Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/126

 on the great structure and looked down stream past the C. & O. bridge to the glimmering sunset in the bend.

The autumnal chill was in the air, and when he stopped walking he felt the drift of the cold in the gathering night. His lips felt dry, his backbone quivered, his mind raced and romped as he realized what strange thing he had fallen upon in the little paragraph from Hickman about White Collar Dan—of all men!

Urleigh needed no stimulant now to bring out of his memory a flood tide of consequential details. White Collar Dan—the scoundrel. Shot, eh? Deserved it, if ever a man did.

"The authorities think, do they?"

Urleigh laughed.

He walked up town and stopped at the Winnower office, where he was lucky, finding Dill Wester just coming down to go out to have something to eat. Urleigh joined him, and they went around to the restaurant—the very one in which Obert Goles had vanished as though he had put on a cap of invisibility.

"Will you cover my string for me for a week or two?" Urleigh asked. "I'll post you"

"Be glad to," Webster assented.

Then Urleigh gave him a scratch list of the newspapers who wanted telegraph and those that wanted mail items, and gave him a rapid description of the