“No—I told you that already—it wasn’t Indians.”
“Don’t you know who it was?”
“Oh, yes, I know all of them I want to know. The fact is, up there at Cedar City I met some people that got confidential with me one day, and told me a lot of their names. There was Mr. Barney Carter and Mr. Sam Woods, and they talked right freely about some folks. I found out what I was wanting to know, being that they were drinking men.”
He had moved slightly as he spoke and she glanced at the revolver still held along his knee.
“Isn’t that dangerous—seems to me it’s pointed almost toward father.”
“Oh, not a bit dangerous, and it rests me to hold it there. You see it was hereabouts this thing happened. In fact, I came down here looking for a big man, and a little girl that I remembered, whose father and mother were killed at the same time mine was. This little girl was about three or four, I reckon, and she was taken by one of the murderers. He seemed like an awful big man to me. By the way, that’s mean whiskey your Bishop sells on the sly up at Cedar City. Why, it’s worse than Taos lightning. Well, this Barney Carter and Mr. Sam Woods, they would drink it all right, but they said one drink made a man ugly and two made him so downright bad that he’d just as lief tear his wife’s best bonnet to pieces as not. But they seemed to like me pretty well, and they drank a lot of this whiskey that the Bishop sold me, and then they got talking pretty freely about old times. I gathered that this man that took the little girl is a pretty big man around here. Of course I wasn’t expecting anything like that; I thought naturally he’d be a low-down sort to have been mixed up in a thing like that.”
He spoke his next words very slowly, with little pauses.
“But I found out what his name was—it was—”
He stopped, for there had been an indistinct sound from where her father sat, now in the gloom of the evening. She called to him:
“Did you speak, father?”