The boy told the story of that man-hunt without a suspicion that there was anything in it to outrage the feelings of the girl.

“If it hadn’t been for old Nance Cunningham, I reckon Devil Dave an’ his brothers would have fixed up some cock an’ bull story about how ’Lindy was drowned by accident.  But folks heard Nance an’ then wouldn’t believe a word they said.  Dad swore us Clantons to wipe out the whole clan of ‘em.  Every last man in the hills that was decent got to cussin’ the Roush outfit.  Their own friends turned their backs on all three.  Then the sheriff come up from the settlemint an’ they jest naturally lit out.

“I heerd tell they were in Arizona an’ after dad died I took after ’em.  But seemed like I had no luck.  When I struck their trail they had always just gone.  To-day I got Ranse—­leastways I would’a’ got him if yore brother hadn’t interfered.  I’ll meet up with the others one o’ these times.  I’ll git ’em too.”

He spoke with quiet conviction, as if it were a business matter that had to be looked after.

“Did you ever hear this:  ’Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’?”

He nodded.  “Dad used to read that to me.  There’s a heap in the Bible about killin’ yore enemies.  Dad said that vengeance verse meant that we-all was the Lord’s deputies, like a sheriff has folks to help him, an’ we was certainly to repay the Roushes an’ not to forgit interest neither.”

The girl shook her head vigorously.  “I don’t think that’s what it means at all.  If you’ll read the verses above and below, you’ll see it doesn’t.  We’re to feed our enemies when they are hungry.  We’re to do them good for evil.”

“That’s all right for common, every-day enemies, but the Roush clan ain’t that kind,” explained the boy stubbornly.  “It shore is laid on me to destroy ’em root an’ branch, like the Bible says.”

By the way he wagged his head he might have been a wise little old man.  The savage philosophy of the boy had been drawn in with his mother’s milk.  It had been talked by his elders while as a child he drowsed before the big fireplace on winter nights.  After his sister’s tragic death it had been driven home by Bible texts and by a solemn oath of vengeance.  Was it likely that anything she could say would have weight with him?  For the present the girl gave up her resolve to convert him to a more Christian point of view.

The sun had sunk behind the canon wall when Pierre Roubideau arrived with a travois which he had hastily built.  There was no wagon-road up the gulch and it would have been difficult to get the buckboard in as far as the fork over the broken terrain.  As a voyageur of the North he had often seen wounded men carried by the Indians in travois across the plains.  He knew, too, that the tribes of the Southwest use them.  This one was constructed of two sixteen-foot poles with a canvas lashed from one bar to the other.  The horse was harnessed between the ends of the shafts, the other ends dragging on the ground.