"So!" said Caleb Price. "So! And that was why the wedding--"
"Yes! A foolish fancy of a girl. I don't know what passed between her and Banion. I felt it safer for my daughter to be married, as soon as could be, to another man, an honest man. You know how that came out. And now, when she's as apt to die as live, and we're all as apt to, you others send for that renegade to save us! I have no confidence that he will come. I hope he will not. I'd like his rifles, but I don't want him."
[pg 258]
"Well," said Caleb Price, "it is odd how his rifles depend on him and not on the other man. Yet they both lived in the same town."
"Yes, one man may be more plausible than another."
"Yes? I don't know that I ever saw a man more plausible with his fists than Major Banion was. Yes, I'll call him plausible. I wish some of us--say, Sam Woodhull, now--could be half as plausible with these Crows. Difference in men, Jess!" he concluded. "Woodhull was there--and now he's here. He's here--and now we're sending there for the other man."
"You want that other man, thief and dishonest as he is?"
"By God! yes! I want his rifles and him too. Women, children and all, the whole of us, will die if that thief doesn't come inside of another twenty-four hours."
Wingate flung out his arms, walked away, hands clasped behind his back. He met Woodhull.