“I know it. It will ruin him, and I want it to ruin him. That’s why I’m telling you about it; that it may ruin him. I hope it will tear the stripes from his uniform and send him to jail. And it will!”
He walked nervously about the room.
“Better sit down and tell me this quietly,” said the scout. “I’d advise you not to shout it out of the windows. And walls have ears, you know.”
“It doesn’t matter who hears me now,” said Wilkins excitedly. “I wish these walls had a thousand ears, and a thousand tongues to tell the story!”
He strode up and down the room in a very fury of excited anger.
“It ruins me, of course, but it will ruin him, and that’s what I want. He is so high now, in the opinion of the colonel, but this will drag him down.”
“Quiet yourself and tell me the story,” said Buffalo Bill.
“As I said, he stole that nugget from the colonel, and by listening under the colonel’s window he heard its story, and knows that there are many more like it.”
“Ah! He knows that?”
“And he knows where they are; in the Moonlight Mountains, far to the southwest, on the borders of New Mexico.”