"The girl? Oh, she's Lightfoot's sister. She's going to teach our school, Jelly."
"School?" chorused six shaken voices.
"Now I know you're lying, Bud," Gelle mourned. "I've got to have a serious talk with you, I kin see that. This habit of lyin' where there ain't no cause or provocation—if you'll walk awn over to the Rock with me now, Bud, I'll tell you what I think about it."
"It's him that'll do the tellin', and that right now," a voice broke in ominously. "They's a certain Meddalark that won't have a damn' chirp left in 'im, time we git the pinfeathers plucked out. Us fellers have stood about all we're goin' to from Bud."
"Just another prophet in his own country," sighed Bud, reaching out a hand for Gelle's tobacco sack because he was too lazy to reach into his pocket for his own. "She is Lightfoot's sister. And the bank was robbed, and Charlie Mulholland was killed. I discovered him myself—"
Half an hour went to the telling of the story to the smallest detail, accurately as if he were talking before a jury. For when all the jokes were done, Bud appreciated the hunger these young men felt for news of their world after plugging hard on round-up. They were sick of their own stale company and they craved action, even the vicarious excitement of Bud's experiences. He gave them all he knew, and by the time he had exhausted his store of impressions each man there could visualize the whole affair so far as Bud knew it.
They discussed at length the mystery of its quiet perpetration on the edge of banking hours while forty or fifty men foregathered within gunshot of the place. Then Tony Scarpa, more American than his name implied, swung to the more immediate event.
"Who's Lightfoot and who's his sister, and what's the joke about teaching our school?"
"Straight goods." In the narrowing shadow as the moon swam higher they could see Bud's eyes gleam with mischief. "Lightfoot's a pilgrim; an artist, so he says. I know he's a darn good dancer, for I saw him dance. His sister's a pilgress. They went broke when the bank did, and had to rustle jobs—being perfect strangers in the country and having a bad habit of eating every day. She wanted a school to teach. That's the first and only thing a girl from the East ever thinks of when she comes West; that and marrying some cattle king and wearing diamonds. He wanted to be a cowboy—and I, being an accommodating cuss, gave them both jobs. I recalled the fact that there's a lot you fellows don't know yet, and while you're acquiring useful knowledge she can study your types. You see—"
"Study our what?" A man leaned forward so that the moon shone fully and clearly on his astonished face.