Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 44, No. 5, September 28, 1929

Into the Silent Desert Vanished the Club-Footed Thief of Nopal, But a Little Grain of Sand Left a Clew

I

The bank had not been opened for business ten minutes when the club-footed robber entered. The red tile floor still glistened from its usual morning wetting down with a hose, which was done as much for the cooling effect of swift evaporation in the dry air as to flush out the sifting of desert dust. Facing the entrance behind his cage, big Bart Stollard was cashing a check for Doc Avery, the druggist next door; and Mrs. Merriwether, fidgeting behind Avery, was the only other customer in the place. Mr. Trawl, the president, had just come in, trim and severe and very much the banker as always. Nodding curtly to Bart’s father, who was cashier, vice president and bookkeeper, he had passed on to his desk by the open window, which looked out across the shaded sidewalk into the hot glare of Nopal’s one business street.

Nothing much was stirring out there when the clatter of a motor cycle broke the stillness. From the direction of the paved highway it came, raising the dust, then swerved in a half circle and stopped in front of the bank. Dismounting, the rider leaned his machine against a pillar of the arcade, and crossed the sidewalk with a decided limp toward the door of the bank. Mr. Trawl supposed he was the messenger from the Southwest National of El Metropole, with the ten thousand dollars in ones, fives and twenty-dollar bills to take care of the month-end demand for cash. He was thick-set, coatless, dusty. An old brief case slung over his shoulder presumably contained the expected currency.

And then, before anybody rightly knew what was happening, the man was inside, and masked, and proceeding to hold up the bank. From first to last he spoke no word.

Big Bart Stollard, slow and deliberate as usual as he counted over the bills for Doc Avery, became aware of a black object thrust toward him between the bars of the wicket. It was the short barrel of an automatic pistol leveled at his breast. His good-natured face stiffened to rigid attention. The man had wedged himself in between Mrs. Merriwether and Doc Avery.

“Where’s your manners, young man?” Mrs. Merriwether squeaked indignantly.

She did not know that the bank was being robbed. But chubby Doc Avery did. The hand that held the pistol was resting on his shoulder, and he twitched and perspired, trying to keep very quiet. Over Avery’s shoulder Bart Stollard looked into a pair of eyes fixed on him through the slits of a gray felt mask. The mask covered the face down to the man’s tight-lipped mouth and up to the visor of a soiled checkered woolen cap. Bart spoke quietly to his father, to the frail, resolute man at the bookkeeper’s desk behind him.

“Please, dad, don’t try anything. I’m all right.”

“You won’t try anything either, Bart?”

“No, dad, I’ll be good.”

The robber gestured with the pistol. Bart nodded. Hands in air he backed toward his father until he stood on a line with him, both facing the eyes behind the gray mask at the teller’s wicket.

“Keep backing toward the wall, dad. That’s what he wants.”

They did that, and the robber stepped out from his usurped place in the line in front of Mrs. Merriwether. The old lady gasped to see that he was masked.

“My gracious, what can a body do?”

He showed her. He motioned her and Doc Avery backward to the rear wall beside the Stollards. Only Mr. Trawl, a petrified spectator at his desk, was left. The pistol motioned to him to join the others; he edged side-wise through the gate, then backed as before royalty. Doing so he brushed against the edge of the elder Stollard’s desk and knocked off a metal box in which the notes of the bank’s debtors were kept. The box struck the tile floor with a terrific crash. They all jumped — all except the robber.

“He’s deaf as a post,” muttered Doc Avery.

“Don’t stoop for that box, Mr. Trawl,” Bart shouted. “He’ll shoot you. He thinks you’re reaching for a gun. Come back here. That’s right. It’s no use to resist.”

Now the man moved swiftly. Dipping down at each stride in his violent limp he came skittering through the gate toward them. A monstrous cripple he seemed, and in his unremitting silence there was death alert to strike should they fail to comprehend the viperish pantomime of the instrument in his hand. Bart Stollard had a full view of him now. Tight over his heavy coatless body he wore a soiled chambray shirt, once blue, but faded to an ashen gray. Also he wore gaberdine riding breeches, old and grease-spotted, and high laced boots, one with a raised sole. His mask was wet with perspiration.

