Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/108

 "I thought maybe you was."

Fred played out his hand, counted his points, gathered up his cards with deliberation, still thinking.

"One of them come over here about two years ago."

"A lord?"

"No, he wasn't no lord. I don't suppose he was any more than a low-class angel in that nobility across the water."

"A kind of a wrangler," Barrett suggested.

"I guess that's about where he'd 'a' classed. Somebody with money in the company, his daddy or aunt or somebody, got him a job, like they did you. He wore a red flannel shirt and back-east boots, black and shiny. Looked like a feller I saw actin' he was a minin' man in a play one time. I never saw a feller with so much laugh in him as that boy—he wasn't nothing but a big, applefaced kid, harmless as a pup, it seemed to me."

"What became of him, Fred?"

"They found him dead one morning down there about a mile the other side of where you shot that rustler."

"The hell you say!"

"Shot through the gizzard. They say he was a detective tryin' to find out who's gittin' the money out of this ranch. I don't know. Fellers'll say things like that."

"Well! Did they ever find out who killed him?"

"They never nailed it on anybody. His mother come over here, took the poor feller up and buried him in Cheyenne. If you ever go up there, take a walk around the graveyard, it's the purtiest place in town.