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Dent was buried, the story being told that he had committed suicide. Every one believed it: had he not lost his ranch at poker? That was the end of the business. Other affairs happened and it was forgotten. On this Saturday Martinez had persuaded Saurez to accompany him to San Mateo.

Weir's command to secure evidence had been obeyed. Only the promise to await Saurez' death, troubled Martinez, and with a convenient sophistry he decided that an agreement not to print the narrative in a book did not extend to using it in court. Weir would be delighted it was a famous coup.

Lee sent him to Pat Carrigan, who gave him a scraper and set him to work on the ditch. Toward noon the engineer encountered him moving dirt from the deepening excavation; the sight had an amusing feature. The man, Pedro Saurez, laboured in his own field building the canal at about the spot where he had warned Bryant away when surveying.

Well, then, why should not M. Charles Saurez, on his side, pay me another ten thousand for the same document, which was absolutely undistinguishable from the first? Ten thousand, instead of two hundred which he had the audacity to offer me! Seven o'clock had struck before I finally bowed my clients out of the room. Theodore had gone.

He had prepared two or three dozen depositions of events, as a husk for the real kernel. With Saurez in his office at last he telephoned the priest to call at once and unostentatiously caught on the street four other Mexicans of the better class, bringing them in. When the priest arrived he closed the door and explained his desire they should act as witnesses to Saurez' statements.

I was about to make a dignified reply when he literally threw the next words at me: "Name your price, and I will pay it!" he said. What could I do, save to raise my shoulders in token that the matter of money was one of supreme indifference to me, and my eyebrows in a manner of doubt that M. Charles Saurez had the means wherewith to repay my valuable services?

Out of all the rambling talk and vague accounts of the Dent and Weir affair Martinez was able to piece together the fragments in a clear statement. This was that Saurez had seen Weir and Dent in Vorse's saloon. After losing for a time Weir refused to continue in the poker game, although he was drunk.

She said Saurez, an old man living with his son up a little creek, would know about that, for he used to clean out Vorse's bar-room in those days." Steele Weir grasped Martinez's shoulder in a quick grip. "He did! Get everything he knows out of him," he commanded. "Leave it to me, Mr. Weir. I understand how to wheedle facts out of these old fellows."

Possibly this is the time to take one." "I appreciate your kindness in speaking so, Mr. Pollock." "But I'm quite selfish; I'm seeking entertainment. And your peppery affairs promise it. Do you give me permission to take a hand?" "Gladly." "Then as a beginning I'll go to town. Saurez, you say, was the old Mexican's name?

Following the clue obtained from the woman who had worked in the elder Weir's household, he visited the old Mexican named as having been used as roustabout by Vorse in early days. This was old Saurez, whom he knew. The wrinkled old fellow seldom came to town now, spending most of the time sitting against the sunny side of his son's house on Pina Creek, twenty miles south, where he lived.