"Well, the poor boy is about half convinced I'm right, but he's been an Injin too long to believe it all through. He went off and sent for the Red Gap doctor, but he can't resist making another try for the Injin one; and that old scoundrel holds out for his price. Pete wants him to wait for his pay till haying is over; but he won't because he thinks Pete can get the money from me now if he really has to have it. Pete must of been crazy for fair about that time.
"'All right,' says he; 'you can cure my little chief?'
"The crook says he can if the money is in his hand.
"'All right,' says Pete again; 'but if my little chief dies something bad is going to happen to you.'
"That's about all they ever found out concerning this threat of Pete's, though another Injin who heard it said that Pete said his brother-in-law would make the trouble—not Pete himself. Which was likely true enough.
"Pete's little chief died the night the Red Gap doctor got up here. Ten minutes later this medicine man had hitched up his team, loaded his plunder into a wagon, and was pouring leather into his horses to get back home quick. He knew Pete never talks just to hear himself talk. They found him about thirty miles on his way—slumped down in the wagon bed, his team hitched by the roadside. There had been just one careful shot. As he hadn't been robbed—he had over" a hundred dollars in gold on him—it pointed a mite too strong at Pete after his threat.
"A deputy sheriff come up. Pete said his brother-in-law had been hanging round lately and had talked very dangerous about the medicine man. He said the brother-in-law had probably done the job. But Pete had pulled this too often before when in difficulties. The deputy said he'd better come along down to Red Gap and tell the district attorney about it. Pete said all right and crawled into his tepee for his coat and hat—crawled right on out the back and into the brush while the deputy rolled a cigarette.
"That was when he joined this bunch of noble redmen to advertise the vanishing romance of the Great West—being helped out of the country, I shouldn't wonder, by some lawless old hound that had feelings for him and showed it when he come along in the night to the ranch where he'd nursed her and her baby. They looked for him a little while, then dropped it; in fact, everybody was kind of glad he'd got off and kind of satisfied that he'd put this bad Injin, with his skull-duggery, over the big jump.
"Then he got homesick, like I told you, and showed up here at the door; and I saw it was better for him to give himself up and get out of it by fair and legal means. Now! You got it straight that far?"
I nodded.