Bob shook his head.
“I see him now, judge, as plain as can be, when he said, ‘Don’t force me to do you a mischief; we might both be sorry for it.’ But I pulled the trigger. His bullet is still in his rifle.
“When I saw him lie dead before me, I can’t tell you what I felt. It warn’t the first I had sent to his account; but yet I would have given all the purses and money in the world to have had him alive agin. I must have dragged him under the Patriarch, and dug a grave with my huntin’-knife, for I found him there afterwards.”
“You found him there?” repeated the judge.
“Yes. I don’t know how he came there. I must have brought him, but I recollect nothin’ about it.”
The judge had risen from his chair, and was walking up and down the room, apparently in deep thought. Suddenly he stopped short.
“What have you done with his money?”
“I took his purse, but buried his belt with him, as well as a flask of rum, and some bread and beef he had brought away from Johnny’s. I set out for San Felipe, and rode the whole day. In the evenin’, when I looked about me, expectin’ to see the town, where do you think I was?”
The judge and I stared at him.
“Under the Patriarch. The ghost of the murdered man had driven me there. I had no peace till I’d dug him up and buried him agin. Next day I set off in another direction. I was out of tobacco, and I started across the prairie to Anahuac. Lord, what a day I passed! Wherever I went, he stood before me. If I turned, he turned too. Sometimes he came behind me, and looked over my shoulder. I spurred my mustang till the blood came, hopin’ to get away from him, but it was all no use. I thought when I got to Anahuac I should be quit of him, and I galloped on for life or death. But in the evenin’, instead of being close to the salt-works as I expected, there was I agin, under the Patriarch. I dug him up a second time, and sat and stared at him, and then buried him agin.”