Before he went on with his story the clerk of the hotel returned to the office, and some other men came in at the clerk’s heels. They ranged themselves by the bar, where one or two of them called for liquor, which the clerk dispensed from a long-necked, black bottle.
“What Tom Conover told me maybe amounts to something,” said the marshal, “and maybe it don’t; but you’re entitled to know it, and it may help. It’s this: About twenty or thirty years ago, he said, a child was missin’ in jest about this same way. Skyline wasn’t standin’ here at that time. The kidnapin’ was done south o’ here, at the old ’Doby Wells, where a settler had pitched his shack and was trying to live. Injuns swung down from the mountains and run off with the kid; they didn’t massacree, nor burn the house, nor they didn’t make any ginral raid; they jest snatched up the kid and hit the trail for the mountains.”
“And what became of the child?”
“Well, if anybody knows, I don’t; Conover didn’t seem to. He jest remembered that. But he said he recalled that when it was done there was talk around to the effect that every twenty or thirty years them hill Injuns did a trick like that; what for I don’t know, and I reckon nobody don’t. My idea, though, if I was put to it, is that if the thing ever really happened, it was for a sacrifice of some kind.”
The scout smoked in silence as Woods talked.
“Anything else?” he said, when Woods stopped.
“That’s about all; only Conover was inclined to the theory that it was the work of old Fire Top, and so was we; I mean this present case was the work of that old heathen, we thought. Why he thought it I don’t know, and he never said. He’d been boozing, as I’ve told you, and whether he really knowed what he was talkin’ about or not I can’t say. But there you have it.”
“What else?” the scout asked again, when the marshal once more subsided behind his cloud of smoke.
“I reckon there ain’t anything else, that I know of.”
“Why did you think it was the work of old Fire Top?”