Throughout he spoke no human intelligent word, and once only mouthed an inarticulate growl. This was when, confronting them lined up against the wall, he had to make the same gesture twice and still they did not understand. He reached out with his left hand then, and sank his fingers in the elder Stollard’s thin shoulder and whirled him half round, pushing him face first against the wall. Bart Stollard lowered his hands, but the robber swung upon him and struck up his chin with the barrel of the pistol. Bart thought of the sidewinder, the desert rattlesnake that attacks man, as he felt the cold deadliness in the pupils of the eyes leveled on him. With the others he faced the wall, his hands over his head.

The rest was incredibly swift. Out of the tail of his eye Bart saw the robber dart into the open vault, skimming unevenly as he went — the sidewinder again in his horrible crippled haste. He gave them no chance for a break. Repeatedly the checkered cap, the masked face, reappeared, to vanish again within the vault. Bart could guess what he was doing in there. He was stuffing his brief case with packets of bills. He was stuffing the last of them in when he emerged. Keeping the automatic trained on them, he skittered backward as far as the gate when he faced about and ran for the street. Jostling past two Nopal merchants just coming in, he crossed the sidewalk, straddled his motor cycle, and kicked the starter. With a snort like a startled horse the machine leaped forward.

Bart Stollard was the first to break from the line facing the wall. The instant the robber turned at the gate he broke. He ran to the teller’s window and snatched up his pistol on the shelf underneath. When he reached the street the robber was speeding out of pistol range, but through the swirl of dust he noted that the motor cycle was grayish green in color. One of the two men jostled by the robber had a car outside. Bart sprang into it, and the two men scrambled into the tonneau as he started the car. Others joined the pursuit behind them, Mrs. Merriwether screaming, “Stop thief! Stop thief!”

Over his shoulder Bart heard shots — no, not shots. They were blow-outs, tires gone flat. Two of their own tires blew out, and the car lurched to a standstill.

Tacks — roofing nails! The robber had sown them in the dust as he rode.

“Any skunk that would do that—” said the owner of the car.

Bart jumped out and turned back. Three other cars had stalled, though others were coming, and he ran toward them, waving their drivers to the side of the street. Two more had to stop before he could reach them, but the light delivery truck of the Imperial Grocery, with two citizens on the seat beside tile Mexican driver and four in the body, was just getting under way as Bart swung aboard over the tail gate.

“Off to the side, Tony,” he ordered. “Climb the curb! Keep to the sidewalk!”

A half mile ahead the robber turned south into the highway, toward El Metropole and the Mexican border beyond. Fully a minute later they themselves reached the highway. The cement road lay like a strip of gray carpet upon the yellow floor of the desert. It sloped gently upward over the dunes to the crest of a rise some five miles away. They peered into the jiggling heat waves. The one moving speck visible was the motor cycle and its rider, which topped the rise and was gone.

“We’ll never catch him,” said one of those in the truck.

“Don’t need to,” argued another. “He’s as good as nabbed already. He can’t leave the highway.” The man waved a hand over the sea of powdered dust. “If he keeps on they’ll grab him at the first town. The bank has phoned everywhere by now, you bet.”

“Don’t you suppose he’s thought of that?” Bart asked.

“What of it? What can he do?”

“I don’t know what he’ll do,” said Bart, “but it’s my guess that he’s got something figured out. We’ll just keep on after him.”

II

They did, but when they reached the crest of the long rise they could see no sign of the motor cycle. As straight as a string, the cement strip stretched to the horizon. Nothing moved upon it except a sand truck about a mile away. They overtook the truck and passed it. They picked up the tracks of the motor cycle where the dust had drifted over the paved road. In these places they saw two tracks, one made by the robber when coming to Nopal, the other when leaving. At last they came to a stretch where there was but one track. The robber then had not come this far.

