There was no circumlocution, no trick of equivocation, no shadow of obscurity in the speech of the denizen of Hell's Gap He used words for the purpose of expressing exactly what he believed to be true, and for no other purpose. This the sheriff knew, and others had learned and remembered by certain long glistening scars, covered afterward with the red flannel of their hunting shirts.
White Carter removed his knee from the pommel of his saddle and slipped down to the ground. Here he paused for a moment, knocked the ashes from his pipe and replaced it in his pocket. Then he clambered down the steep bank to the river. The proprietor of Jim's Ford looked on with mighty indifference. The sheriff took up the bundle without a word, returned to his horse, and unbuckling the “throat latch” of his bridle, strapped the bundle to the horn of his saddle. Then he placed his right foot in the stirrup and turned to the mountaineer.
“Spitler,” he drawled, “we found a dead man in Tug the other day. I think this is his coat.”
The mountaineer looked up from the muzzle of his Winchester. “Were there lead in him?” he asked.
The sheriff flung his leg over the saddle and gathered up his bridle from the horse's neck.
“No bullet holes,” he answered.
“Then,” said the giant Hamrick, “he were not killed in the hills.”