"This mornin', just as I was startin' to come over to camp."
"You don't tell!" condoled the visitor. "That's mighty bad after sitting up all-night with your best girl!"
"Long Bill's pretty intent after them breed girls," remarked Captain Bill Henry; thereupon the cowboy flushed angrily.
"No breed girls in mine! The new school-marm's more to my likin'," he boasted. "An' from the sweet looks she give me, I reckon I ain't goin' to have no trouble there!"
The next instant Long Bill lay sprawling in the dust, while old Jim McCullen rained blow after blow upon him. When he finished, Long Bill remained motionless, the blood streaming from his nose and mouth. Old Jim straightened up and looked down at the fallen giant with utmost contempt, then he pulled his disarranged cartridge belt into shape and glanced at his hands. They were covered with the cowboy's blood.
"Reckon I'd better wash up a bit," he remarked easily, and went into the cook-tent.
The men lounged about, apparently indifferent to the scene which was being enacted. It might have been an every day occurrence, so little interest they showed, yet several stalwart fellows gave old Jim McCullen an admiring glance as he passed them.
On the crest of a near divide stood a group of squaws. After a short conference they proceeded slowly, shyly toward the round-up camp. Some distance from it they grouped together again and waited while a very old woman wrapped in a dingy white blanket came boldly up to the group of men, and in a jargon of French and Indian asked for the refuse of the newly killed yearling. The foreman pointed to where it lay, and gruffly told her to go and get it, but she spied the unconscious figure of Long Bill stretched out upon the grassy flat, and with a low cry of woe flung herself down beside him.
"Who done this?" she cried in very plain English, facing the cowboys with a look of blackest anger. No answer came.
"Better tell her," suggested a cow-puncher who was unrolling his bed. "She's a witch, you know."