Wompler smiled his heatless smile. "Proud to have you. If you brought some coffee."
Thunder broke over their heads and rain fell in shimmering sheets. "Plenty of coffee," the detective told them. "Dry salt meat, and cornmeal, too. Now, if somebody thought to bring in some firewood before the rain started…"
Wompler groaned. Somehow the discomfort of their cold, damp cave was made even less appealing, knowing that hot trail fare was there within easy reach. If they could only have built a fire.
Torgason turned to Gault, and Gault met the detective's chilly stare with one of his own. "Seems like you didn't have much trouble finding us."
"Not much," Torgason rested his rifle on his saddle. "I've been watchin' you since we split up at the Garnett place."
"Would you mind tellin' us what makes us so interestin'?"
Torgason looked as if he might smile, but he didn't. "Wompler here's a suspected cattle rustler—that's always interestin' to a stock detective. And there's some things about you, too, Gault. A stranger lands in New Boston on the day Wolf Garnett's buried, bustin' full of questions that's none of his business. On top of everything else, by your own word, you killed a county official."
"A posseman."
"A paid official. As legal, according to county law, as the sheriff hisself."
"I didn't know you'd took to readin' law," Wompler said dryly.
Torgason ignored him. "You killed him," he said to Gault. "And the sheriff let you go. I find that interestin'."
Gault felt anger rising in his throat, but he choked it down. The old line rider had said that Torgason could help him, and he didn't want to fight with anyone who might be able to do that. Harry Wompler regarded the two with a loose smile and seemed totally undisturbed. "Don't mind Torgason," he said lazily. "He likes to get folks riled. In the hopes they'll spout somethin' he can hang them with later."
More thunder rumbled in the darkness. Beyond the shelf the rain was driving down like silver spikes.
Wompler yawned. "If you boys can stand the loss of my company, I think I'll catch myself some sleep." He untied his roll and threw it on the ground next to the riverbank.
Gault and the detective sat with their backs to the rock, staring out at the storm. "How'd you come to get tied up with Wompler?" Torgason asked when the silence became uncomfortable.
"Same way I heard about you. Yorty told me about him."
"That old man," Torgason said coldly, "has got a big mouth."
For some time the two men crouched in uncomfortable silence. Between gusting attacks of the storm they could hear Wompler snoring. When Torgason finally decided to speak, his tone was controlled and thoughtful. "I've been thinkin'. It must of been on a night like this that you talked to Wirt Sewell."
"Just about. But darker."
"And again when you heard what you thought was a shot."
"That was a dream—about the storm, anyway." Gault studied him cautiously. "Why do you ask?"
"Like Wompler said, it's my job to be suspicious."
For some time they crouched silently, watching the storm. Then Torgason said abruptly, "Tell me again about Colly Fay. The things you found in his saddle pocket."
Gault had already gone over this part of the story, but apparently Torgason was still unsatisfied. Patiently, Gault collected his thoughts and prepared to cover the ground again. "There was the ring, the one I gave to my wife. I told you about that." Torgason, a crouching shadow backlighted by sheet lightning, nodded. Gault went on. "There were six double-eagles, and some other coins. A roll of greenbacks wrapped in oilskin. A silver pocketknife, the kind a city dude might carry for cuttin' cigars. Woman's earrings, set with glassy sparkles. Maybe diamonds. A string of milk-colored beads that might have been pearls."
"Is that all?"
Gault drove his memory back to that bitter moment when he had opened the little buckskin pouch and found the ring. "No, there was a watch."
The big-shouldered shadow cocked its head thoughtfully. "What about the watch?"
Gault could see it lying there on the dirty flannel shirt, surrounded by Colly's other items of loot. "It was gold—yellow gold—stem-wound, with a gold face cover. There was a heavy gold chain that must of cost the owner plenty, if it was real gold. There was some writing—engraving—on the face cover."
Torgason's shadow came almost rigidly erect. "What did it say?"
"It was foreign writin' of some kind; I couldn't read it." He thought for a moment. "Somethin' about a fort."
Wompler, who had been snoring only a moment before, sat up on his blanket and said, "Fortes fortuna juvat."
And Torgason said—with something like a drawn-out sigh—"General Mallard Springfield Heath." He lurched to his feet and stared out at the night. The rain was still coming down. "What," he asked in a curiously flat tone, "did the sheriff say when he saw that watch?"
"Olsen?" Gault tried to think back to the moment when he had dumped the parcel on the sheriff's table. "Nothin' special that I recollect. He just looked at it and wanted to know where I got it. Look here," he said, irritated by the air of mystery that had suddenly built up inside the cave, "what's this about forts and generals? What do they have to do with Colly Fay and the sheriff?"
"Not forts," Wompler drawled with the dry superiority of the half-educated. "Fortes fortuna juvat. 'Fortune favors the brave.' The motto of General Heath's cavalry regiment, when he was a colonel. Before he was promoted to general and got hisself killed."
Torgason turned to Gault and asked sharply. "You never heard of General Mallard Heath?"
Gault glanced from one dark, tense figure to the other. "No, I never heard of him. I guess maybe it's time I did."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Torgason had turned back to the storm and was glaring out at the slanting rain. Harry Wompler undertook to enlighten Gault on the life and death of General Mallard Springfield Heath. "The late General Mallard Springfield Heath," he said, with his slack smile.
Heath was a Texas man, born and raised in the brush country along the Nueces, although few Texans would admit to him since the war. Mallard Heath was one of those rare patriots—or traitors, depending on who was telling it —who abandoned his cow-hunting operations in Texas, ignoring the call of Hood and other Southerners, to throw in his lot with the Yankees.
It had been a wise and profitable decision—up to a point. He rose from the ranks and at the end of the war wore the eagle of a Union colonel on his shoulders. Wisely, he declined to return to Texas, except in line of duty and always in uniform. It was in the performance of such duty, in 1878, that General Heath personally oversaw the shipment of $200,000 in gold bullion from Fort Belknap, Texas, to Camp Supply, in the Indian Territory. And it was somewhere between these two points, in the foothills of the Wichitas, that the escort was ambushed, officers and troopers killed to a man, the gold vanished…
"Without a trace," Wompler finished in some excitement. "There's been Army men, and U.D. deputies, and all kinds of sharpshooters and highbinders lookin' for that gold. Never a trace. Mexican and U.S. troops have been watchin' the Bravo for eight years. Same up north on the Canadian line. Never a clue." He chuckled dryly. "Then one day a Territory cowman named Gault walks into Olsen's office and turns over old Fortes fortuna juvat's pocketwatch. And what does the sheriff do when he sees that watch? He don't do nothin'. Torgason, that's somethin' I find interestin'."