CHAPTER VIII
THE MARK OF THE BEAST.
Little Jimmy Coyle would not ride his beloved range again for many a long month. The boy was battling with death when the Texan saw him, but Uncle Billy, who was in attendance, said, he would recover. The lad’s chaparajos and the rest of his cowboy trappings were on a chair at his bedside, a pathetic reminder, Bertram thought, of the active life the boy loved. His .38 rifle, the weapon which he intended to exchange for a .45 some day, when he grew strong enough, stood at the head of his bed, and no one was permitted to handle either it or the garments. Such were the orders of the new district attorney, young Isham Woods, it was explained.
Alma had found Jimmy at the mouth of a wide moraine, leading out upon a mesa, something over a mile from the ranch house. She had thought he was dead, from a wound just above the heart, but she had found that some remnant of life remained. She had attended as best she could to the wound, and then she had carried the boy to the ranch house, the crisis giving her strength far in excess of normal.
The Texan did not tarry at the ranch house after he learned that Jimmy stood a fair chance of recovery. Following Alma’s directions he rode to the scene of the shooting. The moraine afforded an admirable hiding place. In its wide, bowlder-strewn depression one could command an excellent view of the mesa, on which there were always cattle grazing.
Several neighbors were going over the ground, and so was Woods, the district attorney, who had shown an unexpected and most disconcerting disposition to inquire into some of the affairs of the newly organized association of cattlemen. In fact it was currently reported that Woods, who had been figured on as a quiescent tool, had been visited several times by Swingley, with threats of the loss of his political and legal suture unless he mended his ways.
Threats apparently had no effect on the young lawyer, with whom Bertram had struck up an acquaintance which was fast ripening into friendship. Together the Texan and the district attorney surveyed the scene. The would-be assassin had hidden behind a bowlder, on the side of the moraine. His horse had been tied in a clump of asps, that grew over the side of the huge depression. There were some footprints and hoof prints, but the ground was so hard that these could be of no value. The discharged cartridge was found, but that, also, was of no value. Forty-five caliber cartridges of that character were carried by thousands of ranchmen in that vicinity.
“Miss Alma wanted me to give you this,” observed the Texan, handing the district attorney a small square of paper. On it was the customary sign: Rustlers, Beware! printed in lead pencil.
Woods examined it with interest.
“Maybe this won’t be such bad corroborative evidence,” went on Bertram, handing over the paper which he had found on his own cabin door. The same letters were printed on the paper, but the work was done in ink.
“That’s a pretty plain thumb print, down in the corner, isn’t it?” observed the Texan, noting the interest with which the official observed the new paper.
“Yes,” replied Woods. “It’s quite the best one that’s come to light, so far. Let’s go to the ranch house and see if we can find anything corroborative on Jimmy Coyle’s equipment. The assassin came out from his hiding place after he had shot Jimmy and turned the boy over, thinking he was dead. I don’t think he meant to kill Jimmy, but probably the boy saw him and opened fire, or tried to get back to the ranch to give the alarm. Probably the fellow behind the rock thought he had made a clean job of it, but he did not reckon on the vitality of youth.”
The district attorney and Bertram carried Jimmy’s clothes and chaparajos and rifle into a room adjoining the sick chamber and barred out everybody else. “I’m glad to have you work with me in this,” said Woods, “because I can’t trust anybody from the sheriff’s office, and it’s clearly impossible to take up such a case alone. I know I can count on you, right up to the finish.”
“Right up to the finish,” said the Texan grimly, “and that finish can’t come too soon.”
“I imagine it’s not so very far away,” responded the young district attorney. “These range murderers haven’t learned the advantage of working with gloves, like some of the city criminals.”
The official inspected the boy’s clothing. “This shirt,” he said, “must have been pretty well stained by the time the assassin reached the lad. In turning the boy over he naturally took hold of Jimmy’s shoulder, and probably he got some stain from the wound on his hands. Then he’d try to straighten out the boy’s legs, and in doing, that he might have come in contact with the stains on these leather chaps. It might be a good idea to take a look at those first.”
The district attorney brought a small bottle from his pocket and shook some grayish powder into a paper on the table. Then he took a camel’s-hair brush and began applying the powder to different spots on the leather chaparajos.
“It is what is technically known as gray powder,” he explained. “It’s made of charcoal, chalk and mercury. A little of it will bring out a finger print with amazing clearness. Here are some that don’t belong to the boy.”
Under the application of the powder several finger prints stood out clearly. Taking out the paper which Bertram had handed him, the district attorney compared the prints.
“Fate seems to have helped us out,” he said finally. “It might be a matter of some time and difficulty in checking up these finger prints, under ordinary conditions. There are four general classes, known as arches, loops, whorls and composites—self-explanatory names. But there are over a thousand types, and checking up without a complete set of finger prints is ordinarily a matter of difficulty. But right here is where Fate, as I say, seems to have helped us.”
The district attorney called Bertram’s attention to two tiny spots, almost in the center of the thumb print, on the paper which had been attached to the Texan’s cabin, and a print which the powder had brought out clearly on the leather chaparajos.
“The man that made those thumb prints might have been struck in the ball of the right thumb by a rattlesnake, at some time in his life. Anyway that is what we will assume. There are two small scars, just big enough and deep enough to change the swirl of the thumb marking, almost at the very center. Those markings, no matter what type they may fall into, never become confused naturally. In other words, those tiny corrugations never cross each other, unless by accident of an external nature. Such an accident has happened in this case. The peculiarity of this thumb print can be distinguished with the naked eye.”
“Let’s see if there isn’t another on the rifle,” said the Texan. “We can’t be too dead sure about this business.”
