"Come and get me, white man!" cried Jean Paul, over his shoulder
Jack put up his revolver and, crouching, made to seize the man's legs. Jean Paul, with a strange, loud cry, stepped off, and was no more. No sound of any fall came up. Jack had not the stomach to look over.
Four hours later he found the thing below. He had no tools to dig a grave, and he heaped a cairn of stones over it. On the face of a great boulder that overlooked the cairn he scratched an epitaph with the point of his knife:
JEAN PAUL ASCOTA
Killed by leaping from the summit
of Mount Darwin
August — 19—
A bad man and a brave one.
Then Jack lay down and slept around the clock.
XIX
AN OLD SCORE IS CHARGED OFF
Drawing near to the Sapi village on his return, Jack first came upon a group of children picking wild strawberries in the meadow, who fled screaming in advance of him into the compound. There, every task was dropped, and every dark face turned toward him. Fairly startled out of their affectation of stolidity, they streamed toward him from under the sun shelters and from out of the tepees with cries of astonishment. Jack was not deceived by the apparent warmth of their welcome; they were not glad to see him, only amazed that he should have come back at all.
He pulled up his horse in the centre of the square, and remembering the last time he had addressed them, looked them over with a kind of grim scorn. Just now he was unable to feel any of the kindness for these feather-brained children of the woods that Mary had. He knew the value of scant speech with them, and he made them wait for his announcement.