They blinked at the desert that shrivels and erases. The man was gone. Nowhere to the mountain haze on either side was there aught to screen him. The clumps of greasewood would not do it. The sand verbena would not hide a jack rabbit. The man was gone.

The pursuers turned back. They stopped and questioned the driver of the slow-moving sand truck. He regarded them with lazy interest. He wanted to know if their doctors knowed they was loose in this oven heat. Yes, he sort of remembered seeing a motor cycle. Where did it go? Huh, where would it go? It just went. Wished he had a motor cycle instead of a load of sand, to hit up a little breeze. They would have to excuse him, but he wasn’t paying no attention where the motor cycle got to. Real nice broiling weather, wasn’t it?

“Oh, come on,” said one of the men. “This bimbo’s asleep, and he’d be a dumb-bell even if he was awake.”

“And keep out of the sun the rest of the day,” the driver of the sand truck advised them as he threw in the clutch.

A crowd stood around in front of the bank when they returned. Bart saw then that the doors of the bank were closed. His father admitted him. He started to speak to Bart, but turned without a word and led the way to Mr. Trawl’s desk. Bart followed. Two of the bank directors were there. Mr. Trawl’s brows arched behind his nose glasses as he greeted Bart.

“Ah, the end of the grand stand chase, eh? And did you get your man?”

Bart shook his head.

“You wouldn’t,” said Mr. Trawl, “even though he was crippled and deaf. Why didn’t you shoot him when he came in here? But no, I suppose you were counting the buttons on his shirt. Always hipped on details! I suppose you can tell us the color of his pants?”

“I can tell you,” said Bart, “that he wasn’t deaf.”

“Not deaf? He was stone deaf. When that tin box dropped he didn’t so much as start.”

“That was iron control. A deaf man would have jumped. The concussion would have made him jump. Doctors have told me that. When the robber did not jump, that showed that he was pretending to be deaf.”

“Well, what of it? What good does your knowing that do us?”

“It probably kept the robber from shooting you, Mr. Trawl,” said the elder Stollard. “He believed that we thought he was deaf. Consequently Bart convinced him that you were not stooping for a gun. I saw his finger on the trigger, but Bart saved you.”

“But,” Trawl objected petulantly, “that catches us no thief. Very convenient for your father, your not catching him, young man.”

“I don’t understand, Mr. Trawl?”

“Oh, indeed! However, these directors of the bank and myself, we understand only too well.”

“Bart,” said the elder Stollard, “it’s worse than you think. The robber must have known that we were expecting a large sum from the Southwest National.”

“But he didn’t get that. It hadn’t come yet.”

“He did get it, though.”

Mr. Trawl’s laugh was sarcastic. “That is your story, Mr. Stollard.”

The elderly cashier looked only at his son. He went on:

“That money from the Southwest National was brought by a messenger, Bart. He came on the stage before the bank opened. I was alone here, and let him in. I received the money, ten thousand dollars, and the messenger left at once. I opened the vault and put the money there. The robber took it, of course.”

“Like blazes he did!” Trawl burst forth, throwing off his manner of deliberate sarcasm. “A most convenient robbery for you, Mr. Stollard. And you and your son needing money badly for that ranching experiment of yours. Come, come, produce the money so that we can open the bank’s doors.”

Bart trembled where he stood. “That’s rot, Mr. Trawl!”

“Yes, a rotten betrayal of trust.”

“You’ll be saying next that we knew the robber was coming.”

“It would almost seem so. Very strangely the fellow happened in during the only few hours in an entire month when more than a thousand dollars would be in our vault. It’s curious — very.”

“Not so curious. The Southwest National has been sending us currency the same day every month for the past year. Almost any one could make it his business to find that out.”

“Why, yes, that’s so,” spoke one of the two directors. He was Witheral, owner of the sand pits near Nopal and owner of most of the bank. His eyes, under stubborn bushy brows, were afflicted with a squint in their steadfast gimlet boring. “Mr. Trawl’s charges are serious,” he went on, “and your father, Bart, is either unfortunate or — the charges are true. That’s what we have got to find out. However, Mr. Trawl, I might as well tell you this: You have misrated Mr. Stollard in the past. Jealousy, no doubt. Afraid he will displace you. Now listen. In case these charges are proved untrue, we could no longer trust to your judgment, and your place would likely be taken by one whose probity as well as judgment we could in that case trust absolutely.”