An application of powder to the boy’s rifle brought to light several other thumb prints, showing the rattlesnake scar.
“A man who was used to handling guns would pick up the boy’s rifle just by instinct,” said the Texan. “The man that shot Jimmy picked up the lad’s .38, and he probably worked the lever once or twice, explaining the unexploded cartridges that were found on the ground. It’s second nature for a gunman to do anything like that.”
“These prints on the rifle are even clearer than the ones on the leather,” replied the district attorney.
What the official said was true. Under the magic of the gray powder a mixture of thumb prints appeared on the magazine of the rifle which Jimmy had prized so highly. Some of the thumb prints were long and narrow. Those were the marks of Jimmy’s hands. Overlapping them in some cases, and in one or two instances, standing out alone, could be seen larger, coarser finger prints. Where a man would place his thumb in the process of aiming the rifle, were two exceptionally clear prints.
In each of them appeared the tiny flaws in the configuration of the strange lines of the skin, lines which scientists have been at a loss to explain, unless, in some mysterious way, they aid the sense of touch. The flaws caused a slight interruption of the flowing, parallel lines, almost in the center of the thumb.
“Can you convict on evidence like that?” asked Bertram.
“Finger-print evidence is absolute. Some Frenchman has figured up the chances of error, and he had to get into fractional atoms before he arrived at a result.”
“How about the chances of some one else having a scar like this one.”
“There again you’ll get into the atomic fractions. Some other person might have a scar made by a blade, or a deep, jagged scar, made by a barbwire fence or something of that sort which tears instead of cuts; or there might be another person with a single small scar on the thumb, but for any one to have a double scar like this would be so nearly impossible, that you might as well throw the fractions away and say that the thing couldn’t be.”
The Texan looked thoughtfully at the comparative evidence on the table. “How are you going ahead, now that you’ve got this far, Woods?” he asked. The district attorney looked troubled. “I know I can be frank with you,” he replied. “I can’t see that I’m much better off than when I started. Right now is where I need the strongest kind of help from the sheriff, and this is just the time I can’t call on him. He’s been indifferent, right from the start.”
“Indifference is what he was put in there to show,” responded the Texan. “He’s simply delivering the goods to those who have hired him.”
“Well, whatever the reason, I’m brought up against a blank wall. I’ve thought that I could enlist a little force of my own, a few men like yourself and Archie Beam. I don’t want to make the mistake of getting those who are too deeply interested on the rustler side of this war, or they’d be dragging in some of their personal enemies, just to square their own accounts.”
“Well, you know you can count on me,” said Bertram, “but I don’t reckon it will be necessary to have a whole posse in on this thing.”
The young official looked surprised. “It’s going to take a force of men to capture that assassin,” he replied.
“That shows how little you are used to ways and means and men out here,” said the Texan, with a short laugh.
“That man isn’t going to be captured easily, and he’s got to be wounded to be taken,” he added. “One man’s just as good on his trail as a hundred, provided that one man can get the drop. In fact if you go setting a whole pack of hounds on the trail of a wolf like that, all you’re going to do is run him out of the country, and that isn’t what’s wanted, because an enemy of that sort is an enemy not of any one particular clan or neighborhood, but of all humanity. He’s got to be put out of the way for all humanity’s sake.”
The district attorney was puzzled and inclined to be downcast.
“I’m going to help you some in this case,” went on Bertram. “In fact I’m going just as far as it is possible for any one to go. It isn’t alone because I think a lot of that little kid in there, who has been struck down in this ruthless way. There’s a long score to be settled before Jimmy Coyle’s case is to be considered at all. For one thing I believe the man who shot this boy, and who has been doing these murders around here, the work of the masked horseman, is the same person who killed Nick Caldwell.”
“I thought Nick was killed by a general volley, fired by the invaders when the ranch on the Lower Powderhorn was burned,” said Woods in surprise.
“He was and he wasn’t. Nick was wounded when he started to run, but he wasn’t badly hurt until he had almost made his get-away. I believe that the boys with Swingley’s outfit had so much admiration for the fight Nick had put up in that cabin that they were shooting wild, just to let him escape. Swingley knew that. He had determined to get Nick at any cost, and he wasn’t going to see him escape. So, just when the firing lulled, and Nick was about to leap into the underbrush to safety, there came one shot, which drilled him, just as cleanly as that boy was shot, and as Hersekorn has been shot, and as all the rest of the victims of the masked horseman have been shot. There’s no telling just who did it, but Swingley was really guilty in Nick’s case, whether he fired the shot or whether he didn’t.”
“Well, in the boy’s case we’ve made a start, at least, toward something tangible,” said Woods. “I’m going to turn questioner now and ask you how we are going to go about finding the man who made those finger prints.”
The Texan smiled enigmatically. “That’s something we’ll have to leave to the gods,” he replied. “Meantime I want you to give me some of that powder, as I might have to do a little finger-print experimenting myself.”
“Take the bottle and the brush,” replied Woods. “I believe you can carry this thing along further than I can now. I seem to be at the end of my rope.”
The Texan put the bottle and the brush in his pocket. Then he carried Jimmy’s clothes and rifle back to the bedroom.
Making sure that the boy was resting easily, and once more getting assurance from Uncle Billy that the patient would recover in due time, the Texan mounted his horse and rode toward town, after saying good-by to the district attorney.
Alma Caldwell watched him through one of the windows of the ranch house. He had hardly spoken to her while he was at the ranch, nor did he turn in the saddle for a backward glance at the place. She saw his broad shoulders and wide gray hat, rise and fall in easy undulations, as the Texan’s mount was urged into a gallop toward Wild Horse.