"Positive. Funny, isn't it? It was the paper that gave me the lead. Sort of poetic justice his being landed by that--the paper that had the article about you in it."
She looked at him, struck with a sudden idea:
"Perhaps it was that article that made him come to see me in the beginning."
"I guess he wasn't bothering about articles just then. He'd used it to wrap the money in. It was all muddy and ragged, the lower half of the letter gone--the piece about you--got torn out by accident I guess. As I see it he happened to have the paper and when he got the sacks out of the ground, put some of 'em in it. Then when he was in the Whatcheer House he stuffed it in the hole under the floor. It was the handiest way to get rid of it."
Soon after that Crowder left, feeling that he had done a good work. The news had had the effect he had hoped it would. She was a different girl. The last glimpse of her, sitting in that same attitude with her hands clasped round her knees, showed her revitalized, alive once more, with something of the old brown and red vividness in her face.
When he had gone she remembered her letter. It was of no use now. She would have liked to recall it, but it was too late; the clock on the table marked eleven. Through the fitful sleep of her uneasy night it came back, invested by the magnifying power of dreams with a fantastic malignity; in waking moments showing as a bit of spite, dwindled to nothing before the forces gathering for Mayer's destruction.
Old Man Haley's shack stood back from a branch road that wound down from Antelope across the foothills to Pine Flat. Commercial travelers, staging it from camp to camp, could see his roof over the trees, and sometimes the driver would point to it with his whip and tell how the old man--a survival of the early days--lived there alone cultivating his vegetable patch. In the last four or five years people said he had gone "nutty," had taken to wandering down the stream beds with his pickax and pan, but he was a harmless old body and seemed able to get along. He said he had a son somewhere who sent him money now and again, and he always had enough to keep himself in groceries and tobacco, which he bought at the general store in Pine Flat. Maybe you'd see him straying along, sort o' kind and simple, with his pick over his shoulder, smilin' up at the folks in the stage.