie fastened upon him instantly. He observed that her hand moved instinctively to her heart. Beyond question she was in fear. A flash of light clarified his mind. She was a conspirator, but an unwilling one. Possibly she might be the author of the anonymous warnings sent Bolt.
The young vaquero subscribed for a magazine and paid her the money. Tremblingly she filled out the receipt. He glanced at the slip and handed it back.
“Just write below the signature ‘of the Jack of Hearts,’ so that I’ll remember where I paid the money if the magazine doesn’t come,” he suggested.
She did so, and Curly put the receipt in his pocket carelessly. He sauntered leisurely to the hotel, but as soon as he could get into a telephone booth his listlessness vanished. Maloney had returned to town and he telephoned him to get Mackenzie at once and watch the Jack of Hearts in front and rear. Before he left the booth Curly had compared the writing of Mrs. Wylie with that on the sheet that had come by special delivery. The loop of the J’s, the shape of the K’s, the formation of the capital H in both cases were alike. So too was the general lack of character common to both, the peculiar hesitating drag of the letters. Beyond question the same person had written both.
Certainly Mrs. Wylie was not warning the sheriff against herself. Then against whom? He must know her antecedents, and at once. There was no time for him to mole them out himself. Calling up a local detective agency, he asked the manager to let him know within an hour or two all that could be found out about the woman without alarming her.
“Wait a moment I think we have her on file. Hold the ’phone.” The detective presently returned. “Yes. We can give you the facts. Will you come to the office for them?”
Fifteen minutes later Curly knew that Mrs. Wylie was the divorced wife of Lute Blackwell. She had come to Saguache from the mountains several years before. Soon after there had been an inconspicuous notice in the Sentinel to the effect that Cora
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