“You see,” continued Jinks when the door closed, “that I got reason for admittin’ at las’ that you was right, Will, sayin’ as how Bundy didn’t have a thing to do with raidin’ us. You see, it’s like this: We had a mighty sight o’ water piled up in that dam, an’ when them good S’maritan frien’s of our’n blew up the dam, they cut loose a ragin’ mill race like a cloudbust roarin’ down a mountain gully. That torrent ripped an’ roared along the sides the ravine, gougin’ an’ scoopin’ for Sam’s sake. An’ that way it brought to light what would have been hid until somehow Bundy got the ranch in his own claws. Sooner or later he’d of got it. He’d of knowed too much to take the chance o’ that happenin’.”
“You know gold when you see it, Cap—”
“Reckon. An’ there’s a ledge clean uncovered, maybe eighteen foot of it, that looks like some feller had stood off an’ plugged gold into it with a shotgun.”
“Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is Bundy’s discovery. How about the strike up at County Line?”
“He’s got a fence aroun’ most of it, ain’t he? Ten bob-wires, high as your head! Now you look a-here, Will; Bundy’s a gam’ler an’ a poker player, an’ he never went into any sort of business deal in his life that he didn’t make it into a poker game. You know that well’s I do. An’ right now it’s my one best bet he’s playin’ the biggest game o’ bluff over to County Line he ever played in all his life.”
“But there’s gold there, Cap. Everybody knows that.”
“Shore. An’ when a man bluffs he’s always got something in his hand, ain’t he, if it’s only a seven high. Shore there’s gold in the Smokes an’ we’ve knowed that for forty-fifty year. Only it’s in no such bonanza quantity as Bundy makes out. A pocket here an’ a pocket there, yep. More’n one shif’less ol’ desert rat has clawed gold out’n them hills, sometimes a pocketworth a hunderd dollar; an’ I rec’lec’ when ol’ Jimjam Rafferty once opened up a pocket that went better’n a thousan’. But it’s always found all scattered from hell to breakfas’ an’ nothin’ ever to call a mine.”
“Then Bundy has simply salted what he calls his mine up there?”
“Reckon,” said Jinks, as one who knew. “An’ you’ll find out he’s done him the fancies’ job any man ever did in that line. He’s fooled some fellers that mos’ generally would know better. But you’ll note also he bought in all the surroundin’ claims quick’s a cat could wink, an’ then that he built him a high bob-wire fence. An’ with all his shoutin’, he ain’t done any development yet, has he? He’s got excuses, shore—he’s incorporatin’; he’s fixin’ to sell as-is for a coupla million; he’s this-an’-that-in’, jus’ stallin’ for time.”
“Maybe,” said Dorn, very thoughtful. “Maybe, Cap.”
“Maybe your foot!” snorted Jinks. “It’s common talk, ain’t it, that Bundy’s tryin’ to raise money? Why’n’t he raise him anyhow half a million on his mine? He ain’t got any mine, that’s the answer!”
Lorna began tugging him toward the door.
“Oh, you two!” she exclaimed. “What do we care about whether there is gold in the Blue Smokes or not? I want to see what we’ve got! Come show us, Cap.”
“Right!” agreed Dorn. “First, call all the boys. There’ll be a crowd of us, Jinks, and if you’ve just had a beautiful dream you better start running while you can; they’ll lynch you, sure as shooting.”
“Don’t go an’ tell anybody yet, Will,” pleaded Jinks as the three went out on the porch. “Take time to think it over. We’re out to bust Bundy, an’ for a spell it might be a good idee to keep him from findin’ out that we’re on to him. Maybe he’ll bust himself for us and save us the trouble! He’s still tryin’ to make his bluff good over to County Line; let him go dumpin’ money in that sinkhole a while longer. Maybe you’ll learn some day, Sudden Bill, not to be so danged sudden.”
Lorna laughed. “Imagine Bill ever learning that! Anyhow, I won’t have him spoiled, Cappie darling.”
“Hmf!” said Jinks.
By now they were on the steps, but before they went down into the yard they were hailed by a rider who was just coming down from his saddle by the corral gate. It was Sheriff MacArthur. They saw another man with him; this one sat stolidly in the saddle making no move toward dismounting, his head down, his hat pulled forward as though he wanted to hide his face. Still Dorn recognized him.
