Mr. Ephraim Watts, in spite of all confusion, clad as carefully as upon
the preceding day, deliberately climbed the fence and stood by the lawyer
and made a single steady gesture with his hand. He was listened to at
once, as his respect for the law was less notorious than his irreverence
for it, and he had been known in Carlow as a customarily reckless man.
They wanted illegal and desperate advice, and quieted down to hear it. He
spoke in his professionally calm voice.
"Gentlemen, it seems to me that Mr. Smith and Mr. Ribshaw" (nodding to the
man with the rawhide whip) "are both right. What good are we doing here?
What we want to know is what's happened to Mr. Harkless. It looks just now
like the shell-men might have done it. Let's find out what they done.
Scatter and hunt for him. 'Soon as anything is known for certain,
Hibbard's mill whistle will blow three times. Keep on looking till it
does. Then" he finished, with a barely perceptible scornful smile at the
attorney, "then we can decide on what had ought to be done."
Six-Cross-Roads lay dark and steaming in the sun that morning. The forge
was silent, the saloon locked up, the roadway deserted, even by the pigs.
The broken old buggy stood rotting in the mud without a single lean,
little old man or woman--such were the children of the Cross-Roads--to
play about it. The fields were empty, and the rag-stuffed windows blank,
under the baleful glance of the horsemen who galloped by at intervals,
muttering curses, not always confining themselves to muttering them. Once,
when the deputy sheriff rode through alone, a tattered black hound, more
wolf than dog, half-emerged, growling, from beneath one of the tumble-down
barns, and was jerked back into the darkness by his tail, with a snarl
fiercer than his own, while a gun-barrel shone for a second as it swung
for a stroke on the brute's head. The hound did not yelp or whine when the
blow fell. He shut his eyes twice, and slunk sullenly back to his place.
The shanties might have received a volley or two from some of the mounted
bands, exasperated by futile searching, had not the escape of Homer's
prisoners made the guilt of the Cross-Roads appear doubtful in the minds
of many. As the morning waned, the advocates of the theory that the
gamblers had made away with Harkless grew in number. There came a telegram
from the Rouen chief of police that he had a clew to their whereabouts; he
thought they had succeeded in reaching Rouen, and it began to be generally
believed that they had escaped by the one-o'clock freight, which had
stopped to take on some empty cars at a side-track a mile northwest of the
town, across the fields from the Briscoe house. Toward noon a party went
out to examine the railroad embankment.