"It's a damn lie! I was up in the mountains and don't know nothin' about it."
"You were standing at that back window of the police shack when Seth and Hadley were playing alone, and when you shot Seth you were smooth enough not to open the front door for fear some one might be coming and see you, but jumped from the back window."
Carney took from his pocket the paper templet he had made of the tracks in the mud.
"I see from the soles of your gum-shoe packs that this gets you." He held it up.
"It's all a damned pack of lies, Bulldog; you've been chewin' your own hop. Who's goin' to swaller that guff?"
Carney had expected this. He knew Tacoma was of the determined one-idea type; lacking absolute eye-witness evidence he would deny complicity even with a rope around his neck. He realized that with the valley lying twenty feet deep in snow he couldn't take Tacoma to Bucking Horse; in fact with him that was not the real desired point. If Carney had been a Mounted Policeman the honor of the force would have demanded that he give up his life trying to land his prisoner; but he was a private individual, trying to keep clean the name of a woman he had a high regard for—Jeanette Holt. He wanted a written confession from this man. Bringing in the stolen money and the cards wouldn't be enough; it might be said that he, himself, had taken these two things and returned them.
Even the punishment of Tacoma didn't interest him vitally. Two thieves had combined to rob a stranger, and over a division of the spoil one had been killed—it was not, vitally, Carney's funeral.
Now to gain the confession he stretched a point, saying:
"They believe Seth Long. He says you shot him." Startled out of his cunning, Tacoma blundered: "That's a damn lie—Seth's as dead's a herrin'!"
"How do you know, Tacoma?" and Carney smiled.