“I are ther Bad Man o’ ther Big Horn,” was the cool reply.
“Well, you do look as if you could get away with a big horn.”
“Look a-hyur, stranger pard, is yer pokin’ fun at me?” angrily asked the man.
“No, you are pokin’ that old gun at me,” was the cool response.
“Who is you, anyhow?” asked the man, struck with the superb bearing and handsome, fearless face of the scout.
“Sitting Bull,” answered Bill, most innocently.
“Like as not you are one of the renegades said to belong to his tribe,” was the bold remark of the scout.
“No, but I are friendly with ther Injuns.”
“That means you dare not live among your own race, for you look as though you might have been a white man once.”
The basilisk eyes of the stranger fairly blazed at this, and his brow grew dark with rage, while he answered quickly:
“Ef I are, yer’ll never live ter tell thet yer seen me.”
“I’ll stake that I do. Come, put up your money, or make no threats.”
“Waal, you is a bold one, and I’d like ter know yer handle.”
Instantly the man’s face changed again, growing livid with passion, while he hissed forth:
“When I am at home, that is my name,” was the reply, and Bill continued: “Now tell me your name, for the more I see of your face the more I feel we have met before.”
“What deviltry were you in when I saw you last, old man?”
“I’ll tell yer jist what I were doing then: It were a long time ago, and you was a mere boy then, and you was guide fer a train I went ter rob one night, and----”
“You are Ginger Sam, by Jove!” cried Buffalo Bill, recalling the man’s face, after nearly twenty years.
“I remember you now, you miserable old sinner, and how you and your gang hired as teamsters to the train and intended to massacre all hands one night and get the booty.”
“Thet’s so; but you overheard two o’ ther boys talkin’, and ther’ were hangin’ done by ther train people, and I’d hev gone ther same way if I hadn’ lit out. Yer thwarted me then, Bill Cody, and I’ve heerd o’ yer doin’ big things o’ late on these hyur borders, an’ I intend ter cut yer days short.”
“And I have heard how you played your old tricks of deviltry until you could not live in a border settlement, and here is where you came to hide your ugly head, was it?”
“You are a bad citizen, Ginger Sam,” said Bill Cody, with a light laugh, although the man still kept him covered with his revolver.