Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/92

 "That's nonsense. We haven't been near the Reservation. What do you mean, shoot her husband? Is he dead?"

"Not dead. Very sick man."

"Any of you fellows know what they're talking about?"

But apparently nobody did. The story was circumstantial enough. The wounded Indian claimed that he had been returning from across the range with a sack of potatoes which had been given him, and that his horse had got away from him; he had shouldered his sack and was on his way back when he had been shot.

"Sure there was potatoes in that sack?" Jake asked suspiciously.

The squaw, following a word from the policeman, nodded vigorously.

"Just where was all this?"

It was when he heard where it had happened that Jake turned and called to Tom McNair, haughtily aloof under his tree. And Tom sauntered over.

"Know anything about this, Tom?"

"About what?"

"An Indian shot over on the East fork."

"If it's the Indian who killed a cow up there maybe I do. He tried to kill me too."

Jake's frown deepened.

"You God damned fool!" he said. "You got the fellow."

"Then there's one bad Indian the less," he retorted. "He'd a sack of meat over his shoulder when I saw him."

"He claims it was potatoes."

"Then he's not dead! That's bad news."

He faced the stolid policeman and the almost equally stolid squaw.

"Now get this," he said. "Go back to the Agency and tell the Superintendent that I caught Weasel Tail killing beef and I fired and missed him. And tell him that later on he did his damnedest to kill me, and I fired back. If he got his he had it coming, and more too. And now get out. Vamoose. Good night."

But the policeman did not go at once. He took Tom's name, writing it slowly and carefully in a note book while