Chapter III

14

STRANGE FISH

“Listen, if I got into any trouble, it was my own doing. You never told me to look for the fat man in the first place,” Johnny Toms said.

“Thank you, Johnny,” Paris told him. “Hadn't we better call the police?”

Johnny gripped her arm. He was moving her toward where they had left the horses. He was giving orders to Frosty and Fred.

“Go back to the house with Miss Stevens,” he told Frosty and Fred. “Paris, you call the sheriff from the house.”

Immediately, it seemed to Paris, she was riding toward the ranch houses. They rode fast, thundering through the night on the horses, as if fleeing something.

Paris had a clutching fear that the telephone wire would be cut. It wasn't. The fear, she thought as she waited to be connected with the sheriffs office, was silly.

She wondered what she would say to the sheriff. But when his office answered, words came readily.

“This is Miss Paris Stevens at the S−slash−S ranch,” she said. “Will you have the Sheriff come out immediately?”

“He left for there more'n an hour ago,” the voice said. “He should be there now.”

Paris was stunned. She couldn't think of a thing to do except hang up.

SHE looked at the telephone blankly. Fear crawled around her, crowding close. It was worse than any earlier fear. It was close to terror.

“Frosty,” she told one of the cowboys. “Frosty, you go back and find Johnny. Tell him the Sheriff was on his way out here an hour ago. I don't know how that happened. Tell Johnny to—to be careful.”

“Yes'm,” Frosty said. He sounded scared.

The other cowboy, Fred, stayed in the ranch house. He was a solid, stoical man over draft age. He sat there stolidly, and only twice did he get up to investigate suspicious sounds. The first time it was the horses in the corral, fighting again. The second time it was Johnny Toms.

Johnny was worried. Worried enough that he didn't think to talk like Tonto in the Lone Ranger.

“It's lucky you sent Frosty with word the Sheriff was coming,” he said. “That saved me some sweating.”

“What happened, Johnny?”

“You remember smelling something burning in the campfire?”

“Yes, leather or cloth or—”