“Now you are meaning my father, Mr. Witheral?”

“Yes, but only if these charges are proved false.”

“It’s a dirty shame! My father—”

But that line would get nowhere. Bart Stollard became slow, plodding, his usual self.

“How much,” he asked, tense about the lips, “would be required to balance the bank’s cash?”

His father was able to tell him. Eleven thousand, six hundred and eighty-five dollars. That amount exactly the robber had taken from the vault. Methodically Bart noted down the amount.

“Since the bank is closed and I’m not needed here,” he said, “I’ll be taking the rest of the day off.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Trawl, “that you are going to catch the thief?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Ah, yes, and you’ll be sure to count his buttons, won’t you?”

“Oh, let up, Trawl,” said the other director wearily. “The boy knows the robber has got to be caught. All right, Bart, take the afternoon off.”

Bart felt a hand on his shoulder, his father’s hand.

“Thanks, Bart,” said his father.

Bart hurried to the garage where he kept his roadster and drove straight to the highway and turned south. “A man can’t just disappear,” he said to himself. That was all he had to go on.

He stopped and questioned the drivers of the few cars he met. He got plenty of interested comment, but no information. He made the same inquiry at the filling stations at Mesquite and Date Grove. No one had seen a grayish-green motor cycle. They had been on the lookout too, ever since hearing of the robbery over the telephone.

At every culvert bridging an arroyo or washout, Bart stopped. His thoroughness as to detail, which had often earned him chilled reprimands from Mr. Trawl, would not permit him to pass any possible hiding place. At last, under a culvert some twelve miles south of Date Grove, he found the motor cycle. Nor was that all. Here also the man had left his clothes, or such of his clothes as might form a part of the description broadcast by Mr. Trawl. There were the faded chambray shirt, the soiled checkered cap, the laced boots, one with a raised sole, the gaberdine riding breeches, and the gray felt mask, evidently cut from an old hat.

“About everything except the money,” Bart said to himself. He took up the garments one by one and set his faculties to work to read signs on them. Finally he rolled them up into a bundle and took them with him. The motor cycle he had to leave. He looked for its serial number, but found that it had been chiseled off.

A question filled his mind as he drove on. How was the robber traveling now? Bart put on all speed to the next little oasis of adobes and palms, and here at Golconda Wells he telephoned north and south that the robber was no longer on his motor cycle and that the previous description as to his clothes no longer applied. After leaving Golconda Wells he overtook a seed salesman that he knew, who was bowling leisurely along in his work-a-day coupe. The compartment in the back of the coupe was open and filled, as usual, with sacks of alfalfa seed, the “real genuine hairy Peruvian” which the energetic Mr. Weerts boosted endlessly up and down the valley.

Only recently Bart and his father had bought an experimental assortment of budded avocados of him. That putty-colored coupe with its sacks of alfalfa seed and the spry, slim nurseryman in his linen suit at the wheel had been a familiar sight on the highway and county roads for more than a year past. As Bart came alongside he saw that the coupe was carrying a passenger, a thick-set man in overalls slumped forward, inert, his head on his hand. Bart honked, slowed down, and both cars stopped.

“Suppose you’ve heard about the robbery, Mr. Weerts?” Bart began.

“Been hearing about it all morning,” the salesman replied. He had a keen, kidding way about him usually, but he was serious and genuinely concerned now. “Say, that’s too bad. Caught the fellow yet?”

“I was wondering,” said Bart, “if you haven’t got him there now,” and he nodded at the figure besides Weerts. “Where did you pick him up?”

“Back at Barlow’s,” said Weerts. Barlow’s was on a county road twenty miles off the highway. “They tell me he is a dare-devil broncho buster, but,” said Weerts, his lean face twisting into an ironic grin, “look what a tractor plow did to him this morning.”

