"It's wuss this time," answered Peter gravely. "I'll give yer the yarn in a few words. I sent this here chap Joe over to fetch a seeder Hurley had borrowed two years ago and hadn't returned. Wall, he heard shouts as he come up to the shack, and saw Hurley whacking Tom here, the lad he'd got apprenticed to him. Joe wasn't having that, nohow. Eh?"
He looked over at our hero as if for corroboration. Then Tom chimed in.
"Hurley's a bully," he cried. "He was tying me to the post when Joe asked him to leave off. He was polite, was Joe. But Hurley swore and threatened him too. Then he struck at him, and there was a shindy. My, but Joe stuck to his man and hammered him in fine style! If it hadn't been for the rake handle, Joe would have beat him, big though Hurley is. But he struck Joe over the head, and then I ran for help."
"Seems to me as this here Joe did well," declared Mike curtly. "Wall, now?"
"There ain't much to tell. Tom reached Jim Canning's, and he rang me up. We was all of us along here as quick as possible. Hurley took the rig and drove off, and there ain't a doubt that he's taken a gun with him. He cleared Joe's pockets of every cent—about sixty dollars, he reckons—as well as a letter of some value. But that ain't all. There's been trouble in the shack. That ere brute set upon his wife and made an end of her."
When the whole tale came to be understood, there was little doubt that the brute Hurley had flown into a furious temper, and had become almost mad with passion. His unfortunate wife he had killed with a knock-down blow, while the reader has learned of his subsequent movements.
"Wall?" asked Peter, looking expectantly at Mike.
"You wait a bit, mate," said the other. He dropped his cigarette, lifted his hat solemnly, and entered the shack. There was a severe air on his handsome, sunburned face as he emerged.
"Of course," he said, "we've got to follow; that is, I have. If you gentlemen——"
"You don't need to ax," exclaimed Peter, with added bluntness. "We're here. Ef you want us, we're right alongside you all the time. Murders ain't often done in the settlements, but when they are, then it's every man's job to find the brute as did it. You lift yer little finger, and you've every man Jack willing and ready."