Chapter VII

42

STRANGE FISH

Doc did some thinking about the man in cowboy boots who had given them directions in Tulsa.

“That fellow back in Tulsa,” Doc said gloomily. “We had better not forget him.”

“By Jove!” Ham said, with the Harvard accent he used when he was upset. “You mean he was a stinker?”

Doc frowned. “To gear this for our arrival the way they did, they had to know when we left Tulsa. And they had to know we were coming here. Of course they might have guessed that we would come by plane and that we would land here, because it was the logical thing to do. But to time it as they did—that wasn't luck. That was good snaky headwork.”

They were impressed. It was startling to discover, or suspect they had discovered, that they had fallen into a trap in Tulsa.

If whoever they were after—or whoever was after them, which was more like it—had the acumen to post a man in Tulsa, it was further unpleasant evidence of what they had already begun to realize. They were up against a foxy intellect. Someone who was three or four jumps ahead of them.

Monk muttered, “Wonder how many guys are mixed up in this, anyway?”

“It's not one or two, we can see that,” Ham told him gloomily.

They pushed through some more brush, and Doc said, “That must be the ranch yonder.”

The ranch was sprawled pleasantly in the Oklahoma sunlight. The buildings were neat, white. The scene looked placid. Four or five cowboys were sitting under a cottonwood tree. One was working on a tractor and the others seemed to be watching.

“Do we walk right up?” Ham asked uneasily.

Doc started to say that he would go alone, then changed his mind. He could see that Monk and Ham were getting jittery. With the sort of temperaments they had, another session of hiding in the brush or in ditches while things happened would not do them any good.

When they walked up to the group under the tree, the cowboy working on the tractor stopped operations, put a foot on the tractor front wheel and said, “Hy'ah.”

“This the Stevens ranch?” Doc asked.

“That's right.”

“We want to see Paris Stevens,” Doc said.

“That would be kind of tough to do,” the cowboy said. “She and the foreman, Johnny Toms, pulled out of here this morning.”

THE cowboy was long and rusty looking and had large ears. Doc wondered if they had heard the shooting.

They should have, but they might have thought it was someone hunting. Still, they should have seen the plane come down, and granting they had a natural amount of curiosity, should have ridden over to see why the ship Chapter VII

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had landed. But they hadn't.

“They say where they were going?” Doc asked.

“Who?”

“Miss Stevens and Toms.”

“Oh, them. No, they didn't say. It was back east somewhere though. New York, maybe.”

“You sure they went to New York?”

“Nope.”

“What makes you think they did?”

“Miss Stevens lives there. Maybe she didn't go there. I don't know.”

Doc stood there. He felt foolish. Thwarted. As if he had reached for something, and found it wasn't there. The feeling, together with the embarrassing conviction that he had been made a sucker of from the time things started happening in New York, made him self−conscious. He couldn't think of anything more to say.

“Hot day,” he remarked.

“Yep.”

“Something wrong with the tractor?”

“Hydraulic gadget is out of whack. I just fixed it, I hope.”

Another self−conscious silence.

“Any drinking water around?” Doc asked.

“Sure. Try the windmill over there. It's cooler.”

Doc went over to the windmill. Monk and Ham followed him. None of the cowboys came along.

“They weren't too full of information,” Monk said in a low voice. “What do we do now?”

“The first thing the Sheriff will do,” Doc surmised, “is come over here and warn the ranch hands to be on the lookout for us. So we had better get away from here.”

Ham said, “Those cowboys don't look excited. I guess they don't know anything is going on.”

“It's hard to tell,” Doc said.

They walked back the way they had come. The cowboys remained under the tree. The one who had been working on the tractor had started the engine. He was listening to it run.