Lutcher grinned, and wrote. Wint took the check and his hat and left Lutcher with the marshal. He went to the bank, drew the money, and deposited the cash to the city’s account. “Just so there can be no question of stopping payment on that check,” he explained. Back at his office, he told Lutcher he was free to go. Lutcher, contriving to look dapper and well-dressed in spite of his night, took himself away. Then Wint turned to the marshal. “Now, Jim, how about it?” he asked. “What’s the case against him?” Radabaugh shifted the knob in his cheek to clear the way for speech; and he sat down, and hitched his trousers up, and opened his coat and put his thumbs in his armholes. “We-ell,” he said, “it was like this.” He had been scouting around for two weeks past, he said, according to Wint’s orders, without discovering anything. But the afternoon before, an automobile had come into town with some boxes in the tonneau and a stranger driving. It made some stir on Main Street; and then it drove openly enough to Lutcher’s place, on the alley. He had seen the boxes carried up Lutcher’s stair. “First off,” he explained, “I figured it couldn’t be what it looked like. Didn’t seem as if they’d be so open about it. Lutcher had been lying low. I figured they might be aiming to get me excited, just to make a fool of me. So I held off a spell. “But the thing stuck in my head. They might be trying a game, and they might not. I decided to keep an eye on Lutcher’s place, and I did. All that afternoon.” Wint said: “They were brazen, eh?” “I’d say so,” Radabaugh agreed; and he shifted his plug and went on. “Nothing happened, particular, all afternoon. I et my supper; and after it was dark, I took another walk down that way. Met Jack Routt coming out of the alley; and he stopped me and talked to me. It was on his breath. Plain enough. He must have knowed that; must have meant me to smell it. He was so darned open, I suspicioned there was a trick. So I still held off. “But I took a walk through the alley about nine o’clock. All quiet. A light in Lutcher’s place, that was all. Some men up there. I wondered. “I walked through again, after a while. Sounded like they was having a game. Finally, about a quarter past eleven, I come along through, and some one yelled. Sounded boozy. So I says to myself: ‘Jim, you’re the goat. You got to bite, if it’s only to see the joke.’ So I went up the stairs. Quiet.” “No search warrant?” Wint asked. “Why, no,” said Radabaugh innocently. “I was just dropping in for a drink, like I’d done before. Some time back.” Wint grinned. “Of course. Go ahead.” “We-ell, the door wasn’t locked,” said Radabaugh. “So I knew I was meant to come in. And I went in. On in where they were. Four of them. Tuttle, and Harley, and Gates, and this Lutcher. I went in; and Tuttle throws a five-dollar bill to Lutcher and says: ‘Here’s for that last bottle, Lutch.’