The lost charm

Author of “Sleeping Dogs,” “An Honest Troubador,” Etc.

With the help of Goliath, David doubles in Sherlock Holmes and The Good Samaritan.

A small, wiry, red-haired man scrambled through the thick growth of brush, half slid and half plunged down a steep declivity and halted in the middle of the hard, worn road where he drew a deep breath, wiped the sweat from his face and consulted a huge silver watch.

“Quarter past ten and I sure ought to be in time for the down stage. It’s seven miles from our camp here by this short cut, and I’ve done it in one hour and a half, and I win five from Goliath, and then from Hank,” he muttered, after which he grinned cheerfully, rolled a cigarette, and planted himself in an attitude of repose on a roadside boulder. He took from his pocket a tiny parcel, unwrapped the newspaper protecting it and scanned the inscriptions on a half dozen letters as if to reassure himself that all had been correctly addressed, after which, for lack of anything further to do he sat and idly stared at the enormous panorama of mountains, forests, ravines and cañons that were visible from his perch and which formed a portion of the back edge of the Big Divide. The stillness was so profound that even the trees had lost their almost inaudible whispering and his ears, finely attuned to nature, could distinguish the faint murmuring of the river that, hundreds of feet below, cheerily and busily made its way over and between myriad boulders. For fully fifteen minutes he sprawled listlessly before he lifted his head and listened attentively with his face turned up the white, stony highway.

“Here she comes,” he commented, and straightened himself, arose from the boulder and walked into the middle of the road where he stood waiting to intercept the oncoming vehicle. The noise grew louder, gained a crescendo of sound made up of clattering hoofs, a driver’s voice admonishing his horses, and the screeching of brake shoes grinding on iron tires, and then the down stage swung round a bend and as the pedestrian waved his arms up and down came to a halt. The driver was using heavy-weather language and beside him on the box a man who had lifted a sawed-off shotgun lowered it with a grunt and stared downward.

“Lord Almighty! David, we didn’t recognize you any too soon!” he exclaimed.

“And that’s the truth,” growled the driver, shifting in his seat. “You certainly did pick a mighty dangerous spot to flag us this time.”

“Why, what’s the matter with you fellers anyhow?” David demanded. “One of you grabs leather and the other a gun as if you thought you were about to be held up and was ready to shoot on sight.”

The driver and the express messenger grinned at each other and the latter rested his shotgun between his legs and as he reached for tobacco remarked, “Reckon you ain’t heard the news, pardner. It’s just two days ago since this same stage was stuck up almost on this exact spot. Right down there at the next bend, in fact, a hundred yards from here. I wasn’t along, but Bill here had no chance to put up a fight. Road agent got away with the treasure box.”

“Well, I’ll be hanged!” David exclaimed as if incredulous. “Who’d of thought it! Reckon that’s the first holdup around here for as much as ten years, ain’t it? How much did the feller get away with?”

“Only one package with seventy-five hundred dollars in it,” the messenger answered. “But the worst of it is the sheriffs don’t seem to have any idea at all who did it. They came up here within two hours, scouted around down there at the point, picked up the robber’s trail and followed it clean up to the bare top of the ridge, got another little patch of it a half mile farther along and followed it down into the road and there it was lost. The feller was simply turning back toward Wallula Camp and for all that anybody knows may be there right now.”

“Didn’t bother the passengers, eh?” David asked thoughtfully.

“Wasn’t any, same as now,” the driver informed him. “And this gink was wise enough, too, so that he didn’t bother the United States mail. Didn’t want Uncle Samuel on his train along with the express company’s men and the regular officers, I reckon. But--by gosh! He knew how! Just like old times, it was! And me takin’ no chances, either. You can bet your head on that!”

“I can, Bill! I can!” David agreed, with a sarcasm that was wasted on the knight of the ribbons. “But what I stopped you for was to get you to mail this package of letters for me when you get down to the other end. Reason I happened to come here was that it’s just about seventeen miles less than carrying them into Wallula.”

The messenger reached down and took the letters, the driver remarked that he must be “gittin’ along” and then as he released the brake called over his shoulder facetiously, “If we get stuck up I’ll hand these over too. Reckon they ain’t worth as much as that seventy-five-hundred-dollar package the stick-up got and that had been shipped by Boss Shaughnessy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”

His laugh was drowned in the clattering of hoofs as the stage jumped forward, its wheels throwing up little clouds of dust and its momentum increasing as it reached the bend and disappeared around it. But David was left standing in the middle of the road with his mouth open and an expression of astonishment on his face.

