I repeated my story in a raised voice—I had not yet had time to regain composure. I accounted for each of my movements from the beginning until now, vehemently reasserting my ignorance and innocence. But I saw that they were not even attending to me any longer; they looked at me only now and then, they spoke low to each other, pointing to the other end of the valley, and turned, while I was still talking, to receive the report of another man, who came from among the stolen horses.
Then I fell silent. I sat by my saddle, locking my hands round my knees, and turning my eyes first upon the men, and then upon the whole place. A strange crystal desolation descended upon me, quiet and cold. The early sunlight showed every object in an extraordinary and delicate distinctness; the stones high up the sides of the valley, the separate leaves on the small high branches of the cottonwoods; the interstices on the bark on lower trunks some distance away; the fine sand and grass of the valley’s level bottom, with little wild rose bushes here and there; all these things I noticed, and more, and then my eyes came back to my little dead fire, and the blackened coffee-pot in which I had made the tea. “Your friend McDonough,” they had said to me at Washakie, and I had wondered what was behind their reticence when I inquired about him. They were always ready, I bitterly reflected, to feed lies to a tenderfoot, but a syllable of truth about McDonough’s suspected dishonesty, which would have saved me from this, they were unwilling to speak. It was natural, of course; everything was natural. I saw also why McDonough had been so precise in asking which way I expected to travel. Over on Snake River, and in Idaho, the sorrel was in no danger of identification, and therefore I should be safe. But even with the whole chain of evidence: the doctor’s bill, the corral, my unlucky tale of a map which I could not prove, and the branding-irons with which they believed I was going to alter the legitimate brands—what right had they to deny me the chance I asked?
The last two of them now came from the horses to make their report: “Five brands. Thirty-two head. N lazy Y, Bar Circle Zee, Goose Egg, Pitch Fork, Seventy-Six, and V R.”
“Not one of you,” I broke out, “knows a word against me, except some appearances which the post-trader will set right in one minute. I demand to be taken to him.”
“Ain’t we better be getting along, Lem?” said one.
“Most eight o’clock,” said another, looking at his watch.
“Stand up,” said Lem Speed.
Upon being thus ordered, like a felon, my utterance was suddenly choked, and it was with difficulty that I mastered the tears which welled hotly to my eyes.
“Any message you want to write—”
“No!” I shouted.