He tilted up the man’s head and Bert saw that one eye was bandaged and that one forearm was in splints.

“They did what they could for him seeing Barlow has no telephone and they couldn’t get a doctor, and when I happened along, they asked would I deliver him to the hospital down at El Metropole.”

“And can’t we be getting there?” complained the man.

“Sure,” said Bart hastily. “Sorry I stopped you, but—”

“Don’t mention it,” said Weerts, starting his car.

III

Bart smiled feebly and speeded ahead. The floor of the valley widened on either side as he rode. The mountain ranges receded into the orange haze of late afternoon. Out over the vastness were flecks of silver — mesquite in the lowering sun. More and more the dunes gave way to irrigated fields. Now and again Bart Stollard felt a lesser dryness in the air, as if there had been a shower of rain, and he did not need to look to know that he was passing between long stretches of growing alfalfa. Canneries, icing plants, cotton gins, refrigerator cars on sidings, began to mingle with the clumps of greasewood. He had reached El Metropole.

He turned into the wide paved main street flanked by long blocks of covered sidewalks and shops of stucco, one and two stories high. He kept on to the plaza and got out at the town hall. He found the police station inside, and the chief of police in his office. He was a moist, sodden man in a swivel chair. His eyes regarded the intruder without moving. He listened unblinking to Bart’s story and Bart’s appeal for aid. Then he removed the loose dead cigar from between his lips and said:

“Are you Bart Stollard? Uh-huh, I’ve been hearing about you.”

“You have? Who from?”

“From the Southwest National. A guy in your bank phoned them. Guy named — Crawl.”

“Trawl.”

“All right, Trawl. He mentioned you’d be rampaging down here, telling us how to catch the robber.”

“Not at all,” said Bart, “I’m asking for help.”

“Yeah, but the Trawl gink warned us we wasn’t to take you as any way representing the bank, wherefore you’ll kindly bear in mind that thief catching is my business and I would like to attend to it myself.”

Bart departed. So that was what Mr. Trawl had done for him. Mr. Trawl did not want the robber caught. He could not afford to have his charges proved false.

At the Hotel Metropole across the way in the privacy of the room assigned him, Bart called up his home over long distance.

“Oh, Bart — your father!”

It was his mother’s voice.

“He needs you, Bart. People are saying things. The bank must have cash or it can’t open in the morning. Mr. Trawl telephoned to the Southwest National for money and they refused. Things are serious and your father — oh, Bart, it would kill him!”

“Mother, you don’t mean—”

“Yes, Bart, I do. I’m afraid — I’m afraid he will be arrested if — if nothing worse.”

Bart Stollard was white to the lips, saying what he could as his mother hung up the receiver.

He sat down, but he couldn’t think. He got up. He went out and drove around in the twilight. He passed an empty sand truck, and recognized the driver. Bart had passed him during the afternoon after leaving Weerts and the thick-set man. His truck was empty now. He had dumped his load and was going home for the night.

The sand bunkers were here in El Metropole. Bart remembered shaking sand from the garments he had found under the culvert, and it was not entirely the yellow sand of the dunes. Part of it was bluish-black, like black loam, very fine. It was a rare sand, and came only from the Witheral pits north of Nopal. It had one peculiarity. It adhered tightly when wet and kept its form, so that it was in demand by foundries for making molds. Bart remembered also that there were grains of it embedded in the grease-caked hubs of the motorcycle under the culvert. His thoughts were racing now. He drove to the railroad, to the sand bunkers from which the molding sand was shipped to San Diego and Los Angeles. The man in charge was leaving for the day — a red-headed man cursing under his breath.

“Trouble?” Bart inquired.

“It’s that dumb buzzard that just pulled out,” grumbled the red-headed man. “If his truck body leaks, why don’t he get it mended ’stead of patching it with junk? What do you reckon I just got through snaking out of the bunker?”

“Was it a box?”

The red-headed man regarded Bart with respect.

