by Talbot Mundy
“We’ll soon see.”
The sheriff turned to one of his assistant deputies, who was leaning against the side of the car, chewing tobacco, and listening alertly without asserting himself in any way.
“Shorty, I think it’s up to you to follow that Italian who was here a minute ago. D’you know where he went?”
“Shore. I c’n see him now.”
“See where he goes, and bring me word. I’ll be here awhile yet.”
The deputy walked off without comment, rolling himself a cigarette as he went, resembling by no means a salaried proponent of the written law. He looked more like a dry-goods clerk on his vacation, except for a certain measured litheness in his walk.
“Just a minute,” said the sheriff. “There’s one thing I can do right now.”
He walked to the end of the car — the end that he had been watching across my shoulder — and reached it at the same moment that the Italian with the Dantesque face began coming down the steps.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Been stealing a ride? No? What have you got there?”
“All-righta, boss, I jus’ taka letter, thass all.”
“You — liar! You’ve been stealing!”
“No, boss! Honest to God! Strika me dead, I taka da letter.”
“Cut the talk! Prove it!”
The Italian pulled an envelope out of his hip pocket. The sheriff snatched it out of his hand, glanced at it, showed it to me, and gave it back. It was addressed in a woman’s hand in pencil to “Mr. A. V.”
“All right. You get by this time.”
The Italian hurried off.
“Have you got time to follow that man, Casey?” asked the sheriff, and Casey strolled away with both hands in his pockets.
“What did you figure on doing with this minstrel troupe you’ve brought along?” the sheriff asked me, and I countered with another question —
“Have you had any trouble in Sparks with a colored society called the P.O.P.?”
“Not what we’d call trouble in this part of the world. There’s quite a number in the railway sheds. They hired an iron shack on the edge of town, and the talk in there went to their heads a bit. They got to pushing white men off the sidewalk. That was as far as it went. They don’t use that shed no longer.”
“Where do they meet now?” I asked.
“They don’t. They were in that shed when we started to haul the uprights out from under it. There’s a donkey-engine in the next lot, and we had a chain passed ‘round the drum with a hook at the other end made fast to a couple of four-by-fours. They came out like black bats flitting out of Hell, and since then they been kind of superstitious about holding meetings. Why do you ask?”
“My plan was, supposing you agree, to turn my outfit loose and let them get in touch with these P.O.P.’s. I hope to discover whether Antonio Vittori has been mixed up with the P.O.P. in this town. If so, we’ll have another line on him, and—”
“Hell!” the sheriff interrupted. “Between you and Casey we’ve got lines enough. We’ll pop over into California in my car, get a search warrant and a couple of deputies from over there, and look him up. If you’ve got the evidence, we’ll fix him.”
“Mrs. Aintree — she who wrote that note just now, and sent it by the Italian — is an accomplice of Vittori-Bhopal Gosh,” I answered. “She has been sending him telegrams. He expects us here. He knows we’ve brought along a gold plate that he wants. He’ll make a desperate attempt to get it; and he has almost certainly made arrangements for getting away directly afterwards. He’s a damned clever rascal, and the last person in the world to find cooped up at home at a time like this.”
“What’s your idea anyway?” he answered, scratching the back of his head. “To set some kind of trap for him?”
“I’d hate to get Bhopal Gosh without the gold plates, and he may have hidden them.”
“I’ll give you any help I can.”
“This colored gang of mine is hand-picked,” I answered. “Let them circulate, and if they can find one of their race here in touch with Bhopal Gosh they’ll send word that they’re loyal P.O.P.s, and can steal that remaining plate and get it to him. He wants it badly enough to take a chance.”
“H’m! Sounds rather like trapping a bear with sealing wax, but maybe I don’t quite get the value of that plate — to him, I mean. As you say, if he’s half-clever we’d hardly find him at home. All right, turn your gang loose. You’d better caution them. We’ve been cleaning up this town. Some of the boys might conclude to make a fresh start.”
Our colored crew were interested in one subject only at the moment — supper, naturally. They were standing around us close enough to call attention to themselves, and no pack of hounds at a day’s end could have looked more wistfully anxious.
