But I was talking about Clancy. Well, that bullet of Perley’s caught him on the cheek bone, glanced in, plowed through his left eye, and landed up somewhere against the cartilage of his nose—a bullet will make queer tracks sometimes, worse than surveyors by a heap. They got him down to Big Cloud to a doctor’s, and before he was half cured he disappeared. They had a sort of makeshift hospital here in those days, and when I say “disappeared” I mean they found his bed empty one morning, that was all.
I told you I didn’t know whether Perley had any hand in putting that Indian in the car, or the other redskins at the Bend. I don’t. I told you I didn’t know what was between him and the half-breed before all this happened. I don’t. Perley never said. But day after day as he and Lee pounded up and down on the local through the mountains, he began to grow silent and moody.
Lee, young Lee then, was the only one that could get anywhere near the inside of his vest. He took to Lee, and Lee liked him; but even Lee had his limits when it came to confidences. There was lots Perley never opened his lips about. No, I don’t know as it makes much difference now.
Lee was the first of the two to hear that Faro Clancy was “loose.”
“It looks to me like a bad business,” he said, after telling Perley the news.
Perley’s eyes just narrowed a little. “It looks more like a bad shot, a rotten bad shot,” he answered evenly.
“That, if you like,” returned Lee; “but there’ll be more to follow.”
“One would think you knew Clancy,” said Perley, cool as ever.
Lee was anxious. Call it presentiment or what you like, from that moment the thing was on his nerves. Perley had been pretty good to him; had made things a heap easier for the young fellow, green and raw as he was, in a hundred different ways. Things like that mean something.
“Look here, Perley,” said he, “I’ve heard some talk, and I know there’s something behind all this between you and that devil. I’m not asking for confidences——”