CHAPTER XXV
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It was Amada Garcia put me on,” said Nick Ellhorn to Emerson Mead and Tom Tuttle, as the three sat in Mead’s room, whither they went at once to hear Nick’s story. “One morning the first of this week Miss Delarue came runnin’ up to me on the street and said Amada was sick at her house and had walked all the way in from Garcia’s ranch and had something to tell that she wouldn’t say to anybody but Emerson. I went over to see if she would tell me what she wanted, and Emerson can thank her, and the padre, for gettin’ out of this scrape with the laugh on the other side. She thought she was goin’ to die and had unloaded her soul on to the padre, and he had ordered her to tell Emerson Mead what she had told him. I reckon the little witch wouldn’t have peeped about it to anybody if the padre hadn’t made her. She didn’t want to say a word to me, and at first she said she wouldn’t, but I finally made her understand she couldn’t see Emerson, and I swore by all the saints I could think of that I’d tell him and nobody else exactly what she said. So then she whispered in my ear that Señor Mead didn’t kill Señor Whittaker, and I inched her along until I got out of her that Will Whittaker wasn’t dead.
“That was all she meant to tell me, but I was bound to get all she knew. And I got it, but I want to tell you right now, boys, that I had a hell of a time gettin’ it. Every time I got a new thing out of her she’d make me get down on my knees and kiss the crucifix and swear by a dozen fresh saints that I wouldn’t tell anybody but Don Emerson, and that he wouldn’t tell anybody else, and that nothin’ should happen to Don Will because she had told it.
“She finally admitted that she and Will Whittaker had been secretly married away last spring and had never said a word about it to anybody. By that time I felt pretty sure that it was Mr. Will himself who had made a killin’, and I sprung my suspicion on her and threatened her with the padre and swore a lot of things by a whole heap of fresh saints, and she finally told me just what had happened.
“It seems that a cousin of hers—one of their everlastin’ primos in the sixty-third degree, I reckon—came up from down along the line somewheres, and she was so glad to see him and he was so glad to see her that he hugged her and stooped over to kiss her—I reckon likely she’d been flirtin’ her eyes and her shoulders at him—when bang! bang! bang! and he dropped dead at her feet and there was esposo Will in the door, mad with jealousy and ready to kill her too. Say, boys!” Nick stopped short, the stream of his narrative interrupted by a certain memory. “Say, that was what it was!” And he slapped his thigh with delight at having solved a mystery. “That’s the reason she had such fantods when I wanted to kiss her that day last summer! It was just because she happened to remember this other time!”
The others smiled and chuckled and Mead said: “You know I told you then, Nick, it wasn’t because she didn’t like your looks!”
“Well, he was ready to kill her, too, but she threw herself on him and begged for her life and swore the man was her cousin and there was no harm, and presently Will’s companion came runnin’ in and they got the young man cooled off. He and the other man talked together a little while and then they put Will’s clothes on the corpse and Will dressed himself in the dead man’s and they took the dead body away in the wagon, and Amada washed up all the blood stains and never let a soul know what had happened, because Will told her if she did her father would sure have him arrested and hung. And he made her swear to be a faithful wife to him and promised to send for her as soon as he could.