“Maybe some dog killed it and the carcass got into the creek. My sheep can’t get to the water because my pasture is fenced. That’s on Wyker’s side, anyhow. I won’t risk fording to get over there. It’s as dead right now as it will ever be,” Jacobs asserted.
Their trail grew narrower and more secluded, winding up a steep hill between high banks. Half way up, where the road made a sharp turn, a break in the side next to the creek opened a rough way down to the water. As they neared this, a woman coming down the hill caught sight of the two horsemen around the bend, and made a swift movement toward this opening in the bank, as if to clamber down from their sight. She was not quick enough, however, and when she found she had been seen, she waited by the roadside until the men had passed on.
Asher, who was next to her, looked keenly at her as he bade her good morning, but John Jacobs merely lifted his hat without giving her more than a glance.
The woman stared at both, but made no response to their greetings. She was plainly dressed, with a black scarf tied over her tow-colored hair. She had a short club in one hand and a big battered tin can in the other, which she seemed anxious to conceal. When the men had passed, 179 she looked after them with an ugly expression of malice in her little pale gray eyes.
“That’s a bad face,” Asher said, when they were out of her hearing. “I wonder why she tried to hide that old salt can.”
“How do you know it was a salt can?” Jacobs asked.
“Because it is exactly like a salt can I saw at Pryor Gaines’ old cabin, and because some salt fell out as she tipped it over,” Asher replied.
“You have an eye for details,” Jacobs returned. “That was Gretchen Gimpke, Hans Wyker’s girl. She married his bartender, and is raising a family of little bartenders back in the hilly country there, while Gimpke helps Hans run a perfectly respectable tavern in town.”
“Well, I may misjudge her, but if I had any interest near here, I should want her to keep on her own side of the creek,” Asher declared.
And somehow both remembered the dead sheep down in the deep pool at the foot of the hill.