The scout, however, proceeded to explain to him just what the situation meant. The boy’s eyes sparkled as he listened.
“Cayuse make um ride back plenty good time, hey?” he asked. “Buenos! Me like um.”
“Why did you come back?” the scout asked.
“Wild Bill say Cayuse come, make um stay ’long with Perry and white squaw. Him say tell um Pa-e-has-ka we find um trail, mebbyso follow um trail all night. Ugh!”
“I see. Wild Bill thinks he may be all night running out the trail, and if I got back from town he wanted me to know that he thought he was meeting with some success. Put out your pinto, Cayuse, and we’ll go into the house. There’ll be some preparations to be made, Perry,” he added to the rancher while the Piute boy was attending to Navi.
“It won’t take long to make the preparations,” returned the rancher. “From the looks of things, I shouldn’t wonder if Nate and Hattie were already making preparations.”
A wooden shutter closed over one of the cabin windows, on the side facing the corral.
“Those shutters,” went on Perry, “are bullet-proof. Nate rigged them up when we first began having trouble with the barons. I never thought we’d have to use them in helping to keep a mob of lynchers away from Nate.”
The scout caught the discouraged note in the rancher’s voice.
“There’ll be no lynching,” said he, with a resolute snap of the jaws, “even if there are lynchers coming. Rest assured of that. I have a little authority from the United States Government, and I’ll use it.”