"Know him?" enquired the Constable curiously.
Mahon passed a hand across his moist brow. "I knew a cowboy once—best friend I ever had—best a man could have. He gave that name once because he had no other to give. . . . He, too, was part Indian. Peter's a common Indian name. . . . He's dead now. He gave his life for me."
"That was Blue Pete, wasn't it?" asked Williams. "We got some of the story up here. He was working with us down there at Medicine Hat, wasn't he?"
The Sergeant moved toward the shack. "That drop makes me dizzy."
Within the shack Tressa laid a sympathetic hand on his.
"You'd better tell us about it, hadn't you? You're thinking a lot."
He smiled sadly into her tender eyes. "There's not much to tell," he began, "at least, not in quantity. Blue Pete was the whitest man that ever lived, the whitest of any colour. Yet he died a rustler—giving his life gladly for one who had done nothing more for him than call him friend. He was no rustler at heart. For years he had stolen horses and cattle in the Badlands of Montana, because, as he said, every one rustled there, more or less; he was brought up to it. Perhaps he did a bit more than the others, but that was because he knew more tricks. I came on him just north of the border. He'd come across before the rifles of two cowboys who hated him so badly they'd quite forgotten that he could have picked them off with ease any time he wished. Though he was the best shot in the Badlands, he never used his rifle till he had to; and for days he'd been running before them."
He looked about the room, feeling the silence. To him it was as a tribute to his dead friend.
"I took him in to the Inspector. He became a detective for us. You see, the rustlers were getting a bit the better of us because they knew the Cypress Hills and we never had force enough to take time to study them. Blue Pete didn't need to. He could pick up a trail anywhere and follow it like a blood-hound. . . . I learned a little from him; that's why I'm up here. With his assistance we ran down some of the rustlers. It was he proved to us that our own ranchers were among the rustlers—proved it to his own destruction. It was at the trial of one of them that he received the blow that sent him wild again. For a week he'd been on the trail of that fellow, a man we'd long suspected, half rancher, half hotel-keeper, and his nerves were a bit raw from lack of sleep and being forced into the open. You see, it meant giving up all the cow-punching he loved, for no rancher would employ him then."
A flash of anger lit the Sergeant's face.