“You mean you’d had the D. T’s.”
“That’s what I mean; I didn’t just have ’em, but mighty near it. I would have, if I hadn’t stopped. And the stoppin’ was almost worse than goin’ on. You know how ’tis; you’ve seen lots o’ the boys that way. Well, them’s me; and I was nighabout crazy, I reckon. But I’d cut the stuff out, and meant to stay by that resolution.
“So I ambles down here a while ago feelin’ about as good-humored with myself and the world as a she-wolf that’s lost her cubs. And because I was nervous, and didn’t know what to do with myself, I began to shoot at a target. It was a card that I had stuck up on that mesquite; if you’ll look at the mesquite you’ll see where some o’ my lead plunked into it while I was shooting. I wasn’t shooting at anybody, nor dreaming o’ harmin’ anybody.
“Then these wild men jumped out at me, slingin’ their crazy lingo; and I’ve just waked up to the discovery that some o’ my lead must have went astray. They say I hit a woman. It’s the first time for me, Woods, and I’m sorry if it’s so. I didn’t know it, and didn’t mean it.”
Ben Woods looked at him intently.
“That sounds straight, anyway,” he said.
“It’s the truth, and the whole truth!” asserted Conover. “What would I want to be shootin’ a Mexican woman for, anyhow? Ask these chaps if the woman wasn’t in her house? I never seen her, and she must have been.”
The marshal turned to the Mexicans.
“Was the woman in her house?” he demanded fiercely.
They pressed forward and began to make excited statements; yet out of what they said he managed to extract the confession that this was so.