“I could tell east and west and I knowed the way I had ought to go, but did ye ever know a man to do what he’d ought to—always? That white man wore boots. I couldn’t no more keep from trailin’ him an’ I could fergit that plunder. It wa’n’t easy, in that high ground, but I kep’ goin’ an’ I knowed I was doin’ a good job. About sun down, I come to the end o’ the trail, as we say out hyar.”
“You lost it?”
“One of ’em, I never lost,” said Mr. Weston slowly. “Jist when the sun was makin’ shadders on the mountain side, I seen somepin afore me I wisht I’d never seen. On a pile o’ rocks, sort o’ square like, was the big white man stark an’ stiff dead.”
“Dead?” almost shouted the awed boy.
“With a hole in the back o’ his head like this,” added Mr. Weston solemnly, holding out his closed fist.
Roy shuddered.
“The Indians killed him?” he almost whispered.
“Shore,” answered Weston. “And they wasn’t but one answer to that. It took me days to figger it out, but thar was only one reason. How that white man come among ’em o’ course no one’ll ever know. But bein’ thar, he wuz the biggest thing ’at ever happened. They’d never seen a white man afore. He might’a been a kind a holy thing to ’em. Mebbe even a god. An’ when I came along they seen they wuz other white men on earth. Ef he’d been a god he wa’n’t the only one. So they went back to their old feathers an’ painted sticks an’ Injun totems. But they sacerficed the new god first.”
“And the paper?” asked the boy, after a long silence.
“’Ceptin’ his gun and boots,” said Mr. Weston, “it wuz the only thing on him I took. What it means, I guess the White God o’ the Lost Injuns knowed. But I don’t. If it’s Injun, ain’t no Injun I ever met could read it.”