“Stirring up a lot of agitation over petty rustling,” Rock said casually, “when he was stealing wholesale from his own outfit, the Maltese Cross.”
“Buck Walters stealin’ cattle! What you talkin’ about?”
“They say you should never speak ill of the dead,” Rock went on, “but what I tell you is a solemn fact. Some of his crowd went over the divide with him. The rest of them are on their way to jail. We got them dead to rights, working over the brand in a set of hidden corrals on the slope of East Butte. There’s been some excitement, I wish to remark. Uncle Bill Sayre, the other executor of the Snell estate, came up from Texas. He’s tying up his buggy team down at the stable. You know Bill Sayre from Fort Worth, don’t you? You’ve heard of him, anyway.”
He addressed his remarks directly to Elmer who glanced out and saw a tall figure approaching the house.
“Well, by heck!” he said in frank astonishment. “That’s the darnedest thing I ever heard of. You say Buck is dead?”
Rock nodded.
“I was on his trail. He knew it, I guess. That’s why he was so anxious to put me away. He started a war, and he got what was coming to him. He had worked the brand on nearly two thousand Maltese Crosses that we know of already.
“I’ll be darned,” Elmer said again feebly. “I wonder if that was why he was sicking me onto you?”
“I expect,” Rock said coolly. “He made a dirty break that morning, here. He was pretty deep, Buck was.”