Part 29 (1/2)

”I'd like to talk with him,” the young woman announced.

”All right,” Mackenzie a.s.sented. ”To-morrow mo'ning----”

”No, to-night, Uncle Mac.”

The cattleman looked at her in surprise. Her voice rang with decision. Her slight figure seemed compact of energy and resolution. Was this the girl who had been in helpless tears not ten minutes before?

”I'll see if he's at his office. Maybe he'll come up,” Curly said.

”No. I'll go down to the courthouse if he's there.”

Flandrau got Bolt on the telephone at his room. After a little grumbling he consented to meet Miss Cullison at his office.

”Bob, you must go to bed. You're tired out,” his cousin told him.

”I ain't, either,” he denied indignantly. ”Tired nothing. I'm going with you.”

Curly caught Kate's glance, and she left the boy to him.

”Look here, Bob. We're at the beginning of a big job. Some of us have to keep fresh all the time. We'll work in relays. To-night you sleep so as to be ready to-morrow.”

This way of putting it satisfied the boy. He reluctantly consented to go to bed, and was sound asleep almost as soon as his head struck the pillow.

At the office of the sheriff, Kate cut to essentials as soon as introductions were over.

”Do you think my father robbed the W. & S. Express Company, Mr. Bolt?” she asked.

Her plainness embarra.s.sed the officer.

”Let's took at the facts, Miss Cullison,” he began amiably. ”Then you tell me what you would think in my place. Your father needed money mighty bad.

There's no doubt at all about that. Here's an envelope on which he had written a list of his debts. You'll notice they run to just a little more than twenty thousand. I found this in his bedroom the day he disappeared.”

She took the paper, glanced at it mechanically, and looked at the sheriff again. ”Well? Everybody wants money. Do they all steal it?”

”Turn that envelope over, Miss Cullison. Notice how he has written there half a dozen times in a row, '$20,000,' and just below it twice, 'W. & S.

Ex. Co.' Finally, the one word, 'To-night.'”

She read it all, read it with a heart heavy as lead, and knew that there he had left in his own strong, bold handwriting convincing evidence against himself. Still, she did not doubt him in the least, but there could be no question now that he knew of the intended s.h.i.+pment, that absent-mindedly he had jotted down this data while he was thinking about it in connection with his own debts.

The sheriff went on tightening the chain of evidence in a voice that for all its kindness seemed to her remorseless as fate. ”It turns out that Mr.

Jordan of the Cattleman's National Bank mentioned this s.h.i.+pment to your father that morning. Mr. Cullison was trying to raise money from him, but he couldn't let him have it. Every bank in the city refused him a loan.

Yet next morning he paid off two thousand dollars he owed from a poker game.”

”He must have borrowed the money from some one,” she said weakly.

”That money he paid in twenty-dollar bills. The stolen express package was in twenties. You know yourself that this is a gold country. Bills ain't so plentiful.”

The girl's hand went to her heart. Faith in her father was a rock not to be washed away by any amount of evidence. What made her wince was the amount of circ.u.mstantial testimony falling into place so inexorably against him.