“Shaughnessy--it was Tom Shaughnessy’s money that was looted, eh? Wonder why he sent--hang it all! I’ll bet there was something crooked in that holdup--just because it was Tom’s money! I wonder if there was real money in that package? Yes, of course there must have been, because the express agent wouldn’t have taken it on the blind. Um-um! Wonder if somebody who had been robbed by Shaughnessy, or some of his gang, didn’t know it was being shipped and played even?”

He thought of the numerous crooked deals and gouges perpetrated by the boss of Wallula and his associates, all of whom had once been driven from the camp of Sky Gap by the more reputable citizens, and of the longstanding feud between this gang, himself, his lifelong partner Goliath, and his new partner Hank Mills, and grinned cheerfully as he thought, “Well, if any poor cuss has played even with Shaughnessy he’s got my support. Luck to him!”

After again consulting his watch David leisurely struck back from the road, taking to the hillside in nearly the same place from which he had emerged, and climbed upward toward the crest. He paused after a few minutes and looked back toward the road that now lay considerably below and again his mind worked round the incident of the stage robbery.

“That would be the right place down there,” he ruminated as his keen gray eyes scanned the white line that wound beneath. “And a man standing here would have had a grand-stand seat all to himself to watch the whole show. Or, if the chap that turned that trick had wanted to find a place to have a good look at the stage before he held it up he could have stood here, seen her as she came around that stretch up above, and then have had time to get down to that point and throw his gun on Bill as she came round that bend.”

As if this thought proved interesting David began to scan the brush and ground near by and almost instantly stopped in an attitude of surprise and whistled a note of astonishment; for all unexpectedly he had blundered on to a place where a man evidently had rested for some time. Had David been asked if he were an expert trailer he would probably have denied such craft; but Goliath, his huge partner, would have asserted that there was no man on all that great range who could “read sign” like this same wiry, alert, active, ferret-eyed man who now began moving around in a bent attitude peering at every impression in the earth, at every crushed bunch of grass, and at every broken twig of brush. David seemed actually exultant when he found a stump of a cigar which had been chewed as if nervous teeth had worked upon it long after its fire had expired. A minute later he found the gaudy band, frowned at it for a time, and then put it into his pocketbook, wrapped the cigar in his handkerchief, pocketed that also, and resumed his search. He paused over each footprint and again brightened when he found one in a patch of moist earth and sand that was clear and distinct. He got to his hands and knees and taking an old letter from his pocket carefully cut it out into an exact pattern of the footmark and with a stub of a pencil marked thereon every nail, noting little peculiarities of position as well as the fact that on the heel there was the imprint of a small iron plate almost new.

“That right boot heel was old, and the man had the plate put on because the heel was beginning to run over a little bit,” David muttered. “Maybe he was a little bowlegged. Anyhow, he treads heavier on the outer edge of his heel than on the ball of his hoof. Must find a mark of his left foot that’s clear.” He continued his trailing. Finally this search was rewarded and again he paused and made another pattern, reasoning as he did so, “Nope, the man wasn’t bowlegged, and the left heel had no plate and so doesn’t wear off like the right. That shows that most likely he hits the right heel harder because he either limps a little or has had that right leg or foot hurt some time so that it steps just a trifle different from the other one. One thing is sure; he’s a heavy man, and those marks were made by a town man’s shoes and not by any miner’s brogans or boots.”

Yard by yard he followed the telltale trail until he had worked it out thoroughly in his own mind that the unknown man had been restless and moved about somewhat aimlessly as if his wait and watch had lasted for some time. Then came another discovery, that the man had seated himself or crouched down behind a heavy clump of brush and remained there for some time, occasionally with restless movements as if intensely interested in observing something while at the same time taking precautions to remain in hiding. David had put himself into the same position and found that he could look through small openings in the brush which had been made larger by hands twisting off one or two of the branches, and that he had an exact bird’s-eye view of the spot in the road where the stage robbery had taken place. On making this discovery David once more uttered a tiny whistle and mused, “Uh-huh! That’s the way, eh? There were two of them in it instead of one, as Bill, the driver, and the deputy sheriffs think. Maybe the one up here had a rifle beaded down on the stage all the time so that if it came to any sort of a show-down he could pot Bill or bring down a horse to make the game certain.”

He devoted some time to seeking the marks where a rifle butt might have been rested and was disappointed because he could find nothing to bear out his reasoning. He still hoped to find some such indication, as he had made a complete detour and picked up the trails where the watcher had come and gone. They led away to the road below at a long angle and, proving that patience with keenness has its reward, David now made another most important find. It was nothing less than a coin watch charm with the few links connecting it to the chain from which it had been broken, at sight of which David’s eyes widened as if he had found something unbelievable.