Joshua sat looking at the tails of his wheelers for a long time, then suddenly he burst out laughing. The thought that anybody on earth would pay anybody else to trail him over the country struck him as about the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. But The Whimperer’s story had the ring of truth.
“Did Slim Wolfgang shoot me?” Joshua fired at the yegg so suddenly that he jumped with surprise.
“Well—now—er—”
“Tell me!”
“Jack, I—”
“Spit it out, damn you, or I’ll—”
The fingers that threatened The Whimperer’s prickly throat had clasped a striking hammer for several months, and the bare brown arm back of them looked to the old tramp like a copper cylinder, bulged in two places by internal explosions.
“He—he done it, Jack. He tried to croak youse!”
“Were you along?”
“No. But I know he done it. He had a thoity-thoity rifle in his tent f’r a week before it happened, an’ den afterwards she wasn’t dere no more. He’d borried it to hunt deer wid, he said.”