“You’d better not say that to him, right now,” advised the scout, speaking to Shepard, “but give it to him hard, that he is making a fool of himself. Tell him it shows he must be in with the blackleg gang that has been running the robbery-and-murder mill round here lately, and that he ought to know what the end will be for the members of that gang.”
The saloon keeper was in his usual place, wiping off the sloppy bar with a damp cloth. He looked white-faced and worried.
The sheriff delivered Buffalo Bill’s message.
Gopher Gabe heard it through without apparent emotion, but a bit of color came into his fat cheeks, and his ratlike eyes glittered.
“You tell Cody for me, that he is an a-number-one fool,” was his answer. “Does he take me for an idiot?”
“You don’t know a thing about it?” Shepard asked.
“Certainly I don’t. I’d be a candidate for a lunatic asylum, wouldn’t I, if I done a thing like that?” He crushed the damp cloth in his thick fingers, and looked at Shepard. “Cody has got so excited over his failure to do anything, that he has gone to seein’ visions. Now, there ain’t no band of highwaymen makin’ their headquarters in this town; and you, as sheriff, ought to know that. There’s been hold-ups and robberies; but they’ve been done by individuals. Cody’s like a blind snake in August--scared at every sound he hears, and strikin’ out at everything.”
Matt Shepard was about convinced that this was the truth.
“Of course, he’s naturally he’t up by this disappearance of his pard,” he said, almost apologetically.
“Maybe the Dutchman is on a drunk, and layin’ out somewhere,” Gopher Gabe suggested.
“As for that woman, the place to find out about her is at the Casino; if the manager of the show can’t tell you anything about her, I can’t.”
“About this Fool of Folly Mountain?” said Shepard, coming back to what to him was a subject of mysterious interest. “They tell me he’s been buckin’ the tiger heavy of late, in your rooms back there.”
“Well, he says he is gittin’ a lot of gold out of that wuthless dirt in what he calls his mine; and if he wants to drop it here with me, I ain’t goin’ to make a kick, am I?”
“And they say he’s gittin’ thicker’n fleas with some of the suspected men about town?”