His prisoner, who was sitting up now, made a gesture to indicate that he still was entirely at a loss.
“I’ll give you a hint to help tip you off. What was you doin’ just before the hell-raisin’ broke loose?”
“Well, my line got twisted in a sapling—”
“No, no, before that even.”
“I—let’s see? I—oh, by gosh!”
It all came back to Chaney; the answer to the riddle that had pestered him that afternoon on the rim-rock nearly a year before. The thing that had made him hesitate, half persuaded to return. The same thing which subconsciously had fretted him through his sleeping on that first night of flight. It came back vividly—how his duplicate false upper plate had fallen out of his shirt pocket on the wet shale; how, absently, he had wondered why the plate should be in his pocket when properly it belonged in the canvas carryall which fitted under a flap of his ground-cloth; how he had picked it up and balanced it momentarily on a flat stone, not restoring it to his pocket for fear of another fall; how then he noticed a sizable trout nosing in out of deep water to the shallows and how, hoping to land him, he cast. And then the gut leader snagging and he turning to free it and then—the first astounding quiver underfoot.
“Exactly,” affirmed the deputy as though he read what rolled in Chaney’s mind. “Your extry set of store teeth! There they was, settin’ on a rock, smilin’ at me as pleasant as you please and shinin’ in the sunlight.
“I don’t know why ’twas, but right then and there there popped into my head something that happened once up in Nevada when I was a kid livin’ with my folks just outside of Carson City. A fellow in Carson that had a glass eye hired a lot of Piute Indians to clean up a piece of ground for him—get the rocks and stumps out, you know. Well, them Piutes would work along all right as long as he stood right over them, but the minute he’d go away they’d every last single one of ’em lay down and take a nap. So finally he got an idea. He took his glass eye out of the socket and set it on a stump facing down the field and he says to old Johnson Sides, the Peacemaker of the Piutes, who could speak English and acted as interpreter for the gang, he says to him:
“‘You tell your bunch that I’m goin’ away a little while, but I’m leavin’ my eye behind me to watch and see that none of ’em don’t loaf on the job.’
“And old Johnson translated it and he put off somewheres. Well, sir, it worked fine for several days. Every time he quit the job he left his eye behind him on the stump. And every time a buck felt like loafing he’d look around and see that glass eye glarin’ his way, or anyhow seemin’ to, and he’d duck his head and spit on his hands and go to it again.