“Waugh!” whooped Nomad. “You’ll stir up an Injun uprisin’, ef ye do.”
“Vot iss makin’ me mad as hornedts,” declared the baron, “iss dot I ditn’t shoodt Penson vhen he smashed der lamp. Dot vos incriminal carelessness, vor I had a beadt on him.”
“If ye had, baron, you would be now deprivin’ yerself o’ much-needed excitement,” Nomad told him. “You couldn’t be huntin’ fer him right now, ef he war dead, could ye?”
“And you couldn’t be runnin’ the pleasant resk of him slammin’ a bullet into ye as you go along hyer,” added Shepard.
“Dot iss so,” the baron admitted. “I am t’inkin’, too, dot pefore ve gidt him ve vill pe having so mooch excidemendt as neffer vos.”
Between the town and the Indian village was a hill, which had some good hiding places in and around it.
This they searched, on their way back; though really they had begun to feel that perhaps Benson had hurriedly left the country.
Benson was in hiding on this hill, and he had seen them coming.
He was armed, and in a desperate frame of mind.
“So, they think they’ll surround me, and get me!” he snarled, when he saw Wild Bill and Shepard go in one direction, and the scout, with the others, in another direction. “There will be dead men here, if they crowd me.”