“He got in here one night, me being his best friend, and we talked it over.  I advised him to go down and give himself up and have it over; and he agreed, and went down to Red Gap the next day in his new clothes and knocked at the jail door.  He made a long talk about how his brother-in-law was the man that really done it, and he’s been searching for him clear over to the rising sun, but can’t find him; so he’s come to give himself up, even if they ain’t got the least grounds to suspect him—­and can he have his trial for murder over that afternoon, so he can come back up here the next day and go to work?

“They locked him up and Judge Ballard appointed J. Waldo Snyder to defend him.  He was a new young lawyer from the East that had just come to Red Gap, highly ambitious and full of devices for showing that parties couldn’t have been in their right mind when they committed the deed—­see the State against Jamstucker, New York Reports Number 23, pages 19 to 78 inclusive.

“Oh, he told me all about it up in his office one day—­how he was going to get Pete off.  Ain’t lawyers the goods, though!  And doctors?  This J.W.  Snyder had a doctor ready to swear that Pete was nutty when he fired the shot, even if not before nor after.  When I was a kid at school, back in Fredonia, New York State, we used to have debates about which does the most harm—­fire or water?  Nowadays I bet they’d have:  Which does the most harm—­doctors or lawyers?  Well, anyway, there Pete was in jail—­”

“Please tell in your own simple words just how this trouble began,” I broke in.  “What did Pete fire the shot for and who stopped it?  Now then!”

“What!  Don’t you know about that?  Well, well!  So you never heard about Pete sending this medicine man over the one-way trail?  I’ll have to tell you, then.  It was three years ago.  Pete was camped about nine miles the other side of Kulanche, on the Corporation Ranch, and his little year-old boy was took badly sick.  I never did know with what.  Diphtheria, I guess.  And I got to tell you Pete is crazy about babies.  Always has been.  Thirty years ago, when my own baby hadn’t been but a few weeks born, Lysander John had to be in Red Gap with a smashed leg and arm, and I was here alone with Pete for two months of one winter.  Say, he was better than any trained nurse with both of us, even if my papoose was only a girl one!  Folks used to wonder afterward if I hadn’t been afraid with just Pete round.  Good lands!  If they’d ever seen him cuddle that mite and sing songs to it in Injin about the rain and the grass!  Anyway, I got to know Pete so well that winter I never blamed him much for what come off.