* * *
They got me on my feet, and gathered up my clothes, and got me tucked and buttoned. Putting my boots on my wobbly feet was too much trouble, so Casey carried them. Or maybe she was trying to punish me by making me walk barefoot over to the hotel.
We sat around a little table in the hotel office, me with a big cup of coffee in front of me while they discussed what to do. The pie was also in front of me and I stared at it wondering how it had led me into trouble, and as the coffee hit me, I began to remember.
I had gone off to get that pie...no, start earlier. Jewel robbery. A big diamond on a gold stick pin. It was valuable, but it was also of great sentimental value to the foreign fellow who owned it. So he offered a reward of two hundred dollars for its return. We, along with Deputy Tilly—who isn’t the brightest guy, but steady and we worked okay with him—tracked the thief, caught him, and got back the pin, but we were in a town with no jail and no sheriff. So we locked the thief in a room in the hotel, and locked the diamond up in a little strong box in the hotel office, and we set to guarding it.
“Did he get away?” I asked, meaning the thief.
“No,” said Casey. “It was his partners.”
“What partners?”
Casey just glared at me, and I remembered us speculating that the thief must have had a fancy woman as a partner, because the foreign fellow had been embarrassed, and reluctant to say how the thief had got the pin away from him. And now it looked like the same thing had happened to me, only I couldn’t remember enough to be embarrassed about it.
I was glad I was too groggy to talk much yet. Casey and Deputy Tilly ignored me, and talked about which way the ladies had most likely gone, and how to catch them. I set about trying to remember....