“Aye,” he said darkly, and a long pause ensued. “It was me or him,” he went on, in a cold, even, passionless voice. “An’ my way o’ thinkin’ an’ actin’ at such show-downs is th’ same, I reckon, as old Israel Hands’—a certain gentleman o’ fortune in a book I guess yu’ve never read, Barney.... ‘Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them’s my views—amen, so be it.’ ... He had his chance, anyway, an’ he left me his card, which I’ll pack to my grave,” he ended significantly, touching the scar.
The flies began to buzz around the carcass and the steady “munch, munch” of the feeding horses sounded in their ears, whilst the sun, blazing hotly down upon them without the mercy of a cooling breeze, sent up little shimmering heat-waves from the sagebrush-dotted parched ground. Shorty presently found his voice again.
“Sargint,” he began, with a certain surly respect that it was noticeable had hitherto been omitted, “d’yu’ mind me askin’ yu’ a question?”
Ellis glanced at him indifferently, his deep-set gray eyes wide with their peculiar, aggressive blank stare.
“Go ahead—what is it?” he said.
Shorty licked his dry lips. “Was it Jules le Frambois as told yu’ ’bout—?”
“No,” interrupted Ellis irritably. “Jules told me nothin’, an’ I asked him nothin’; an’ what’s more, I’d see yu’ an’ him ten fathoms deep in h—l before I’d suck up any of yu’ Ghost River crooks’ cursed lies.”
“Were it George Fisk, then—or Scotty Robbins?” the other pursued.
A puzzling, suspicious thought suddenly flashed into the policeman’s alert brain at the man’s persistence, and instantly his face became an inscrutable mask.
“Now yu’re talkin’,” he answered meaningly.