“Yer seed me, youngster?” the man drawled, not angrily.
“No, I didn’t see you,” said Westy, “but gee, you don’t have to see a person to find them out. You shot a deer and you know as well as I do it isn’t the season. And then you hid your gun—I guess you thought I was a game warden or something. But I found it, I’ll tell you that much and I saw your name on it.
“Do you know what you made me do?” he added, becoming vehement as his anger gave him courage. “You made me kill a deer, that’s what you made me do! You made me kill a deer after I promised I’d never shoot at anything but a target—that’s what you made me do,” he shouted in boyish anger. “You didn’t even kill it, you didn’t! Now you see what you did, sneaking and shooting game out of season! Now you see what you made me do!”
There was something so naïve and boyish in putting the injury on personal grounds that even Meadows could not repress a smile.
“I made a promise to my father, that’s what I did,” said Westy indignantly.
The man neither confessed nor denied his guilt. It seemed strange to Westy that he did not deny it since criminals always protest their innocence. At the moment the man’s chief concern seemed to be a certain interest in Westy. He just stood listening, the while holding the little girl close to him and playfully ruffling her hair. Perhaps his dubious standing with the authorities made him lukewarm about protestations of innocence.
“Waal?” was all he said.
“And you’re not going to get away with it either,” said Westy.
Meadows drew a tinfoil package from his trousers pocket, took some tobacco from it and replaced the package in his pocket. Westy saw that the package was a new one and that it bore the MECHANICS DELIGHT label.
“You left the other package in the woods,” Westy said triumphantly, “and that’s how I happened to find your gun.”