“It’s Mex Fontana!” he said. “Looks like the law had him in tow. Now what?”
MacArthur hung his spurs over the saddle horn, left Fontana with the two horses and came on to the house.
“Seems like I smell bacon, coffee, too, maybe,” he called to them, and seemed cheerier than they had seen him for a long time. “Morning, Miss Lorna. Hello, boys.”
They returned his greeting as cheerily as it was given. Then he looked at them and they looked at him, a noticeably beaming quartette, and MacArthur demanded: “Say, what’s happened? Where are all the long faces gone? You three look like folks that had just found a gold mine or something!”
They laughed at that, thinking what a surprised man he was going to be when he came to learn how his offhand diagnosis had rung the bell. Dorn shot back at him, “You, too, Mac. Found a bonanza? Or just a diamond mine?”
“Pearls,” chuckled MacArthur. “That’s all. Two kinds, though. Pearls of wisdom along with some of the same sort Hank Smith had in his pocket. If you’ll ask me in I’ll help you track those bacon and coffee smells to their den, and we’ll chin.”
So they turned back into the house. Over their late breakfast they alternated moments of brisk, inconsequential chatter with sudden profound silences; that was because MacArthur had jerked his head toward Josefa as much as to say, “Wait till she’s out of the way.” When they had finished she was dispatched to the barnyard with eggs and bacon and coffee for Fontana, and instructed by Dorn to amuse herself outside until called. Then MacArthur got his cigarette going and his elbows on the table and treated Dorn and Lorna and Jinks to a frank, probing scrutiny. He saw Dorn and Lorna look at each other—and suddenly MacArthur grinned and fancied that he knew now what had put that sparkle into their eyes. He winked at Jinks. And then his puzzled frown came back.
“That would explain why these two youngsters are all wreathed in smiles,” he conceded. “But what’s come over Jinks here? A girl can’t fall in love with two men the same time, can she? Anyhow no girl, no matter how good she was at it, could fall in love with you, Jinks, old boy.”
“Think you’re smart, don’t you, Mr. MacArthur?” said Lorna, and she wrinkled up her nose at him.
“I do feel sort of smart this morning,” admitted the sheriff complacently. “All puffed up about it, too. Here I’ve been running around in circles ever since the day when Mike Bundy butchered Jake Fanning—”
“What!” burst incredulously from Dorn. “Bundy did kill Fanning then? You’re sure of it? Not just guessing?”
“I’ve got my rope on Mex Fontana at last,” said the sheriff. “It’s out of him that I squeezed the two kinds of pearls. What I was gladdest to get were some few words of the truth. Yes, Bill, I know Bundy killed old Jake. But the devil of it is I don’t know that I’ll ever prove it. I have felt it in my bones all along, but somehow it does take a good bit of believing to believe that of Mike Bundy. He ought to have had more sense. And even yet I can’t quite get why he did it.”
“There’s the gold mine in the Blue Smokes,” suggested Dorn, tentatively. “Jake knew about it, found it himself, no doubt. And Bundy—”
“Only there isn’t any gold mine in the Blue Smokes,” grunted the sheriff. “I permitted myself the luxury of dropping the boys up at County Line a little hint this morning. It’s just the biggest, rawest, most beautiful hoax this neck of the woods ever heard about.”
Lorna and Dorn and old Cap’n Jinks were so silent, their faces so blank, their eyes so guarded against tr
afficking with one another’s, that it would have been hard for a man far less shrewd than Bart MacArthur to have failed to sense their constraint. He knew that what he was telling them about County Line did not in the least surprise them. He realized instantly that something had happened to make this trio stand on its guard against him this morning.
Promptly he shoved back his chair and stood up. “Thanks for the hand-out,” he said curtly. “I’ll be shoving off.”
“Hold on a shake, Mac,” said Dorn.
“Nope. I came here to chin, like I said. I hoped I’d bring news that somehow might help along. You three knew already that Bundy’s mine was a colossal hoax. You haven’t said as much as damn-your-eyes to me. So adios. I’m going.”
