“And now he won’t talk to me, won’t even look at me, won’t let me come in here when he’s here. And nothing will ever make things right again, and I was so afraid you’d kill him, because he’s only a boy, and …”
I had to shut my eyes and pretend I had passed out to shut her up.
I must have slept some, because when I looked around again it was day, and Milk River was in the chair.
He stood up, not looking at me, his head hanging.
“I’ll be moving on, Chief, now that you’re coming around all right. I want you to know, though, that if I’d knowed what that—done to your gun I wouldn’t never have throwed down on you.”
“What was the matter with you, anyhow?” I growled at him.
His face got beet-color and he shuffled his feet.
“Crazy, I reckon,” he mumbled. “I had a couple of drinks, and then Bardell filled me full of stuff about you and her, and that you was playing me for a Chinaman. And—and I just went plumb loco, I reckon.”
“Any of it left in your system?”
“Hell, no, chief! I’d give a leg if none of it had never happened!”
“Then suppose you stop this foolishness and sit down and talk sense. Are you and the girl still on the outs?”
They were, most emphatically, most profanely.
“You’re a big boob!” I told him. “She’s a stranger out here, and homesick for her New York. I could talk her language and knew the people she knew. That’s all there was—”
“But that ain’t the big point, chief! Any woman that would pull a—”