“Yes, I do. He has been under the noses of you fellows all the time. He
comes by night to the old graveyard at the White Church.”
“The devil! That’s where they buried his wife.”
“Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to suspect that he would
return to her grave some time.”
“The very last place that anyone would have expected him to return to.”
“But you had exhausted all the other places. Learning your failure at
them, I ‘laid for him’ there.”
“And you found him?”
“Damn it! he found _me_. The rascal got the drop on me—regularly held me
up and made me travel. It’s God’s mercy that he didn’t go through me.
Oh, he’s a good one, and I fancy the half of that reward is enough for me
if you’re needy.”
Holker laughed good humoredly, and explained that his creditors were
never more importunate.
“I wanted merely to show you the ground, and arrange a plan with you,”
the detective explained. “I thought it as well for us to be heeled, even
in daylight.”
“The man must be insane,” said the deputy sheriff. “The reward is for
his capture and conviction. If he’s mad he won’t be convicted.”
Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that possible failure of justice
that he involuntarily stopped in the middle of the road, then resumed his
walk with abated zeal.
“Well, he looks it,” assented Jaralson. “I’m bound to admit that a more
unshaven, unshorn, unkempt, and uneverything wretch I never saw outside
the ancient and honorable order of tramps. But I’ve gone in for him, and
can’t make up my mind to let go. There’s glory in it for us, anyhow.
Not another soul knows that he is this side of the Mountains of the
Moon.”
“All right,” Holker said; “we will go and view the ground,” and he added,
in the words of a once favorite inscription for tombstones: “‘where you
must shortly lie’—I mean, if old Branscom ever gets tired of you and your
impertinent intrusion. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Branscom’
was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I can’t recall it. I had lost all interest in the wretch, and it did
not fix itself in my memory—something like Pardee. The woman whose
throat he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when he met her. She had
come to California to look up some relatives—there are persons who will
do that sometimes. But you know all that.”
“Naturally.”
“But not knowing the right name, by what happy inspiration did you find
the right grave? The man who told me what the name was said it had been
cut on the headboard.”
“I don’t know the right grave.” Jaralson was apparently a trifle
reluctant to admit his ignorance of so important a point of his plan. “I
have been watching about the place generally. A part of our work this
morning will be to identify that grave. Here is the White Church.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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