“You throw away that gun!” he returned from behind the boulder and at last he heard it clatter among the rocks. “Now your pistol!” he ordered, but the Indian burst out angrily in his guttural native tongue. What he said could only be guessed from his scolding tone of voice; but after a sullen pause he dropped back into English, this time complaining and insolently defiant.
“You shut up!” commanded Wunpost suddenly rising above his rock and covering the Indian with his gun, “and throw away that pistol or I’ll kill you!”
The Indian reared up and faced him, then reached inside his waistband and threw a wicked gun into the dirt. He was grinding his teeth with pain, like a gopher in a trap, and his brows were drawn down in a fierce scowl; but Wunpost only laughed as he advanced upon him slowly, his gun held ready to shoot.
“Don’t like it, eh?” he taunted, “well, I didn’t like this when you up and shot me through the leg.”
He slapped his leg and the Indian seemed to understand–or perhaps he misunderstood; his hand 204leapt like a flash to a butcher knife in his moccasin-leg and Wunpost jumped as it went past his ribs. Then a silence fell, in which the fate of a human life hung on the remnant of what some people call pity, and Wunpost’s trigger-finger relaxed. But it was not pity, it was just an age-old feeling against shooting a man in a trap. Or perhaps it was pride and the white man’s instinct not to foul his clean hands with butcher’s blood. Wunpost wanted to kill him but he stepped back instead and looked him in the eye.
“You rattlesnake-eyed dastard!” he hissed between his teeth and the Indian began to beg. Wunpost listened to him coldly, his eyes bulging with rage, and then he backed off and sat down.
“Who you working for?” he asked and as the Indian turned glum he rolled a cigarette and waited. The jaws of the steel-trap had caught him by the heel, stabbing their teeth through into the flesh, and in spite of his stoicism the Indian rocked back and forth and his little eyes glinted with the agony. Yet he would not talk and Wunpost went off and left him, after gathering up his guns and the knife. There was something about that butcher-knife and the way it was flung which roused all the evil in Wunpost’s heart and he meditated darkly whether to let the Indian go or give him his just deserts. But first he intended to wring a confession from him, and he left him to rattle his chain.
Wunpost cooked a hasty breakfast and fed and saddled his mules and then, as the Indian began 205to shout for help, he walked down and glanced at him inquiringly.
“You let me go!” ordered the Indian, drawing himself up arrogantly and shaking the coarse hair from his eyes, and Wunpost laughed disdainfully.
“Who are you?” he demanded, “and what you doing over here? I know them buckskin tewas–you’re an Apache!”