“What, ponies know better than human beings, do they?” demanded Billie, hardly relishing such a state of affairs.
“They’ve been given an unerring instinct, where we depend on reason, and that often fails us. Just watch a horse feeding, and notice how he refuses to touch all kinds of weeds, and how a cow drops the same out of her mouth after she’s scooped in a whole bunch of grass. Instinct, and nothing else. But there’s no use in us hanging out here, when we can soon get to good water.”
Reluctantly Billie quitted that beautiful spring. He even turned to look back at it several times, and went on to remark:
“That crazy Injun ought to have been shot, to do such a thing. Why didn’t he pick out an ordinary spring, and put his loco weed in the same?”
“Oh! well, perhaps that story is only one of the Indian legends we read about, and it’s really something else that makes the water coming from that spring bad, so that people who drink it feel sick right away. I’ve got an idea myself that it must pass through some sort of copper deposit that poisons the water. Because if this thing happened years and years ago, as the reds say, how could the poison still keep on working?”
“Well, now, that doesn’t stand to reason, does it?” remarked Billie. “And I reckon you’re right when you say it, Donald. But let me tell you I never was more disappointed in my life. But I didn’t notice any bones lying around there, or graves either.”
“What makes you say that?” demanded Adrian.
“Why, if the water is really poisoned, lots of fellows must have drank of it, time in and time out, not knowing how dangerous it was; and if they fell down and kicked the bucket, wouldn’t we see their bones scattered around, just as the wolves and coyotes had left ’em?”
“Oh! it doesn’t kill you outright, they say; just sickens you, until you feel like you’d be glad to die to end it all,” Donald assured him.
“I’ve heard people talk that way about being