When at last Kaiser began to act like a 186 reasonable being, I said to the Indian, pretty loud and sharp, so he wouldn’t know I was scared:
“What do you want?”
He grunted and made a noise down in his throat, which I couldn’t see meant anything. So I said:
“Don’t understand. Where’d you come from?”
He only grunted again. I knew that a great many times an Indian will pretend he can’t talk English when he can, so I kept at him.
“What you going to do with the gun?” I next asked him.
This seemed to interest him. He looked down at it over his thick eyelids and said in very good English:
“Shoot thieves. Steal Indians’ ponies.”
It flashed upon me that perhaps I could make him help me after all, though I could see that he was a renegade and a drunkard.
“Did you see the fight?” I asked, beginning vaguely to suspect the truth.