The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion by Loren D. Estleman Page B

submitted to a search. Instinctively, he felt Fletcher’s list contained the answer to the mystery that troubled him, keeping him awake even though he’d become inured to the bedbugs’ torment and spoiling whatever appetite he’d developed for watery dumplings and chunks of undercooked chicken floating in curdled gravy. His quest for the solution wore the paper to pieces and continued to elude him long after he’d committed every item to memory: four large trunks; one army dispatch case; two train cases; six satchels, various sizes; one pr. duelling pistols; one Colt’s revolver, .45 caliber; four fence foils; one bicycle; many, many items of clothing, each detailed within the limits of a frontier lawman’s knowledge of such things; and etcetera.
    Any one of the satchels could have been used to carry away the money from those robberies where satchels were reported. The company seemed to prefer oilcloth sacks, but there was no mention of one on Fletcher’s list. Even if there had been, it didn’t explain just how they’d gotten the notes and gold and silver out of town. Whatever plan they used, it would be in place as well in the communities where they hadn’t been searched; they could never be sure they wouldn’t, and this was one gang that took no unnecessarychances. They might have buried it, but that would mean returning to the scenes of all their robberies, braving the very risk they’d taken careful steps to avoid the first time. This wasn’t a bunch of guerrillas, shooting up the town and hollering and riding hell-for-leather into open country, saddle pouches stuffed with cash. The means to retrieve the spoils had to be as clever as the means they’d used to acquire them in the first place. For the first time in his career, Philip Rittenhouse was—well,
baffled
, as the sensational press often said of the police back East. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and of late he’d become enough of a connoisseur to assign it a rare vintage.
    Pondering the problem again after his interview with the Wells, Fargo manager in Sioux Falls, he stopped to buy a copy of the
Deseret News
in a mercantile that carried several territorial newspapers. The stacked headlines had caught his eye:
    DOUBLE OUTRAGE AT THE OVERLAND
    FREIGHT OFFICE STRUCK TWICE IN A MATTER OF HOURS
    SECOND BAND FORCED TO LEAVE EMPTY-HANDED
    REIGN OF TERROR FOLLOWS
    PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF MANAGER OBERLIN
    Sipping weak coffee—it might have been strong tea—in the window of a restaurant looking out on Main Street, Rittenhouse chuckled over the account of the hapless second gang’s reaction upon finding they’d been outflanked by a rival. He strongly suspected they were Jack Brixton’s Ace-in-the-Hole marauders. Salt Lake City was a plausible ride from Denver, where they were known to patronize Nell Dugan’s Wood Palace; much good that did, with Nell’s lips sealed as tight as her corset. He recognized Breed’s description.
    That was the old man’s headache, with his obsession for protecting railroads, a frequent Brixton target. But he’d wire the office. There was no telling if anyone was reading the farther-flung papers in Rittenhouse’s absence, and in any case Pinkerton wasn’t likely to pay much attention to what happened at Overland. He’d written off stage companies as a vanishing source of income.
    Turning the page, the detective was excited, but not much surprised, to read half a column about the presentation by the Prairie Rose Repertory Company of
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
at the Salt Lake Theater.
    He lifted his gaze across the street to rest his eyes from the dense print; at this rate he would soon need spectacles to read. He watched a dusty fellow in range attire lead his equally dusty mount up to a community trough, watched it plunge its muzzle into the water and suck.
    Rittenhouse thought of his memorandum book then, and the notes