“I guess he thinks I paid him; but for a while he prob’bly wasn’t in a condition to appreciate it. We left him layin’ there in the snow. When we had started off, we saw him crawl to his feet and stagger int’ the buildin’.” Bully laughed gleefully. “He sure was lookin’ sick!”
“And this young Hindu went away with ye?”
“He went as far as the street corner beyond the parade ground. And I didn’t see him again until we was both of us hauled up before the officers, here, charged with puttin’ Merriwell in that trunk and tryin’ to kill him.”
“How did he git into that trunk?” the elder Carson demanded. “You said it was Kadir Dhin’s!”
“Blessed if I know how he did git into it!” Bully declared. “Jest between you and me, dad, it looks like Kadir Dhin went back there to the barracks and mebby found him in a faint from that lickin’, and put him in. But Kadir Dhin says he didn’t. Merriwell told the officers that after he got to his room he fainted, and that when he came to he was here in Carsonville, and he didn’t know, himself, how ’twas done. Kadir Dhin told the officers that he didn’t go back to the barracks at all, after leaving me at the corner; but that after a while he went down to the station, and when he saw the trunk there he looked at it, wonderin’ whose it was, as it looked so much like his, and had no marks on it.
“And it was right there,” said Bully, “when he wasn’t being believed, and the thing would have been cinched on him, that Colonel Gunn came popping in to his rescue, with the most amazing yarn ye ever listened to.”
“I think I heard some o’ that; but you go over it, for mebby I didn’t git it straight. Seems to me, Bully, you was mighty reckless all along, and it’s a wonder to me y’ ain’t in the jail.”
He was looking at Bully closely; his brows were furrowed, and the half-humorous light had faded out of his eyes. He was again pulling at his yellow-gray goatee, this time nervously.
“Colonel Gunn said,” Bully explained, “that a Hindu soldier who had killed the girl’s father in France was known to be somewhere around here, and once before had tried to carry her off; and ’twas his belief that this Hindu had got into the barracks.