Shooting For Justice by G. Tilman (top 100 novels txt) 📗

seen his face. He was a short man, dressed as a workman. He always had a feed sack over his head. It had cutouts for eyes and mouth.

He left or recited a poem several times during his robberies.

Though he wielded a full-length double-barreled shotgun, he had never fired a shot in his many robberies. He preyed almost always on Wells Fargo stages. His modus operandi was to break off the green treasure box’s padlocks.

Sarah scanned the road and left and right as she rode. She slipped the new twenty gauge from its holster hanging off Kate’s saddle horn. This would be the arrest of a lifetime, she thought. Sarah was unaware Pope had turned his back on the opportunity to make the greatest arrest in American history only a week ago. He would never tell her. She did not have a need to know.

Soon, she came to a place with rifle barrels behind a tree and several bushes. She knew they were a ruse, but dismounted Kate and circled around the clump with two barrels and approached, shotgun at the ready.

As she thought, they were fakes. Props used to scare victims into thinking they were surrounded. Sarah circled the area and began her search for clues and evidence.

There was every possibility the famous robber and his shotgun were still in the immediate area. She did not know what transportation he had or how badly he was wounded. Or, if his wound was just a hope on the part of the Wells Fargo driver or jehu. She wondered why it was he instead of the shotgun messenger. He may just want to be known as the man who shot Black Bart. One of the detectives needed to ask him why he shot the robber.

It took Sarah a while to clear the area and feel confident Black Bart was nowhere close. She put her shotgun in the holster since the description was more apt than scabbard.

Removing her notebook, she began her crime scene sketch. She wrote the location as closely as she could in the upper right corner and drew the road and, using her compass, included the direction. Sarah left the box undrawn until she searched the area. She did not want evidence to fall outside the box she drew around the main scene. She put an X where it appeared the stage had stopped. A clue was one, ten-gauge empty shotgun shell. The shotgun messengers always reloaded as soon as possible after firing, having only two rounds before resorting to less effective revolvers.

She made a note to ask if the jehu had handed the shotgun back to the shotgun messenger who had reloaded.

Sarah placed the empty shell in a small evidence sack and continued her search. The treasure box was not there. Apparently, either the driver took it onwards with the stage to Napa or the robber took it. There were no other horse tracks in the area. Black Bart had never been identified with using a horse to reach or leave a robbery. Sarah deduced the driver took the treasure box on the stage. Had Black Bart actually gotten any treasure, or valuables carried in the treasure box? Or had he been shot, and the robbery interrupted?

She did find a broken padlock. The lock answered her question. She noted its position beside the road on her sketch and put it into an evidence sack also.

Sarah circled in a fifty-foot radius of the stage’s position. She found footprints. The shape of the toe and heel suggested shoes to her rather than boots. They were not deep, even in a patch of soft loam. She noted the man was not very large, which also fit the profile for Black Bart. She tried to track him but lost the trail after a hundred feet into the scrub. Where were the two Popes when you needed them?

At the point where she lost the footprints, she found what would prove the greatest clue of all. A handkerchief with specs of blood on it. It was still twisted as if it had been bound around something. She surmised it had been used as a bandage wrapped around a hand, wrist or ankle.

She marked the find and used a rock to hold it in place until Hume arrived. Sarah noticed a laundry tag safety-pinned to one corner. This one clue, she knew, was how they would find and end the stage robbing career of Black Bart, whoever he was.

Sarah could hardly contain her excitement.

Using the paced off distance from the find to the stage, she drew a line between the two. Sarah then scribed the outer boundaries of the box for her sketch. She carefully paced the length and width and included those measurements by the lines of the boundary.

She dated and signed the sketch and ate something while waiting for the two senior detectives.

They arrived in a rented carriage and she reviewed her sketch and walked them around the crime scene. They stopped and examined the handkerchief and its laundry mark. Hume told her it was important. Morse offered to track it down but asked for Sarah and perhaps five other detectives to assist. If Black Bart was based in San Francisco like both Hume and Morse thought, they had to visit each of hundreds of laundries until the owner of the small rectangle of cotton was found.

Hume concurred. They stopped by the cabin on the way back to the ferry. Sarah told Millie what was going on. Millie told Sarah, Israel was on the way back from an errand and would unsaddle, rub down and feed Kate.

Sarah packed several days’ worth of clothes in a valise and left with the very excited Hume and Morse in the carriage.

“I think, after all these years, we’ve got him, Jim!” Morse exclaimed.

“I do, too. Thank heavens you walked a wide perimeter, Sarah,” Hume said.

“I did, but actually found the handkerchief at the point where I lost his trail while tracking him. It was frustrating losing his trail.