Tim Benson sat thinking over this, forming his crafty plans. He knew now that Buffalo Bill would “get” him unless he could hurl a force against the scout’s party and crush it. That force might be the Utes.
“I’ve got the whisky,” he announced, “and I’ll go in with you in this thing; it will make for the safety of both of us. I’ve been using the Ute village as a hide-out on more than one occasion, and have found it a mighty good place. But Cody has brought up Matt Shepard, the sheriff, with a posse, and gone all through it, more than once recently. And he’ll do it again. The Utes are afraid of the sheriff and his posse; though without that posse backing him they wouldn’t stand it. Iron Bow told me the last time I was with him that he couldn’t hide me again; he’s afraid Shepard will lug him off to the Blossom Range jail. So it’s not that the old scamp ain’t willing enough to hide me; and he wants the whisky I give him for it.”
“Where do ye keep this whisky? Git it in the town every time?”
“I used to. Lately I had a burro load cached in the hills, as a thing to fall back on, if I wasn’t able to get it in the town. Ye see, I didn’t dare take it all to the Utes at once, and didn’t want to. The most of it is in that cache now, in bottles.”
“Wow!”
“How does it hit you?”
“Great!”
“My idea is this; and you can tell if it will work. Give enough of that stuff of yours, in that whisky, to a lot of the warriors, and get them into a bloody humor; then make them think that Buffalo Bill’s crowd is out here to make trouble for ’em. It ought to send them out against Cody’s gang red-headed.”
The apelike man gurgled what he probably thought was a laugh.
“It’d do it.”