“You devil!” he said to the fallen man. “Keep off, or——”
He looked up the road toward the town, where a crowd had appeared, a crowd which increased in numbers, and was led by a man Conover knew to be the town marshal.
With one eye on the howling Mexicans, who were trying now and then to get at him, Conover stared at the advancing crowd.
“What’s Ben Woods want? Coming for me, is he? Well, that’s queer! They don’t pull a man in this town for a little shooting, as a usual thing, unless he kills somebody; and all I’ve been potting is an old playing card. I was a fool for even doing that—a fool and drunk, or nigh it! A man can’t slay a memory by shooting a card to pieces.”
He stepped with quick stride to the side of the road, where he had a mud wall at his back; so that he was now able to face the Mexicans and also watch the crowd that hurriedly approached from the direction of the town.
The patois of these peons was strange to him, but he was beginning to catch words that he understood, and slowly the meaning of what they meant filtered in.
One of his bullets, glancing against a rock, had entered a Mexican jacal and struck a Mexican woman, injuring her severely. It was the husband of the woman who had tried to knife him; and her brother had run into the town and summoned the marshal with a direful story.
The marshal was now coming, with a posse, to arrest the “wild American” who was supposed to be shooting up the Mexican portion of the town. The reports of the revolver had given point to the story of the woman’s brother.
“Hit a woman, eh?” said Conover incredulously. “Hit a woman when I was merely shooting at the representation of one? Is that what you’re howlin’ about?”
He flung a glance at the woman’s husband, who had crawled out and recovered the knife, and was again trying to get where he could use it.