“No, but I wisht I had,” he said calmly. “He’d oughter be dead, the old skunk, trying to poison all them sheep.”
“Poison the sheep; what sheep?”
“Your sheep,” Bill’s brows contracted as he looked at me. “Your sheep,” he repeated, his voice rising as I scarcely seemed able to grasp his meaning. “All the sheep at Hay Gulch Camp, that’s what he came out here for, and he’d a done it, too, if it hadn’t been for that kid in there.” Bill jerked his head in the direction of my room.
“Ted?” I asked, my emotion stifling my voice.
“Ted,” Bill affirmed, “he caught him at it red-handed, and probably saved two thousand sheep from bein’ dead this minute.”
“How on earth did he find out?”
Bill straightened up in his chair.
“Them eyes of his’n don’t miss much, I’m here to tell you, and his everlastin’ snoopin’ around done some good after all.” Bill’s eyes glowed with pride. “Yesterday, before Bohm left, Ted come across him mixin’ a lot of stuff with some grain, and, of course, had to know all about it. The old man finally told him he was fixin’ to poison the prairie-dogs on his claim, bit he was so peevish about it, Ted said he didn’t believe him, and mistrusted somethin’ was wrong.
“The kid didn’t say nothin’ to me about it; had some fool notion about playin’ detective, I reckon, at any rate he got up along about four o’clock and rode out to Bohm’s claim to do a little reconorterin’.”
Bill reluctantly put the glass down and tipped back in his chair. “He hid his horse in the gulch and crope up in the grass like an Injin. The herder wasn’t nowhere in sight and the sheep was still in the corral, but old Bohm was there all right, fixin’ little piles of that poisoned wheat just where the sheep would come acrost it the first thing.”