Five minutes, ten minutes, he stood there, staring across the level bit of valley lying quiet at the foot of the jagged-rimmed bluff standing boldly up against the star-flecked sky. Then he shook himself impatiently, muttered something which had to do with a "doddering fool," and retraced his steps quickly through the orchard, the currant bushes, and the strawberry patch, jumped the ditch, and so entered the grove and returned to his blankets.
"We thought the spook had got yuh, sure." Gene lifted his head turtlewise and laughed deprecatingly. "We was just about ready to start out after the corpse, only we didn't know but what you might get excited and take a shot at us in the dark. We heard yuh shoot--what was it? Did you find out?"
"It wasn't anything," said Grant shortly, tugging at a boot.
"Ah--there was, too! What was it you shot at?" Clark joined in the argument from the blackness under the locust tree.
"The moon," Grant told him sullenly. "There wasn't anything else that I could see."
"And that's a lie," Gene amended, with the frankness of a foster-brother. "Something yelled like--"
"You never heard a screech-owl before, did you, Gene?" Grant crept between his blankets and snuggled down, as if his mind held nothing more important than sleep.
"Screech-owl my granny! You bumped into something you couldn't handle--if you want to know what I think about it," Clark guessed shrewdly. "I wish now I'd taken the trouble to hunt the thing down; it didn't seem worth while getting up. But I leave it to Gene if you ain't mad enough to murder whatever it was. What was it?"
He waited a moment without getting a reply.
"Well, keep your teeth shut down on it, then, darn yuh!" he growled. "That's the Injun of it--I know YOU! Screech-owl--huh! You said when you left it was an Indian--and that's why we didn't take after it ourselves. We don't want to get the whole bunch down on us like they are on you--and if there was one acting up around here, we knew blamed well it was on your account for what happened to-day. I guess you found out, all right. I knew the minute you heaved in sight that you was just about as mad as you can get--and that's saying a whole lot. If it WAS an Indian, and you killed him, you better let us--"
"Oh, for the lord's sake, WILL YOU SHUT UP!" Grant raised to an elbow, glared a moment, and lay down again.
The result proved the sort of fellow he was. Clark shut up without even trailing off into mumbling to himself, as was his habit when argument brought him defeat.