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The answer seemed to come in the questioning voice of the coroner. "Your name, please?" "Laura Rodaine. Least, that's the name I go by. My real maiden name is Laura Masterson, and " "Rodaine will be sufficient. Your age?" "I think it's sixty-four. If I had my book I could tell. "Your book?" "Yes, I keep everything in a book. But it is n't here. I could n't bring it."
"'E could n't do much else, Boy. Rodaine was stronger in some ways then than he is now. That was in different days. That was in times when Squint Rodaine could 'ave gotten a 'undred men together quicker 'n a cat's wink and lynched a man without 'im 'aving a trial or anything. And if I 'd been your father, I 'd 'ave done the same as 'e did.
Out 'e went, muttering to 'imself, and I well, I went to Center City and read the papers." They chuckled together then; it was something to know that they had not only forced Squint Rodaine to show his enmity openly, but it was something more to make him the instrument of helping them with their work.
The matter of the finding of the skeleton could be handled easily, Fairchild saw, through Maurice Rodaine. One word from him to his father could change the story of Crazy Laura and make it, on the second telling, only the maundering tale of an insane, herb-gathering woman. Anita could have arranged it, and Anita might have arranged it.
Instinctively Fairchild knew that the greatest part of his mean temper was due to the strike in the Blue Poppy; instinctively also he felt that Squint Rodaine had known of the value all along, that now he was cursing himself for the failure of his schemes to obtain possession of what had appeared until only a day before to be nothing more than a disappointing, unlucky, ill-omened hole in the ground.
They were practically alone at the mouth of the mine, Fairchild with a laugh dying on his lips, Rodaine with all the hate and anger and futile malice that a human being can know typified in his scarred, hawklike features. A thin, taloned hand came upward, to double, leaving one bony, curved finger extending in emphasis of the words which streamed from the slit of a mouth: "Funny, weren't you?
Then Maurice Rodaine nodded straight toward Robert Fairchild. "The light was good, and I got a straight look at him. He was that fellow's partner a Cornishman they call Harry!" "I don't believe it!" Anita Richmond exclaimed with conviction and clutched at Fairchild's arm. "I don't believe it!" "I can't!" Robert answered. Then he turned to the accuser.
It was a paragraph leading the "personal" column of the small, amateurish sheet, announcing the engagement of Miss Anita Natalie Richmond to Mr. Maurice Rodaine, the wedding to come "probably in the late fall!" Fairchild did not show the item to Harry. There was little that it could accomplish, and besides, he felt that his comrade had enough to think about.
And I 'll bet she 's going with Maurice Rodaine! Oh! She's got a wye about'er!" "Oh, shut up!" growled Fairchild, but he grinned in schoolboy fashion as he said it. Harry poured half a can of oil upon the bearings of the chiv wheel with almost loving tenderness. "She 's got a wye about 'er!" he echoed. Fairchild suddenly frowned. "Just what do you mean? That she 's in love with Rodaine and just "
"Decidedly funny!" was the caustic rejoinder of the younger Rodaine. Fairchild laughed, to cover the air of intensity. He knew instinctively that Anita Richmond was not talking to him simply because she had sold him a ticket to a dance and because her father might have pointed him out.
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