Brice and Allison were packing up, methodical men both. They always arranged their compartment as if they expected visitors. Allison liked to have his spare shoes and slippers at the bottom of the bag, with the things on top laid neatly, so the business of tidying up took time. I wanted to call them out and introduce them, and had turned to do it, when something occurred to put that for the moment out of mind.
* * * * *
THERE came a herd of colored men from the direction of the station platform, mostly in overalls, lurching along and laughing, obviously of one mind — a big, hefty-looking lot, and maybe forty of them. They approached our crew and began making the idiotic P.O.P. signs. In less than a minute there was a regular reunion taking place, with the sheriff and myself more or less in the midst of it.
“Things seem to be working out to suit you,” said the sheriff.
I was looking about for Sam, he being the one who usually caught on to a notion quickest, and had just spotted him on the outside of the crowd, when Mrs. Aintree came hurrying heavily down the car steps and pushed her way toward me, shoving the darkies away to right and left as if they were so many nine-pins. She was in one of her towering passions — full of what she imagined was divine fire — so wrathy with self-righteousness that nothing but her own ideas and her own convenience had any weight as far as she was concerned.
“You wicked devil!” she began, marching right up to me. “I suppose you are planning to stage another sacrilegious farce! Who is this man?”
The men of the West have manners. The sheriff drew back until he was obscured in shadow, and began to take apparently intense interest in the conversation of the darkies.
“You will pay for all your doings!” Mrs. Aintree went on. “You think you’re very smart. I know your thoughts; you think the money and the praise you’ll get for this is recompense enough for all the harm you’re doing! You’re being well paid for it, and you simply ooze self-satisfaction! You’re a disgusting sight, Mr. Ramsden, let me tell you that!”
“I’ll give you permission to tell me that, if that’s what’s troubling you,” I said.
“Troubling me? I am far from troubled!” she retorted. “I am simply trying to stop you before you destroy yourself with your own wickedness! You could do good if you chose, but you chose evil. The way of the transgressor is hard, Mr. Ramsden! You are laying up hell for yourself, and I would save you from it if I could!” She meant every word of it, although, by holding my attention she was also forwarding an almost perfect piece of cunning. I believe she was obeying orders. She caught her breath for another outburst, but there came an interruption from the other end of the car — behind me in the dark.
“Help! Help!”
It was Allison’s voice. I went to the rescue, but I’m a trifle slow at starting and the sheriff reached the steps ahead of me, swung himself up by the hand-rail, and was first into the car. I brought up short behind him. The doors of compartments A and B were fastened together, handle to handle, by a piece of stout wire twisted as if someone had used pliers for the purpose. It took time to unfasten them, for the wire was too thick to cut with an ordinary clasp knife, and all the while Allison kept wrenching at the door from the inside,
taking up the slack and making our work more difficult. However, we got both doors open at last, and Allison came stumbling out with blood all over his face. Brice was lying unconscious on the sofa, bleeding too.
“Have ye got him?” Allison demanded.
“Got whom?” asked the sheriff.
“Ye mean ye’ve let him get away? Ye mean — My God! D’ye know what’s happened? Did ye not see where he went? Are ye stricken daft? Oh this exped-ee-tion! I knew from the verra first it was for-r-e-doomed!”
“Sit down and tell us,” said the sheriff quietly, pushing him by the shoulders while I gave a hand to Brice, who seemed to be recovering consciousness.
“Man, the plate’s gone! There cam’ a dark-faced loon through yon door wi’ a girt stick in his han’, and wi’out sayin’ one wor-r-d he struck at Brice an’ me as if we were cattle an’ he a flesher wi’ a pole-ax! I held up ma han’ to save Brice, for the fir-r-st blow was aimed at him, an’ there — look! — there’s where the blow landed on ma for-r-earm. Then he str-r-uck me in the face wi’ his other fist, an’ grabbed ma satchel. The strap broke! Then he struck Brice, who was up an’ comin’ for him. Then he struck me again, an’ we were baith unconscious for I dinna ken how long — an’ then I tried to get out an’ ca’ for help, an’ the door was fastened! An’ so the plate’s gone — the only one we had, left — gone for good and a’! An’ poor Brice dead — a good little man, a good little frien’ was Brice; I’ll not forgie’ masel’”
“Your plans don’t seem to be going quite so good, do they?” said the sheriff, eying me with a dry smile.
