“Thar—thar!” he said. “That’s all right; he ain’t hyer now.”
She stared round.
“He cut out,” he said; “but he tuck the nuggets I got out o’ that pocket in the mine yisterday.”
“He didn’t shoot you?” Buffalo Bill asked her, as he again looked at the wound and the caked blood round it. “It resembles a pistol wound.”
“He hit me with a pistol, I think,” she averred. “I reckon it was the pistol hammer done it.”
“Very likely.”
As Juniper Joe still showed an unwillingness to get help, Buffalo Bill soon left the cabin, and sent a physician, whose office he passed on his hurried way back to the town.
“Of course, the hammer of a pistol could have made that wound,” he thought; “but to me it looked mightily like a bullet wound, made some hours before, though it had bled rather recently.”
He could not get away from the thoughts suggested by Jackson Dane’s declaration that Juniper Joe and his wife were the two who had played road agents and corraled the treasure guarded by the baron and the prospectors.