Sleepy moved back slightly, his right hand brushing over his gun-butt.
‘He was drunk when he left here,’ said Bert Roddy. ‘He must ’a’ rode off the grade. Poor old Briggs.’
‘Do yuh think he shot himself and then choked himself to death with the rope?’ asked Hashknife slowly.
‘Oh, I forgot that,’ said Bert. ‘He couldn’t have done all that, Hartley.’
‘Sounds foolish,’ said Dave Morgan.
‘The body is down there in a cave to prove it.’
‘Oh, I’m not disputin’ yore word, Hartley.’
‘And last night,’ said Hashknife slowly, ‘somebody shot Rex Morgan’s horse on the Coyote Cañon grade, while him and Nan Lane was ridin’ to Cañonville. They kept shootin’, and drove the kid and the girl over the edge, where they slid all the way to the bottom. God only knows how they lived.[’]
‘I reckon they had a hell of a time. Briggs was down there, crazy as a loon. He stuck ’em up with a gun and took the girl to a cave; but the kid follered and whipped Briggs, knockin’ him out cold. I reckon it bumped Briggs’s head pretty hard, ’cause he didn’t wake up the last they saw of him.[’]
‘But they never roped him.’