And now Dorn and Lorna and Jinks did look at one another, and the sheriff saw them out of the corners of his eyes, saw them nodding, too. So his old smile came back and he dropped down into his chair again and said: “That’s better. Now what?”
Jinks’ tale of his discovery lost nothing in being twice told. MacArthur heard him out without a word, then sat silent save for the drumming of his big blunt fingers on the tablecloth. Of a sudden he jerked his head up; he sat staring straight before him at a blank wall which, so far as he was concerned, fell open before him to reveal a long vista between solid facts clicking into place. His fist came crashing down into an open palm.
“It’s all as clear as a hole through a plate glass window!” he boomed out at them in a sort of jovial thunder. “There were a dozen questions I kept asking myself, questions that stood up in my way like barb-wire fences, and now this answers every one of them! Oho, Mr. Mike Bundy, have I got you by the scruff of the neck!”
“I guess by now I know Mike Bundy pretty well,” said Dorn, frowning. “Somehow I can’t figure him as a killer, MacArthur.”
“I know. Me, too, at first. But ask yourself this: What keeps him from being a killer?”
“He’s too big a gun. He’s too wise. He takes chances, all right, but he wouldn’t take a chance like that. Not unless—”
“That’s it! Unless! That was as far as I got, Bill. Unless, let’s say, the reward was enormous. Or unless the man was desperate. And desperate is what Bundy’s been for a good long while, and enormous was what the reward promised to be! Out on the end of a limb with it about to break off under him, he saw his great big chance. Would he turn killer with things like that?”
Slowly, even reluctantly, Dorn nodded.
“Bundy killed Jake Fanning,” said MacArthur, and folded a finger down into his palm. “He killed One Eye Perez.” He folded a second finger over to join the first. A moment he sat looking at Dorn, then slowly he brought a third finger down. “And he killed Nellie Kent. It was all because Bundy was in a jam to begin with, then because Jake Fanning found gold right here. A part of this I know; a part is easy to guess. Later, after we’ve had time for some thorough investigating, the whole thing will come out.”
He knew whereof he spoke. And the time was boiling up when, as he predicted, all this would be as clear as that hole in his plate glass window.
“Of course I thought of Bundy as soon as Fanning was killed,” he went on. “But it didn’t seem reasonable. Bundy could have shut Jake’s mouth some other way, or anyhow he could have gone ahead and done what he did do later at County Line, grabbing what folks thought was the cream. Next, One Eye Perez got knocked over. Now there were two funny things about that. One was that Bundy, when he showed up right afterward, didn’t have a gun on him. The other was that two of Bundy’s men, Smith and Fontana, grabbed Miss Lorna here and put the job on her. I’d have said right off one of those two boys did it—only it stuck in my craw that Bundy didn’t have a gun on him! He just overplayed his hand that time. He was so anxious to get himself out of the picture that he stepped square into it. I knew he’d been carrying a gun everywhere he went for a long while. I started looking for it and I found it. Behind One Eye Perez’s place there’s a well; in the bottom of the well was Mike Bundy’s gun.
“And here’s something. I got the bullet out of Jake Fanning’s skull; I dug the One Eye Perez bullet out of the wall; they were both thirty-eights—and so is Bundy’s gun!
“Did all that point straight enough? Sure it did. Any real evidence in it though? Nary. And never a motive strong enough to make it seem reasonable. Hell’s bells, it didn’t sound reasonable even to me that a man like Mike Bundy would pull those two jobs.
“Then Lorna’s aunt here falls off the back porch and breaks her neck.” Lorna shuddered and under the table put her hand into Bill Dorn’s which went sympathetically half way to meet it. The sheriff, engrossed in his solution of a problem, did not notice. He went on: “Mrs. Kent was always hiring and firing her household help; at that particular time she was doing her own inside work. The two men working outside were off at the upper end of the ranch with a wagon, hauling firewood. So as far as we could tell she was all alone when she got her fall.
“When they got back they found her like that. I asked them what they supposed she was doing, leaning against the railing on the back porch. They said she was leaning over to water some flowers just below, because there was a watering can lying right close to her, some water left in the bottom. I asked what time they got back and found her. They said they got back early, three or four o’clock in the afternoon. They figured she had been dead quite a while—”
“Why,” cried Lorna, “you water flowers either very early in the morning before the sun is hot, or about sundown!”
