Shorty turned slowly, pulling the gate open and propping it with a stick until he had set the buckets through. Deliberation was in his manner, deliberation was in his speech.
“Las’ night, you mean. They hit out right after midnight.”
“Well, where did they go?” Lance ground his cigarette under his heel.
“You might ask ’em when they git back,” Shorty suggested cryptically, and closed the gate just as carefully as if forty freedom-hungry horses were milling inside the corral.
Lance watched him go and turned to Sam Pretty Cow who, having thrust his hay fork behind a brace in the stable wall, was preparing to vary his tobacco-chewing with a smoke.
“What’s the mystery, Sam? Where did they go? I’m here to stay, and I’m one of the family––I think––and you may as well tell me.”
Sam Pretty Cow lipped the edge of his cigarette paper, folded it down smoothly on the tiny roll of tobacco, leaned his body backward and painstakingly drew a match from the small pocket of his grimy blue overalls.
“I’m don’ know nothing,” he vouchsafed equably. “I’m don’ ask nothing. I’m don’ hear nothing. You bet. Nh-hn––yore damn right.”
From under his lashes Lance watched Sam Pretty Cow. “I was over helping hold old Scotty in his bed, the other day,” he said irrelevantly. 261 “He was crazy––out of his head. He kept yelling that the Lorrigans were stealing his stock. He kept saying that a few more marks with a straight branding iron would turn his Eleven into an NL, ANL, DNL, LNL––any one of the Devil’s Tooth brands. Crazy with fever, he was.”
Sam Pretty Cow studied the match, decided which was the head of it, and drew it sharply along his boot sole.