“Yes, dead! What did you think I meant? Lost in the brush?”
“Don’t be a fool, Jed,” Dawson answered quietly, “you are acting like a crazy man. If the sheep are dead it cannot be helped now, but I would like to know how it happened.”
Jed finally told the story of the lost sheep, interrupted at frequent intervals by uncontrollable bursts of profanity.
Dawson listened calmly. “How do you know this?” he asked.
“Bob left Sancho up there to watch the sheep in the other cañon and came down to tell me. Nine thousand dollars gone to smash in one afternoon and all through that—”
“Don’t get to raving again,” Dawson interrupted. “It’s tough luck but we can both stand it.”
At this confession of partnership Scott’s eyes popped wide open with amazement. He had already suspected Dawson of levying graft money for allowing extra sheep on the forest but such a far-reaching fraud as this had never occurred to him.
“We could stand it, yes, but I’m not going to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I am going to own up to running on some extras, let ’em cancel my permit if they want to, and get into some more profitable game.”