"There ain't no thinkin' 'bout it," Caribou answered with asperity. "When I see my boots I don't think they're mine, I just most natur'ly figger they are and pull 'em on. I'd know that dun-colored rat if I see him in a wild herd."
"And yet," Carney objected in an even tone, "this isn't the cayuse that Johnson toted out his duffel from the Eagle Hills on."
A cackle issued from Kootenay Jim's long, scraggy neck:
"That settles it, boys; Bulldog passes the buck and the game's over. Caribou is just an ord'nary liar, 'cordin' to Judge Carney."
"Caribou is perfectly honest in his belief," Carney declared. "There isn't more than half a dozen colors for horses, and there are a good many thousand horses in this territory, so a great many of them are the same color. And the general structure of different cayuses is as similar as so many wheelbarrows. That brand on his shoulder may be a C, or a new moon, or a flapjack."
He turned to Caribou: "What brand had Fourteen-foot's cayuse?"
"I don't know," the old chap answered surlily, "but it was there same place it's restin' now—it ain't shifted none since you fingered it."
"That won't do, boys," Carney said; "if Caribou can't swear to a horse's brand, how can he swear to the beast?"
"And if Fourteen-foot'd come back and stand up here and swear it was his hawse, that wouldn't do either, would it, Bulldog?" And Kootenay cackled.
"Johnson wouldn't say so—he'd know better. His cayuse had a club foot, an inturned left forefoot. I picked it up, here and there, for miles back on the trail, sometimes fair on top of Johnson's big boot track, and sometimes Johnson's were on top when he travelled behind."