He bent and looked at them.  Then he rubbed the places with his fingertips and examined the skin.  A stain had come away from the rock.  It was as if the rocks had been rubbed with lead or a soft iron.  And then, strangely, into the mind of Bull came the memory of what the hotel man had said of the sheriff’s iron-shod heels.

The sheriff had gone for many a year hating Armstrong.  The truth rushed over the brain of the big man.  What a chance for a crafty mind!  To kill his enemy and place the blame on the shoulders of one already known to be a man-killer!  Bull Hunter leaped from the rocks and started back for the town with long, ground-devouring strides.

CHAPTER 8

There were two reasons for the happiness which lightened the step of Bull Hunter as he strode back for the town.  In the first place he saw a hope of liberating Reeve from jail and accomplishing his own mission of killing the man.  In the second place he felt a peculiar joy at the thought of freeing such a man from the imputation of a cowardly murder.

Yet he had small grounds for his hopes.  Two little dark marks on the white, friable stone, marks that the first small shower of rain would wash away, marks that the first keen sandstorm would rub off—­this was his only proof.  And with this to free one man from danger of the rope and place the head of another under the noose—­it was a task to try the resources of a cleverer man than Bull.

Indeed, the high spirits of Bull in some measure left him as he drew nearer and nearer to the village.  How could he convict the sheriff?  How, with his clumsy wits and his clumsy tongue, could he bring the truth to light?  Had he possessed the keen eyes of his uncle he felt that a single glance would have made the guilt stand up in the face of Anderson.  But his own eyes, alas, were dull and clouded.

Thoughtfully, with bowed head, he held his course.  A strange picture, surely, this man who so devoutly wished to free another from the danger of the law in order that he might take a life into his own hands.  But the contrast did not strike home to Bull.  To him everything that he did was as clear as day.  But how to go to work?  If the man were like himself it would be an easy matter.  More than once he remembered how his cousins had shifted the blame for their own boyish pranks upon him.  In the presence of their father they would accuse Bull with a well-planned lie, and the very fact that he had been accused made Bull blush and hang his head.  Before he could be heard in his own behalf the cruel eye of his uncle had grown stern, and Bull was condemned as a culprit.

“The only time you show any sense,” his uncle had said more than once, “is when you want to do something you hadn’t ought to do!”

Steadily through the years he had served as a scapegoat for his cousins.  They set a certain value upon him for his use in this respect.  Ah, if only he had that keen, embarrassing eye of Bill Campbell with which to pierce to the guilty heart of the sheriff and make him speak!  The eye of his uncle was like the eye of a crowd.  It was an audience in itself and condemned or praised with the strength of numbers.