"I tried to save her," whimpered Big Aleck now.
"You lie! Why did you bring her up here then? Why didn't you leave her there—she didn't have to come." Sim Gage still was talking now sharp, decisive. "Where is she now?"
"Good God, man, I told you I didn't know. How do I know which way she'd run? She said she was blind—but I don't believe she was."
"Why don't you?" demanded Sim Gage. "Because she could shoot you?—Because she did shoot you, twice? What made her? Where's my gun? Did she take it with her after she shot you?"
The sweat broke out now on the gray and grimed forehead of the suffering man. "I won't tell you nothing more!" he broke out. "What right you got to arrest me? I ain't committed no crime, and you ain't got no warrant. I want a lawyer. I want this doctor to take care of me. I got money to get a lawyer. I don't have to answer no questions you ask me."
"You say she went over that way?" Sim's finger was pointing across the road in the direction of the fire.
"I told you, yes," nodded Big Aleck. And Sim Gage's own knowledge gained from the last direction of the footprints confirmed this.
"Blind—and out all night in these mountains!" he said, his voice shaking for the first time. "And then comes that fire. You done that, Aleck—you know you done it."
"I told you I didn't know nothing," protested the crippled man, who now had turned again upon his back. "I ain't a-goin' to talk. It was them fellers."
"Some things you'd better know," said Sim Gage, suddenly judge in this court, suddenly assembled. "Some things I know now. You come down to my house your own self. It was you set my barn a-fire and burned my house and my hay, and killed my stock. It was you carried that girl off. I know why you done it, too. You wasn't fighting that bunch in here—they was with you. You was all on the same business, and you know it. You made trouble before the war, and you're making it now, when we're all trying to settle down in the peace."