CHAPTER XII. “Feller, you were right just now!”
ALLISON, whose arm had really received the worst damage, insisted on having Brice taken to the hospital and mourned over him like a lost child. Maybe in that way the edge of his grief over the stolen plate was softened in some degree, which was as well, for only antiquarians can guess what pangs he suffered. However, neither the sheriff nor Terence Casey showed more inclination than I did to take the theft for what diplomatists call a fait accompli. Casey and the sheriff’s deputy returned together, and Casey was the first to get the hang of the situation.
“Those two whaps just walked about town,” he said. “They knew they were being followed. They were decoys. I asked your deputy to lock up both av ’em up and they’re in the coop now. There was nothing in the letter that wan av ’em carried. He knew it. It was blank paper.”
“I get you,” said the sheriff. “And these blacks, I guess, were sent down here to keep the other blacks from standing in the way inside the car.”
“Then Mrs. Aintree came and bawled me out,” said I, “to hold our attention while the trick was being worked. Bhopal Gosh sneaked up to the car from the far side, got a word in her ear, and — it all fits.”
“Fits foine!” said Casey. “Just a minute.” Mrs. Aintree had shut herself into her compartment. Casey mounted the steps and rapped on her door. One or two of her meek minions tried to prevent him, but he kept on hammering until she called out “Come.”
“You’re under arrest — you and the lot av ye!” he informed her through the open door. “Where’s that letter ye received just now by the Dago?”
He came out swearing and laughing alternately, and showed us a handful of ashes.
“She burned it,” he said, “and darn her, she broke up all the ashes in the spittoon! Ye can photograph whole ashes, but not broken wans!”
“Well, there’s no place in our coop for a lady,” said the sheriff.
“We’ll leave her in the car, and I’ll set someone to keep watch. We’ve about one chance to take Vittori, or Gosh, or whatever his name is. Nevada’s kind of big. If he once gets into the mountains, he’ll be difficult to catch — have to send a posse after him and comb the woods. Home’s the likeliest place where he’d cache the New York loot so’s to have it ready for a getaway. He’ll figure on beating back home — had his car parked somewheres close at hand. He’ll aim to pick up the loot he cached at home and head for California. That’s my guess. Any o’ you good at guessing?”
“Anyone you can phone to in Lakelock?” I suggested.
“Wire’s been down since yesterday. Trees are always falling across the wires. Not much of a job to fix, but devil’s own time to get there, ‘specially when the gangs are busy. If Gosh has a highpowered car and his nerve — and it looks as if he had — he’s going to be hard to overtake. My car’s ready.”
Taking one thing with another, Bhopal Gosh had twenty minutes start of us, including five at a cafeteria where we threw some food into the car. Then we went like the fire chief to an “all turn out” alarm, with Casey and one deputy on the rear seat, and there was some “‘scuse it please” driving as we slipped out through the home-going cars of the railway hands and their families, most of them driven by women, and followed the trolley-line by way of Reno.
* * * * *
WE left the interurban car standing still, and whooped through Reno out on to the concrete pike without having killed anybody so far. Then the sheriff opened her out, and we really took a chance or two past Steamboat Springs, where the vapor from the cauldrons underground hung like great ghosts over the landscapes. The only casualty as far as Carson was a cat that ought to have known better. It was a black cat, and Casey swore seriously.
“If it had been a white wan, now, that would have been the same as killing bad luck. But ye’ve killed the good luck, divvle take it!”
However, at Carson we got news, and knew, we were on the right trail. The sheriff drew up at a hotel where they once used to lay out the victims of shootings on the pool table, but now sell meals to ranchers’ wives. There were half-a-dozen loungers in the bar busy bewailing the old days.
