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So with this assurance of good-will we picketed our horses close by the circle of wagons where we could get to them quickly should any of Lessard's troop happen into the camp and prepared to devour the supper Horner's good-natured cook bestirred himself to make ready.
Stone who, I learned, was the wife of Lessard's favorite captain and thither I rambled, wishing mightily for a good stiff jolt out of the keg that Piegan Smith and Mac had clashed over. But if there was any bottled nerve-restorer around Fort Walsh it was tucked away in the officers' cellars, and not for the benefit of the common herd; so I had to fall back on a cigarette.
I thanked the star of destiny then and there that no Mounted Police officer had a string attached to me, by which he could force me to speak or be silent at his will. It was a dirty piece of business on Lessard's part. Even Dobson eyed him wonderingly. "Why, damn it!" Lessard finally burst out, "you've handled this like a green one, fresh from over the water.
MacRae would have shot him dead in his tracks if he'd tried to reach a weapon. But a man who is really game which no one who knew him could deny MacRae won't, can't shoot down another unless that other shows fight; and a knowledge of that gun-fighters' trait saved Major Lessard's hide from being thoroughly punctured that day. "Give me your side-arms, sergeant," he said, nervously.
Lyn substantiated Goodell's story in every detail, so far as it had dealt with her, and she told me, while we pottered about the fire, how she waited her chance when they made camp in Sage Creek, and, snatching Lessard's gun, ran for it in the dark. "I didn't really know where I was," she told me naively. "So I thought I'd better hide till daylight and watch them go before I started.
A little later Bat spread a bed for me on the kitchen floor, and I turned in. But my sleep resolved itself into a series of cat-naps. When the first sunbeam gleamed through the window of Bat's tiny kitchen, I arose, pulled on my boots and went to feed my horse. And when we had eaten breakfast I headed straight for Lessard's private quarters.
I had disliked that big, autocratic major, too, from our first meeting, but it was pure instinctive antipathy on my part, sharpened, perhaps, by his outrageous treatment of MacRae. We dropped the subject forthwith. Lessard's relation to the problem was a subject we had so far shied around. It was beside the point to indulge in footless theory.
No man is supposed, as MacRae had pointed out to me after we'd held up those three troopers, to inflict a compound fracture on one law in his efforts to preserve another. But it had been necessary for us to do so, and we had justified our judgment in playing a lone hand and upsetting Lessard's smoothly conceived plan to lay us by the heels while he and his thugs got away with the plunder.
Mac loomed up in the general blur with Lessard's body on his horse, as I led the others back to where Piegan stood guard over Bevans. "Ain't this hell!" he coughed. "That fire's right on top of us. We got t' make the river in a hurry." It was another minute's work to lash Gregory's body on one of the pack-horses, and release the sullen Bevans from the weight of his dead mount.
Once out of the official atmosphere, I hesitated over my next move. Lessard's high-handed squelching of MacRae had thrown everything out of focus. We'd planned to report at headquarters, see Lyn, if she were at Walsh, and then with Pend d' Oreille as a base of operations go on a still hunt for whatever the Writing-Stone might conceal.
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