“Nope.  Managed to put over a couple of deals that will help the boy out a little, though.  Attached your bank account and your bank stock.  I would have plastered your two automobiles, but that tender-hearted Miguel declared that was carrying a grudge too far.  By the way, where is our genial young host?”

“Horse bucked him off this morning.  He lit on a rock and ripped a furrow in his sinful young head.  So he’s sleeping off a headache.”

“Oh, is he badly hurt?” Kay cried anxiously.

“Not fatally,” Parker replied with a faintly knowing smile.  “But he’s weak and dizzy and he’s lost a lot of blood; every time he winks for the next month his head will ache, however.”

“Which horse policed him?” Bill Conway queried casually.

“The gray one—­his father’s old horse.”

“Hum-m-m!” murmured Conway and pursued the subject no further, nor did he evince the slightest interest in the answers which Parker framed glibly to meet the insistent demand for information from his wife and daughter.  The meal concluded, he excused himself and sought Pablo, of whom he demanded and received a meticulous account of the “accident” to Miguel Farrel.  For Bill Conway knew that the gray horse never bucked and that Miguel Farrel was a hard man to throw.

“Guess I’ll have to sit in at this game,” he decided, and forthwith climbed into his rattletrap automobile and returned to El Toro.

During the drive in he surrendered his mind to a contemplation of all of the aspects of the case, and arrived at the following conclusions: 

Item.  Don Nicolas Sandoval had seen the assassin walking in from the south about sunset the day previous.  If the fellow had walked all the way across country from La Questa valley he must have started about two P.M.

Item.  The Potato Baron had left the Farrel hacienda about one o’clock the same day and had, doubtless, arrived in El Toro about two o’clock.  Evidently he had communicated with the man from La Questa valley (assuming that Don Miguel’s assailant had come from there) by telephone from El Toro.

Arrived in El Toro, Bill Conway drove to the sheriff’s office.  Don Nicolas Sandoval had returned an hour previous from the Rancho Palomar and to him Conway related the events of the morning.  “Now, Nick,” he concluded, “you drift over to the telephone office and in your official capacity cast your eye over the record of long distance telephone calls yesterday afternoon and question the girl on duty.”

“Bueno!” murmured Don Nicolas and proceeded at once to the telephone office.  Ten minutes later he returned.

“Okada talked to one Kano Ugichi, of La Questa, at 2:08 yesterday afternoon,” he reported.

“Considerable water will run under the bridges before Kano Ugichi returns to the bosom of his family,” Conway murmured sympathetically.  “He’s so badly spoiled, Nick, we’ve decided to call him a total loss and not put up any headstone to his memory.  It is Farrel’s wish that the matter be forgotten by everybody concerned.”