The Essential Max Brand - 29 Westerns in One Edition. Max Brand
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7. THE FIRST CLUE
They did not refer to the incidents of that odd reception in New York until they had located a small hotel for themselves, not three blocks away. It was no cheaper, but they found a pleasant room, clean and with electric lights. It was not until they had bathed and were propped up in their beds for a good- night smoke, which cow-punchers love, that Bill Gregg asked: “And what gave you the tip, Ronicky?”
“I dunno. In my business you got to learn to watch faces, Bill. Suppose you sit in at a five-handed game of poker. One gent says everything with his face, while he’s picking up his cards. Another gent don’t say a thing, but he shows what he’s got by the way he moves in his chair, or the way he opens and shuts his hands. When you said something about our wad I seen the taxi driver blink. Right after that he got terrible friendly and said he could steer us to a friend of his that could put us up for the night pretty comfortable. Well, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. Not that I figured anything out. Just was walking on my toes, ready to jump in any direction.”
As for Bill Gregg, he brooded for a time on what he had heard, then he shook his head and sighed. “I’d be a mighty helpless kid in this here town if I didn’t have you along, Ronicky,” he said.
“Nope,” insisted Ronicky. “Long as you use another gent for a sort of guide you feel kind of helpless. But, when you step off for yourself, everything is pretty easy. You just were waiting for me to take the lead, or you’d have done just as much by yourself.”
Again Bill Gregg sighed, as he shook his head. “If this is what New York is like,” he said, “we’re in for a pretty bad time. And this is what they call a civilized town? Great guns, they need martial law and a thousand policemen to the block to keep a gent’s life and pocketbook safe in this town! First gent we meet tries to bump us off or get our wad. Don’t look like we’re going to have much luck, Ronicky.”
“We saved our hides, I guess.”
“That’s about all.”
“And we learned something.”
“Sure.”
“Then I figure it was a pretty good night.
“Another thing, Bill. I got an idea from that taxi gent. I figure that whole gang of taxi men are pretty sharp in the eye. What I mean is that we can tramp up and down along this here East River, and now and then we’ll talk to some taxi men that do most of their work from stands in them parts of the town. Maybe we can get on her trail that way. Anyways, it’s an opening.”
“Maybe,” said Bill Gregg dubiously. He reached under his pillow. “But I’m sure going to sleep with a gun under my head in this town!” With this remark he settled himself for repose and presently was snoring loudly.
Ronicky presented a brave face to the morning and at once started with Bill Gregg to tour along the East River. That first day Ronicky insisted that they simply walk over the whole ground, so as to become fairly familiar with the scale of their task. They managed to make the trip before night and returned to the hotel, footsore from the hard, hot pavements. There was something unkindly and ungenerous in those pavements, it seemed to Ronicky. He was discovering to his great amazement that the loneliness of the mountain desert is nothing at all compared to the loneliness of the Manhattan crowd.
Two very gloomy and silent cow-punchers ate their dinner that night and went to bed early. But in the morning they began the actual work of their campaign. It was an arduous labor. It meant interviewing in every district one or two storekeepers, and asking the mail carriers for “Caroline Smith,” and showing the picture to taxi drivers. These latter were the men, insisted Ronicky, who would eventually bring them to Caroline Smith. “Because, if they’ve ever drove a girl as pretty as that, they’ll remember for quite a while.”
“But half of these gents ain’t going to talk to us, even if they know,” Bill Gregg protested, after he had been gruffly refused an answer a dozen times in the first morning.
“Some of ‘em won’t talk,” admitted Ronicky, “but that’s probably because they don’t know. Take ‘em by and large, most gents like to tell everything they know, and then some!”
As a matter of fact they met with rather more help than they wanted. In spite of all their efforts to appear casual there was something too romantic in this search for a girl to remain entirely unnoticed. People whom they asked became excited and offered them a thousand suggestions. Everybody, it seemed, had, somewhere, somehow, heard of a Caroline Smith living in his own block, and every one remembered dimly having passed a girl on the street who looked exactly like Caroline Smith. But they went resolutely on, running down a thousand false clues and finding at the end of each something more ludicrous than what had gone before. Maiden ladies with many teeth and big glasses they found; and they discovered, at the ends of the trails on which they were advised to go, young women and old, ugly girls and pretty ones, but never any one who in the slightest degree resembled Caroline Smith.
In the meantime they were working back and forth, in their progress along the East River, from the slums to the better residence districts. They bought newspapers at little stationery stores and worked up chance conversations with the clerks, particularly girl clerks, whenever they could find them.
“Because women have the eye for faces,” Ronicky would say, “and, if a girl like Caroline Smith came into the shop, she’d be remembered for a while.”
But for ten days they labored without a ghost of a success. Then they noticed the taxi stands along the East Side and worked them as carefully as they could, and it was on the evening of the eleventh day of the search that they reached the first clue.
They had found a taxi drawn up before a saloon, converted into an eating place, and when they went inside they found the driver alone in the restaurant. They worked up the conversation, as they had done a hundred times before. Gregg produced the picture and began showing it to Ronicky.
“Maybe the lady’s around here,” said Ronicky, “but I’m new in this part of town.” He took the picture and turned to the taxi driver. “Maybe you’ve been around this part of town and know the folks here. Ever see this girl around?” And he passed the picture to the other.
The taxi driver bowed his head over it in a close scrutiny. When he looked up his face was a blank.
“I don’t know. Lemme see. I think I seen a girl like her the other day, waiting for the traffic to pass at Seventy-second and Broadway. Yep, she sure was a ringer for this picture.” He passed the picture back, and a moment later he finished his meal, paid his check and went sauntering through the door.
“Quick!” said Ronicky, the moment the chauffeur had disappeared. “Pay the check and come along. That fellow knows something.”
Bill Gregg, greatly excited, obeyed, and they hurried to the door of the place. They were in time to see the taxicab lurch away from the curb and go humming down the street, while the driver leaned out to the side and looked back.
“He didn’t see us,” said Ronicky confidently.
“But what did he leave for?”
“He’s gone to tell somebody, somewhere, that we’re looking for Caroline Smith. Come on!” He stepped out to the curb and stopped a passing taxi. “Follow that machine and keep a block away from it,” he ordered.
“Bootlegger?” asked the taxi driver cheerily.
“I don’t know, but just drift along behind him till he stops. Can you do that?”
“Watch me!”
And, with Ronicky and Bill Gregg installed in his machine, he started smoothly on the trail.
Straight down the cross street, under the roaring elevated tracks of Second and Third Avenues, they passed, and on First Avenue they turned and