“We prairie folks ain’t partic’lar sot on civilization,” remarked Mr. Owen with affability.
“I hope you’ll never catch him,” said Olive, with a sound very like a sob in her voice.
“The boys they ’lowed you’uns was mighty good frien’s o’ his’n, an’ he’d a mos’ likely come this hyar way to make for the Pottawattamie ’fore we’uns could cotch him. That’s why I come ’long ter look for him hyar,” observed Mr. Owen, rising and putting his head under his saddle flap in order to tighten up the girth a couple of holes.
“Oh, you’ve come here to spy out, have you?” said Olive, in passionate anger. “Why didn’t you say so at first, and ask the question like a man, and not come sneaking around? Do you want to hunt all over the house and see if we’ve got anybody hidden away?”
“No,” said Owen slowly. “Guess that’ll do. I ain’t agoin’ ter hunt roun’. We ain’t no great shakes at bein’ fine folks out hyar on the prairie, but we allers takes the word of a lady, by Gosh. You said you hain’t seen nothin’ o’ ole man Cotterell, guess that’ll do for the boys. Mornin’.”
Mr. Owen rode away, feeling that in the contest of politeness that morning he had certainly scored off Mrs. Weston with her stuck-up Eastern ways.
Olive was in an agony of doubt and terror. That the boys were out hunting for Cotterell was, she knew, but the preliminary to his death, if they caught him. The boys seldom or never let off any one they caught, so she gathered from the stories she had heard of their doings in time past. What was she to do in this difficult dilemma? Should she tell Ezra?
Under ordinary circumstances her first impulse would have been to go straight to her husband with the story she had heard, but in this instance she felt that such a course would be impossible. She knew that Ezra was jealous of Mr. Cotterell, he had betrayed his feelings more than once, and in her heart she knew that few men can be just towards the man who arouses their jealousy. Her husband was a very just man, and could, more than any one she knew, put himself in the place of others and see what was right and what was wrong. But in this instance it was not justice Olive wanted, it was justice that she feared. Although she spoke bravely enough to Owen, a terrible fear lurked in her breast that the evidence, though ludicrously deficient by the rules of procedure that obtain in old established communities, was quite sufficient to convince a prairie jury. Ezra would not sit on a hanging jury, nor would he be a party to catching Mr. Cotterell, but his sense of justice and what was due to the principles professed at Perfection City might carry him no further than this passively inactive point? Would he assist Cotterell to escape? Guilty or not, that was what Olive wanted, and to help in such an undertaking, she felt sure, was what her husband might very well refuse to do.
Was Cotterell guilty? Olive debated this point anxiously in her mind. She knew he went armed, but so did many other men. In fact, to be armed was the rule on the prairie. The doctrine of non-resistance was one of the least understood tenets of the Pioneers at Perfection City, and was observed by nobody else on the prairie. Even Brother Wright, as we have seen—though Olive was quite unaware of this—had granted to himself a special indulgence in this matter. So the mere fact of Mr. Cotterell’s always having his revolver in his belt did not really count for anything, one way or the other. He had always been so gentle and so chivalrous in his manner to her, she found it difficult to force her mind to keep hold of the fact that he was a very passionate man. Everyone said so, and she knew, too, that the Mills’ were a bad lot, drunken quarrelsome men, who, as Ezra said, combined in their character all the vices of the prairie and preserved none of its virtues. How easy it would be for a proud, passionate man like Mr. Cotterell to bring his revolver into a heated argument with Jake Mills, who might be mad with drink. But surely such a shooting was not murder according to prairie law. In her distress Olive found herself falling back upon the probable laxity of that very prairie justice which a short time before she had so scornfully characterised to Owen.
The “boys” who were hunting Cotterell were, as Olive well knew, the most relentless men on the prairie, regular settlers who had found by experience that the only way to keep order was to keep it with their own right hands. They had hung several horse-thieves lately, and had declared they were going to put a stop to the “shooting round promiscuous” of the younger blades. They were not unjust men, but they were hasty, and were moreover already terribly prejudiced against Cotterell.