“They was boards, with the nails still in them! Might have been a box at that, only it busted when he dumped it along with the sand.” Evidently the man believed Bart belonged to his company. “I wouldn’t say nothing to keep you from firing him, boss. He’s a mean buzzard.”

“I can’t promise,” Bart told him, “but I’m beginning to think that he may be relieved of his job for quite a long spell. Now show me those planks.”

The man showed him the planks. Some were five feet long, others four feet. They would have made a large packing case about three feet high, except that the boards for one side were missing.

“You are sure you got them all out?” Bart asked.

“Every last one. I tromped around in that sand until I got them all.”

“Good work,” said Bart. “Now if you want to get rid of that driver, you keep your mouth shut.”

“Trust me, boss, I’m saying nothing at all.”

Bart drove back into town and put up his car in the hotel garage. “A man can’t just disappear,” he was saying to himself. A packing case five by four by three under a load of sand would hide a man and a motorcycle. Let down the tail gate of the truck, and if the box were there, its open side facing out, the robber could climb into the box and there would still be room for the driver to stow the motorcycle in after him. Then close the end gate and back the truck, and who would guess that the fleeing bandit was hidden under tons of sand in a truck that he had overtaken and passed? It was pretty shrewd stuff.

Disconsolate at the thought of trying to outsmart such an adversary, Bart went on, reconstructing the rest of it. At the first culvert where there were no observers the robber had left the truck, taking the motorcycle with him under the culvert where he had changed his outer clothes. There would be a second confederate — one in a car who had whisked him away. The approach of other cars may have prevented the truck driver from ridding himself of the box as well. Nevertheless the robber had vanished more completely than ever. Bart gloomily returned to the hotel, after putting up his car in the hotel garage next door.

At the cigar stand in the lobby, Weerts, the seed salesman, was buying cigarettes. He looked cool and slim in fresh linens after coming in and scrubbing off his day’s journeying among the desert ranchers. He looked fit and humorously content as his small keen eyes regarded Bart from under the snap brim of his crisp white Panama. He waved a hand.

“Smoke?”

“Thanks. Haven’t had supper yet.”

“Me neither. Got your robber yet?”

“No. Guess he’s gone for good.”

“Say, that’s too bad.” Weerts pulled a bill from his billfold and tossed it on the showcase for his cigarettes.

The girl behind the counter picked up the bill and a grain of sand dropped from it upon the plate glass. Bart stared.

“Yes, yes, certainly too bad,” he agreed hastily with Weerts. “Guess I’d better go up and wash.”

He left Weerts. He could not be mistaken. The grain of sand had dropped from Weerts’s bill upon the show case. It was fine and black, with a dark bluish gleam. It was like no sand in all the valley except that which came from the Witheral pit above Nopal. How had it got into Weerts’s billfold? Though a man might change his clothes, and change them yet again, he would not change his billfold. Was it, Weerts who had lain concealed in the box in the truck? Grains of sand so fine would sift through the cracks in the box. One grain told the story. Was it enough? Could he ask the police to arrest a respectable and well known man because he had seen a grain of sand on a show case?

No, officers of the law would investigate first. They would trace the motorcycle back to its former owner. They would shadow or question the truck driver. Bart couldn’t wait.

He recalled seeing Weerts’s coupe in the hotel garage. Weerts had strolled into the dining room. Bart glanced in and saw him at a table facing the door. He himself continued down the lobby to the street entrance.

IV

In the garage, which was large and dimly lighted, he told the attendant that he wished to get something out of his car, and went direct to Weerts’s coupe where it was parked behind other cars against the rear wall. He hoped for time to do what he had come to do. Using his pocket knife he slashed the binder twine with which the bags of alfalfa seed in the rear compartment of the car were sewed. He thrust his arm to the shoulder into the seed of one sack. His fingers touched bottom. He tried a second sack, a third, and in the third his fingers came on a woolen softness. He pulled out a heavy sweater, a sprinkling of seed coming with it. He reached in again, and brought forth a pair of golfing knickerbockers and a second sweater.

