"Fifteen thousand they claim is what the fellers got. And one of your
men that runs the camera was keeping up a bluff of taking a pitcher of
it all the time--that's why they got away with it. Nobody suspicioned
it was anything more'n moving-pitcher acting till they found the cashier
and brought him toy along about one o'clock. It was that Chavez feller
that you had working for yuh, and Luis Rojas that done it--them and a
couple fellers stalling outside with the camera."

"I wonder," hazarded Pete Lowry, who had come down and joined the group,
"if that wasn't Bill Holmes with the camera? He was a lot more friendly
with Ramon than he tried to let on."

"The point is," Luck broke in, "that they took advantage of my holdup
scene to pull off the robbery. I can see how the cashier would fall
for a retake like that, especially since he don't know much about
picture-making. Gather up the props, boys, and let's go home. I'm going
to get the rights of this thing."

"You've got it now," the sheriff informed him huffily. "Think I been
loading you up with hot air? I was sent out to round you up--"

"Forget all that!" snapped luck. "I don't know as I enjoy having you
fellows jump at the notion I'm a bank-robber--or that if I had robbed a
bank I would have come right back here and gone to work. What kind of
a simp do you think I am, for gosh sake? Can you see where anyone but a
lunatic would go like that in broad daylight and pull off a robbery
as raw as that one must have been, and not even make an attempt at a
gateway? I'll gamble Applehead, here, wouldn't have fallen for a play as
coarse as that was if he was sheriff yet. He'd have seen right away that
the camera part was just the coarsest kind of a blind.

"My Lord! Think of grown men--officers of the law at that--being
simple-minded enough to come fogging out here to me, instead of getting
on the trail of the men that were seen on the spot! You say they came in
a machine to the bank and you never so much as tried to trace it, or to
get the license number even, I'll bet a month's salary you didn't! It
was a moving-picture stall, and so you come blundering out here to the
only picture company in the country, thinking, by gravy, that it was
all straight goods--oh, can you beat that for a boob?" He shook back his
heavy mane of gray hair and turned to his boys disgustedly.

"Pete and Tommy, you can drive the wagon back all right, can't you?
We'll go on ahead and see what there is