“Oh, I forgot her! I must have been excited.”
“You prob’ly would be,” agreed Hashknife. “What I want you to do right now is to tell me all about ownin’ this dog.”
“Oh, yes, about the dog,” Jimmy jerked nervously at the sound of a noise outside the patio gate, but it was only Apollo, rubbing his shoulder against the wall.
Jimmy sighed deeply.
“I suppose that was a dirty trick. But when I found out that—that the dog was supposed to belong to a robber, I was afraid to claim him. He ran away from me that night in Blue Wells, you see.”
And then James Eaton Legg went ahead and told them about his experience with the express messenger. Hashknife grinned, when Jimmy told of that battle in the express car, and of how the messenger had described him as being a big, burly man, who tried to draw a gun.
“His lyin’ saves you a lot of trouble,” said Hashknife, when Jimmy had finished his tale. “He didn’t want anybody to think he had been whipped by a smaller man.”
“I suppose so; but I’ll go to town and tell ’em that the dog belongs to me. I might as well shoulder it all now.”
“I wish yuh wouldn’t,” said Hashknife. “Let things ride as they are for a while. If they arrest yuh for shootin’ the deputy, mebbe yuh can make a self-defense out of it. Yuh say that the AK boys saw it? They’ll prob’ly alibi yuh, ’cause they don’t like the sheriff. Under the circumstances a man could lie a little and not bend his conscience too much.”
“Yuh should have stayed and seen the finish,” said Sleepy. “It would ’a’ looked better.”