“Small wonder the robber was swimming in perspiration,” thought Bart.

He held up each garment in turn, and noticed that each sweater was torn in the back, each in the same place. Then the door of Weerts’s coupe opened and a man half stumbled out, evidently just aroused from a nap, but he rushed at Bart Stollard. Bart recognized him as the thick-set man he had seen in Weerts’s coupe, though no patch covered his eye and neither arm was in a sling. He was able-bodied in every particular. Bart struck him as he came on. He slumped, at the same time yelling:

“Weerts... Weerts!”

The garage attendant ran to them.

“Get Weerts! Get Weerts!”

Bart did some quick thinking. Had Weerts picked up this man at the culvert, or had he picked Weerts up? He could drive, all right. The bandages were only a blind. He was thick-set, like the robber — but no, that meant nothing. He had no club foot. Neither had Weerts. That required thought. But Weerts came. The thick-set man had lapsed into the deep shadows. Weerts turned to the garage man.

“Jerry, ask the hotel manager to step here. We’ll see, Mr. Stollard, how far a man can go prying into another’s private and personal effects.”

Bart waited. It gave him more time to think. The hotel manager appeared, looking very serious. Weerts said:

“Mr. Monroe, this young man is the teller of the bank at Nopal that was robbed this morning. It seems to have turned his head. Look what he has been doing, rummaging through my alfalfa seed.”

The hotel manager was aghast. That a guest in his establishment should violate the privacy, the property, of a fellow guest!

“Jerry,” snapped the manager, “phone the chief of police. No. Mr. Weerts, I can’t let this pass. Furthermore, the chief asked to be notified should this man get officious. You’ll not stir, sir!”

“Not an inch,” Bart agreed.

The police chief came. He eyed Bart with a dull cold look of gratified malice.

“Snooping, eh? Huh, I thought so.”

That put Bart on the defensive, and Weerts had maneuvered it. Keen and resourceful wits were against him, and he counted his own as nothing. He was slow and plodding. His way was method — details welded one by one until they were a ponderous machine, like a steam roller. One detail was the thick-set man. Weerts had not seen him yet. Bart pushed him into the light. Weerts was quick.

“Look here,” he said angrily to the thick-set man, “I thought I left you at the hospital.”

The man looked foolish. Weerts gave him no time to reply.

“So you weren’t hurt at all, eh? Just a trick of Barlow’s to get me to give you a lift to town.”

Bart spoke: “He was here guarding your car, Mr. Weerts.”

Weerts parried that, too. “The bum picks out my car to sleep in. What would he guard? My old clothes, maybe?”

“Oh,” said Bart, “are these your clothes?”

For a split second Weerts did not reply. Then he said:

“Of course. I wear them when I have to demonstrate tree planting for customers.”

“Two sweaters at a time, Mr. Weerts?”

“They’re not too many in cold weather.”

“You wouldn’t wear them both on a day like this then?”

“That’s a bonehead question. Certainly not.”

Bart turned to the chief of police.

“Mr. Weerts robbed our bank at Nopal this morning. I’m asking you to arrest him.”

“What?” The chief was disgusted. “Look here, we all know Mr. Weerts. Besides, the robber was deaf and dumb and club-footed and thick-set.”

“He wasn’t deaf,” and Bart explained why that was true.

“But he was club-footed, wasn’t he?”

“Wait,” said Bart. He went to his roadster and produced the roll of clothing that he had found under the culvert. He told briefly how he had found them and identified them as those worn by the robber. He held up the laced boots.

“There,” exclaimed the chief, pointing to the one with the raised sole, “that shows he had one leg shorter than the other.”

“It shows,” said Bart, “that one leg was made to look shorter than the other. He dipped down on his left foot, but this shoe with the raised sole is for the right foot.”

“Well, maybe so,” the chief growled, “but how does that prove anything on Mr. Weerts?”

Weerts smiled. “Yeah, on a slim feller like me, Bart?”

“Pad yourself with these sweaters and the knickerbockers and you wouldn’t look so slim, Mr. Weerts.”