“Got anything to drink?” the sheriff asked.
“Nothing worth while,” said the barkeep.
“Serve us some o’ that. Anybody know Antonio Vittori — Lakelock way?”
“Sure.” Two men knew him. “He passed through Carson in his car twenty minutes back.”
“What sort of car? What make?”
“Didn’t notice. — He’s no auto thief. He don’t need to steal nothin’.”
“Big car or little one?”
“‘Tweren’t a Ford — Hup — Overland — Reo — some such make — nothing a guy like him would help himself to. He’s got money, I’m telling you.”
“We’ll get him! Come on. ‘Night, you fellers. Did he go by Truckee or—”
“No, not Truckee. Up to the right — nearest way home I reckon.”
We piled in, and the sheriff let her go again.
“That hill’s going to slow him to a walk. Let’s hope the gang’s fixed the road for winter; no small car can clear the ridges without slowing for them, and if that’s so we’ll nab him inside Washoe County. Up she goes! Feel this brute purr — never knew a son-of-a-gun like this for eating hills.”
The conversation grew disjointed, for the sheriff set his teeth and drove to suit Jehu son of Nimshi. The fellows behind were clinging to the seat, for the road-gang had put the ridges in; and every fifty or a hundred yards the car would kick like a cow pony just off grass.
The moon shone clearly enough to show the precipices on our left hand — sheer, gosh-grizzly things that fell away from under us for hundreds of feet with never a yard of clearance if another car should want to pass; and our lights showed hair-pin curves ahead such as made the reputations of the old stage-drivers. I kept my hair on by remembering that the sheriff would hardly use all that speed unless he knew the road intimately, but the little he said was scarcely reassuring.
“That’s where the stage went over last June with eleven passengers,” he said once. “Weren’t missed till next morning. Boys found ’em all dead but one, and he’s still in hospital. This next curve we’re coming to’s a bitch. Hold tight! There, didn’t I tell you. There’ll be something happen there one o’ these days; they ought to set that ridge about a rod this side of where they’ve got it. Tel
l those men behind to take a look at their guns. This Indian friend of yours may try conclusions. Darned good places hereabouts for a man to stand you up — that clump of trees ahead for instance. A few shots through your radiator. Sit tight here now!”
We swept around a curve with a yawning cliff six inches from the near wheels, and saw the whole of the finest valley in Nevada stretched in moonlight a couple of thousand feet below. Ahead, the road curved to the left at last, and we could see it snaking along, nearly milk-white, for a mile or two.
“There he is! See his lights? He’s in trouble. No, he’s off again. Changed a tire, I guess. Well, we’ve got him now.”
“Unless he takes to the woods,” I suggested.
“If the sucker does that we’ve got him sure!” said the sheriff.
“Holding a line through these woods is quite a trick; we’d have him inside fifteen minutes. Sit tight, all, I’m going to step on her!”
* * * * *
IT came pretty close to being his last act in this world — close to being the curtain on the four of us. We were still mounting, but the grade was not so stiff and the speed indicator touched forty-five, then nearly fifty as we slid into the shadow of tall sugarpines that loomed above the road on our right hand. Then, neatly as the picture of a screen slips off and gives place to another one, we swerved aside and went headlong over a steep bank. There was lots of time to think. It was like riding in an aeroplane, with all that moonlit valley smiling up at us.
The sheriff leaned forward and switched off the spark as the car took a sidewise tilt in mid-air, and we crashed into splintering tree-tops. The car remained up there, with one front wheel spinning on apparently forever in the calm moonlight, dumping cushions, tools, and us on to a ledge below that provided foothold for the friendly trees. I remember I thought it an awful shame that the trees should break our fall at such immense cost to themselves, but a fellow has strange thoughts sometimes in a crisis.
“That was a Hell of a way we came!” said the sheriff’s voice from somewhere in the dark beside me. “Look at where we left the track— ‘way back there! We coasted through the air forever, pretty near! My foot’s busted. Anybody else hurt worth mentioning?”