"If you knew Lou Redmain as I do—" said she, and never finished the sentence. He watched her walk away, and an odd flash of thought came to him about the Biblical Mary and Martha. The opera house doors were closed, and a puncher guarded them; on impulse he used his right as an Association member and went in. Fear Langdell slouched in a stage chair. A small rancher held the floor, talking in a half-hearted sort of way.
"...I want you-all to realize we've got no militia to call on, no rangers to drag in. Here we are, the biggest, roughest county in the state, cut off from down country. We always have had to fight our own battles, and we will now. Some of you smoke eaters forget that these hills make perfect shelter for the wild bunch. Just try and run 'em all down. If we'd gone about this with a less heavy hand and a hell of a lot of less advertisement we wouldn't of pushed the bad ones into a single herd where they can do us the most damage. We are lookin' right square into no-law country. Lou Redmain's got nothin' less than another Hole-in-the- Wall bunch. And if you had lived in Wyoming like me you'd flinch every time you thought about it. I figured Leverage would anyhow keep things quiet by a show of force. But I had hopes Denver would smash 'em once he made up his mind. There ain't anybody else that could. If he's gone, I just don't know how I can face the prospect of livin' on my place with the wife and kids. I just don't..."
Niland left the hall in need of air. "So they're singin' Dave's swan song. Well, they don't know the man!" But, going along the courthouse corridor and back to his office he remembered an odd thing Denver once had told him. It was about how fast bad news swept over Yellow Hill County. Denver had pointed to the sky and said, "It's one of those things I don't try to explain. Call it the invisible telegraph, if you want. But it comes through the air. I know it. I've felt it. The Indians knew it too. The news of Custer's being wiped out traveled to tribes three hundred miles south before a messenger could even ride thirty miles. It's just another part of the mystery of this country. Whispering Range—there never was a truer name. Some days there's a pressure all around me that's like a smotherin' blanket. I know better than to take chances on those days. Somewhere there's an old medicine drum beating, and the echo of it passes along."
Niland closed his office door, locked it, and threw the dark reveries from his head with conscious effort. Impatiently he lit his pipe, unlocked a drawer, and took therefrom a long leather folder. Out of it he drew a broken sheet of paper, smoothed it on the table, and bent his slim, rebellious face in scrutiny, as he had done a dozen times in the last eight hours.
He had found it in an odd corner of Cal Steele's desk which he had inspected after being appointed executor of the dead man's estate. He would have set it aside as of no importance except that in the back of his mind was the question Dave Denver had planted there. He had been musing ever since over the figures penned upon it. On the left margin apparently Steele had indicated dates. In the center the figures obviously stood for sums of money, and each one following its date. Niland had concluded that these represented proceeds from cattle sales. But what defied his logic was that to the right of each sum had been set a figure 3 as a divisor, and still to the right of this divisor was put down the exact third of the original sum. There were a dozen such individual transactions over a period of about a year.
Nothing in his subsequent searches quite satisfied him. There were instruments of sale of stock between Steele and Fear Langdell registered in the courthouse. Some of them closely followed the dates on this sheet of paper. Others seemed not to. Casual questioning had revealed no sale of cattle from Steele to any other rancher in the district; but the cattleman had made four moderate shipments to the Salt Lake yards during the year. And that was all Niland had discovered.
Niland settled back and blew the smoke heavily across his table. That figure 3 kept working through his head. Cal Steele had no partners. He had no relatives in the country. Nothing in his papers indicated kin or birthplace. Behind his arrival in Yellow Hill were only silence and mystery; nor had Steele ever broken it by spoken confidence. So then, why this three-part division of money?
He put away his pipe with a quick gesture, placed the sheet of paper in his pocket and rose. "Lord forgive me!" he muttered. "I may be sorry for what I find." He went through the business of unlocking and locking, passed to the street, and aimed for the bank. A quick survey told him no news had arrived so far in Sundown. And carrying his oppressive, foreboding fears with him, he entered the bank and met Ed Storm, a blocky middle-aged man who had inherited the institution from earlier members of the family. Storm's assistant was also in the place. Niland nodded briefly to the inner office and entered it. Storm came afterward.
"You look," he observed, "like you were standing on the peak of Ararat two days after the flood, with no grub in sight."
"Well, I feel like I'd been sent for and was only half present. Ed, you know me pretty well, don't you? There ain't a whole lot you don't fathom about me."
"This has all the earmarks of a touch," grinned Storm. "I've seen you throw back five-inch trout and refuse to shoot a doe. Nothing wrong with your moral integrity."
Niland failed to respond to the humor. He talked in jerky phrases, seemingly far afield. "Ethics. We've all got our professional ethics. They're fine things to start life with. Yet I doubt if there's a professional man living who hasn't violated his creed time and again. For admirable purposes, too. Man builds up a pretty schedule of ideals—and life knocks it flatter than a pancake. When I'm old and shot and look back down the crooked trail I hacked out, I think I'll be kind of sad at the fine thoughts I threw overboard. But I think I'll also hope to hear somebody in the hereafter say, 'Well done, good and faithful servant.'"
"Now that you're all wound up, toss the loop," said Ed Storm.
"I'm going to ask you some questions," went on Niland with a rise of energy. "They're questions you could only properly answer in court, but this is something that never will get to court. It dies outside of sight. You understand, Ed? You know, too that I have never blackmailed a man, never clubbed him down with any information I've had against him."
"Fire away—and we'll see what we see, Al."
"All right. I'm not going to explain anything. If you get any ideas on the subject from the way I bore in—that's under your hat. First, did Lou Redmain ever have an account in this bank?"
"That's easy. No."
"Did he ever cash any checks here—within the last year?"
"Yes."
"Were any of those checks from Cal Steele?"
Storm arched his eyebrows. "No."
"From Fear Langdell?"
"Nope."
Niland paused, stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. "You've cleared checks through the bank from Langdell to Steele for sale of beef. I know that. But have you cleared any checks from Steele to Langdell?"
"No-o," said Storm with a slight drag in the answer. Niland studied the banker. Unconsciously he was exercising his habit as an attorney of reading the qualifications and reservations behind witnesses' answers.
"Listen—was Cal Steele in the habit of drawing out large sums of money at a time?"
"Cash—yes."
Niland plunged into the opening swiftly.
"Right after receiving these checks from Langdell?"
Storm stopped to think. "Not necessarily on the same day or week. But he was a hand to draw heavy whenever his balance got substantially large. My one observation is that on the occasions when he drew considerable cash he'd take a trip south to the capital."
Niland's thoughts went off on this tangent. He was aware that Cal Steele often went away for a few days. On the heels of this reflection he tried to place Langdell's whereabouts at those times and found himself doubtful.
"Does Langdell have a bank account at the capital, Ed?"
"Oh, yes. That'd be necessary for him, considering all the investments he's got scattered around."
"Well, after Steele made his trips to the capital, did you ever observe Langdell switching money from the bank there to your bank?"