Weerts sighed, shook his head pityingly.

“You’re a bigger dub than I am, Gunga Din.”

“Yes, and I’m going to take him along,” exploded the chief. “He’s daft. He might get dangerous.”

At once Weerts became serious. “No,” he said, “I want this thing cleared up. I can’t afford to have even a crazy man going around saying I robbed a bank. Besides, I’m sorry for him. I’ll do anything I can to help get this bug out of his head.”

In spite of himself, Bart was shaken. He had to steady himself, remembering the grain of sand — that grain of sand on which he had built so tremendous an edifice.

“Very well,” he said to Weerts, “take off your coat.”

“Sure, I’m perfectly willing to be searched.”

“Now your shirt. The undershirt, too.”

Weerts was puzzled. “You don’t think I’m hiding loot under this gauze undershirt, do you?”

“I want it off. And if there isn’t a scratch over your left shoulder blade, then I’m mistaken, and I’m probably all wrong.”

Weerts complied. It could be seen that he sincerely believed now that he was humoring a crazy man. He stood before them, stripped to the waist, and on his back, over the left shoulder blade, they saw the thin red line of a scratch that had broken the skin. It was so slight that Weerts himself evidently did not know that it was there. The chief gaped, oozing moisture. They all stared at Bart Stollard. They might have been convinced in witchcraft. Bart picked up the two heavy sweaters he had found in Weerts’s car and handed them to Weerts.

“Put them on.”

Weerts hesitated, and put them on.

“Now,” said Bart to the chief, “tell me if the snag in each of the sweaters corresponds to the scratch in his flesh.”

The chief prodded through the two holes with his fat forefinger, rubbing the tip of the finger along the skin.

“The scratch is right here,” he announced.

“Then,” said Bart, “he was a liar when he said he hadn’t worn them today.”

Weerts scarcely flinched.

“I remember now,” he said, “that I did have them on this afternoon. I had to get under my car and I didn’t want to ruin my clothes. I don’t remember getting the scratch. Maybe a sharp rock in the road did it.”

Bart nodded. He was Method, moving ponderously. From the roll of clothing he had found under the culvert, he shook out the faded chambray shirt. Weerts’s eyes grew steady and cold at sight of it.

“Put this on over the sweaters, Mr. Weerts.”

Weerts floored the chief of police with a blow of his fist and dashed for the street. Bart was expecting something of the kind. He drew his pistol and fired in the air. “Stop!” he shouted. Weerts swerved from his clear but long path to the door and darted behind a car. Bart went to where he was and brought him back.

“Now put it on,” he said.

The chief of police was up and sputtering. “Why all this fuss over putting on a shirt?”

Forcibly they put the robber’s faded shirt on Weerts. Bart pointed to a torn place in the shirt over the left shoulder blade. He put his finger through the hole and it went through the hole in each of the sweaters beneath. Drawing apart the edge of the three gaps, he bared the white skin. The fine red line of the scratch appeared before their eyes.

“For the love of fish!” breathed the chief. “But how did he get the scratch?”

Bart told him.

“On a nail. The nail was in a box. The box was in a truck under a load of sand. The robber was hiding in the box. He was crowded in there with his motorcycle. He pushed back against the side of the box, against a protruding nail.”

The chief’s expression grew shrewd and crafty.

“Gosh all rip, then that makes Mr. Weerts the robber.”

“Imbecile!” muttered Weerts.

“What are you doing now, Mr. Stollard?” asked the chief.

Bart was pouring Mr. Weerts’s alfalfa seed out upon the garage floor. Sack after sack from the coupe he emptied upon the floor. His haste was eager and desperate. What use to catch the thief if—

Then with the seed from one sack came an old brief case. The brief case was heavy and distended. Bart opened it, turned it upside down, and let the contents shower upon the floor. Packets of bills were the contents. He stooped and began counting them, slowly, methodically. He looked up, and he was smiling happily.

“Eleven thousand six hundred and eighty-five dollars,” he announced.