SLEUTHING
Scot was called back to Carson on official business, so that it was Hugh
who entrained for Austin to join Browning on his search for evidence. In
the old days of the pony express the boy rider had seen Austin a score
of times. It was in the heart of a desert that stretched six hundred
miles from east to west, a desert walled in by the Rockies on one side
and the Sierras on the other. The town lay huddled between the sides of
a cañon which ran sharply up from the Reese River valley. Houses were
built everywhere and anywhere, on ground so steep that one side of a
house often had a story more than the other. It was a place of dirty
sprawling shacks surrounded by dry dusty plains upon which no birds or
wild beasts could be seen. The note of the place was its raw crudeness.
For here, half a thousand miles from San Francisco, the first wave of
Pacific Coast migration had spent itself.
Yet even Austin had its social amenities—its churches, its schools, its
first-class French restaurant, its theatre, and its daily paper. When
Samuel Bowles of Springfield, Massachusetts, passed through the town in
the middle ’sixties he found its barber shops as well equipped as those
of New York and its baths as luxurious as continental ones.
Over a Chateaubriand with mushrooms, following a soup that could have
been inspired only by a Gallic brain, Browning and McClintock sat at a
small table in the famous French restaurant and discussed the problem
before them. The lawyer had made small headway. He knew the date of
William Thornton’s death. The man had fallen down a shaft while drunk
two weeks after the date of the contract which the Dodsons held. He had
found no evidence of any irregularity. Nobody he had met recalled a
visit made by the Dodsons to town, but in the ebb and flow of the camp’s
busy life they might have been here. For in the boom days hundreds of
men drifted in and out each week.
Browning had worked at the court house. Hugh mixed with people at the
post office and in saloons. A dozen times that day he turned the
conversation upon Singlefoot Bill. He picked up a good deal of
information about the habits of that eccentric character, but none of it
seemed very much to the point. The first lead he struck was at the
Mammoth Lager Beer Saloon, a big resort on the corner of Main and
Virginia.
An old-timer had been telling a story about Thornton. After he had
finished he pulled himself up and ruminated. “Doggone it, that wasn’t
Singlefoot, either. It was his brother Chug.”
This was news to Hugh. “Had he a brother?”
“Sure had.” The old-timer chuckled. “Lived in cabins side by side an’
didn’t speak to each other for years. I reckon the good Lord never made
two more contrary humans than Chug an’ Singlefoot.”
“Where’s Chug now?”
“He’s been daid two years.” He referred the matter to another
tobacco-stained relic. “When was it Chug died, Bill?”
Bill made a stab at the date. His friend promptly and indignantly
disagreed with him. They argued the matter with acrimony, but Hugh
learned nothing definite from the quarrel.
He remembered that newspaper editors are encyclopædias of information
and departed from the saloon, even though he had read in an
advertisement that “Votaries of Bacchus, Gambrinus, Venus, or Cupid can
spend an evening agreeably at the Mammoth.”
The editor made Hugh free of his files. He was not sure about the dates
of the two old fellows’ deaths. One had died about three months before
the other, but he could not even tell which one had passed away first.
“They were alike as two peas from the same pod,” he explained. “Both
cranky, gnarled, and tough old birds. Even their names were almost
identical. One was Willis Thornton and the other William Thornton.”
Hugh’s eye quickened. He had an intuition that he was on the edge of an
important discovery, though he could not guess what it was. He looked
through the back files till he came to the issue of August 14th of two
years earlier. A short story on the back page was the one he wanted. The
last sentence of it sent a pulse of excitement beating through his
blood. The story read:
OBITUARY
We regret to record the death of our esteemed fellow citizen
William Thornton, due to an accident which occurred Thursday
night while on his way home after an evening spent down town. It
appears that Mr. Thornton must have strayed from the path in the
darkness of the gulch and fallen down a deserted prospect hole.
His head struck the rocks below and death was probably
instantaneous. His body was discovered there next morning by Jim
Simpkins who works a claim near by.
Thornton was one of the first settlers at Austin and has lived
here ever since. He was an eccentric character and had become an
institution of the town. His brother Willis Thornton, the
well-known prospector called Singlefoot Bill, died last June, it
will be recalled.
Hugh read the last sentence a second and a third time.
“His brother Willis Thornton, the well-known prospector called
Singlefoot Bill, died last June . . .”
Either the reporter was in error or Hugh had stumbled on a fact of prime
importance, one that knocked the props out from under the whole Dodson
case. For if Singlefoot Bill was Willis and not William, and if he had
died in June and not in August, then he could not have relinquished his
claim to the Dodsons on July 29th of the same year. The claimants must
either have bought from “Chug” Thornton instead of Singlefoot, or else
the paper was a forgery pure and simple. One phrase of the document
stuck in Hugh’s memory. The conveyor of the property had been referred
to as “William Thornton, known as Singlefoot Bill.” But surely “Chug”
Thornton, before signing so important a paper, would have corrected an
error so flagrant as a reference to himself as Singlefoot Bill. The fact
that this mistake in identity had been allowed to stand pointed to
forgery. Probably the Dodsons had learned the date of William Thornton’s
death, had never heard of his brother, and had jumped to the conclusion,
just as Browning and Hugh had done, that he was the old prospector who
had worked Bald Knob.
All of which reasoning was based on the hypothesis that the story he had
just read was true as to facts. Hugh proceeded to run it down. He looked
over the June files of the paper and found the obit of Willis Thornton.
At least three times in the story he was referred to as Singlefoot. It
even mentioned the fact that he had prospected for years at Piodie.
From the newspaper office Hugh went to the undertaker. That gentleman
was drowning his sorrows at the Mammoth, but he was one of that class of
drinkers whose mind is clear only when he has had a few drinks.
“Don’t remember which was Willis and which William,” he told Hugh, “but
I know I buried Singlefoot in June and Chug in August. Whyn’t you go out
to the graveyard an’ look up the tombstones?”
“That’s good advice. I’ll take it.”
Hugh wandered through the bleak graveyard perched on the side of a hill
across which the wind always seemed to sweep. He found the graves of the
brothers, and above each a clapboard upon which had been lettered their
names, cognomens, and the dates of their deaths. These, too, confirmed
what he had learned from the paper and from the undertaker.
When Browning found out what Hugh had discovered he thumped the table in
his room with an excited fist.
“We’ve got ’em right. We’ll spring our surprise on Dodson, trap him out
of his own mouth, and throw the case out of court before it ever goes to
a jury,” he cried.