MacArthur nodded. Jinks came over and patted Lorna on her curly head.
“Nick Carter used to have a lady assistant, Miss Lorny. You an’ me could go places together, detectin’!”
“So,” resumed MacArthur, “the coroner and I came out here one night to sort of look into things. All we found, as you know—”
“Lorna doesn’t know,” said Bill Dorn swiftly. “We didn’t see any use telling her.”
“Well, she’s got to know sooner or later, and it might as well be now.” When Lorna heard how they had found the grave empty, she cried out, “Oh, it’s too horrible!” and clung tighter than ever to Bill Dorn’s hand.
“And then for a time,” continued MacArthur presently, “I was up a stump. But I figured that if Bundy had had any hand in this, too, he would have required other hands than his own. Smith and Fontana, as a good bet. Already they knew a lot; they were pretty sure to know about Perez. So I was hunting a way to make them talk when Wong’s cleaver put Hank Smith into the silent squad. But at last I’ve got Fontana, and I found the way to make that half-bred snake open up wide!”
He had to stop and chuckle over it, and to admit that he had played it pretty low-down on Mex Fontana! Here is what he had done: He had rounded up a dozen men in County Line known to be friends of Bill Dorn’s. After he had coached them in their parts they ambushed Fontana, gang-jumped him when he came riding into camp, smuggled him off into a convenient lonely canon and proceeded to make it clear to him that he was about to be swung off into eternity on the end of a rope under a pine tree. They said to him: “We know you’re one of the gang that raided Palm Ranch. Well, it was your last raid, Mex.” And only when the rope was tight and a screaming, terror-maddened wretch was at the end of hope though not of frenzied struggling, did the law, as represented by Sheriff MacArthur, put in an appearance.
“They’re all rats, these killers,” said MacArthur disgustedly. “A dirty coward is Fontana. When I told him I’d save him from that gang only in case he’d tell every damn thing he knew, and that if he did come clean I’d promise him a chance to skip south across the border, he started spouting like a geyser. I was right about it being him and Hank Smith who had done the grave robbing. And he led me straight to the new grave, about two miles north of here.”
The sheriff did all he could to spare Lorna, touching only lightly on the essential details. Mrs. Kent had not died of a broken n
eck; her skull had been crushed. And, considering that she was a small, slight woman weighing but little over a hundred pounds, and that the fall from the back porch was inconsiderable, it was rather more than merely likely that her death had been caused by a tremendous blow, such a blow as a man might have delivered with a club or the heavy barrel of his gun.
“Bundy killed her. Now that Jinks has found where Bundy’s gold mine really is—and that it was never Bundy’s at all—I’m going at last to be in a position to slap Mr. Bundy in the hoosegow, and to give the County Attorney enough facts to get him started on a chain of evidence that’ll hang Mike Bundy as high as a kite. And just think!” He glared at them. “You three confounded conspirators were going to hold out on me, cheating me out of knowing the one thing I had to know to make sense out of the whole mess.”
“Even yet,” muttered Dorn, “I don’t see how—”
“Look, Bill; here’s what happened. Mike Bundy was a big gun, but he never was as big a gun as he thought he was. From the jump, in everything he did whether straight or crooked—and most of it was crooked—he overplayed his hand. He can’t help that sort of thing anymore than a rag can help fluttering in the wind.”
Then, casting back for a beginning to the time when Mike Bundy began his career here in the Southwest, and advancing gradatim to the present crisis, the sheriff pictured for them a line of action which could hardly have failed soon or late to swung into an outright criminal trend. Many facts he had gleaned, many were pure, though logical, deductions. Later when they knew the whole story they saw that the shrewd sheriff, though in error here and there, was in the main as right as rain.
“Here’s what happened,” to quote MacArthur. Jake Fanning, grubstaked by Bundy, had really found gold in the Blue Smokes, but, when Bundy had looked into it carefully, it was nothing to get excited about. Fanning kept on prospecting. On one of his trips, returning to Nacional, he camped in the afternoon in the ravine at Palm Ranch. And there, by sheer chance when least expecting it, he had come upon the bonanza which in his shiftless way he had been hunting all his life.
The Sixth Western Novel Page 21