Not a car in any of the four
garages sported Silvertown cords.
At the last garage an arc light flared over the wide doorway. Starr,
feeling pretty well disgusted, was leaving when he saw a tire track
alongside the red, gasoline filling-pump. He stopped and, under cover of
lighting his cigarette, he studied the tread. Beyond all doubt the car he
wanted had stopped there for gas. But the garage man was a Mexican, so
Starr dared not risk a question or show any interest whatever in the car
whose tires left those long-lined imprints to tell of its passing. He
puffed at his cigarette until he had studied the angle of the front-wheel
track and decided that the car must have been headed south, and that it
had made a rather short turn away from the pump.
This was puzzling for a while. The driver might have been turning around
to go back the way he had come. But it was more likely that he had driven
into the cross street to the west. He strolled over that way, but the
light was too dim to trace automobile tracks in the dust of the street so
he went back to the adobe cabin and put in the next hour oiling and
cleaning and polishing a 25-35 carbine which he meant to give Helen May,
and in filling a cartridge belt with shells.
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