Ralston nodded his head in mingled satisfaction and regret. So the thief was working from the MacDonald ranch! Did the Indian woman know, he wondered. Was it possible that Susie was in ignorance? With all his heart, he hoped she was. He walked leisurely to the house and leaned against the jamb of the kitchen door.
"Have the makings, Ling?" He passed his tobacco-sack and paper to the cook.
"Sure!" said Ling jauntily. "I like 'em cigilette."
And as they smoked fraternally together, they talked of food and its preparation--subjects from which Ling's thoughts seldom wandered far. When the advantages of soda and sour milk over baking powder were thoroughly exhausted as a topic, Ralston asked casually:
"Who killed your last beef, Ling? It's hard to beat."
"Yellow Bird," he replied. "Him good butcher."
"Yes," Ralston agreed; "I should say that Yellow Bird was an uncommonly good butcher."
So, after all, it was the Indians who were killing. Ralston sauntered on to the bunk-house to think it over.
"Tubbs," McArthur was saying, as he eyed that person with an interest which he seldom bestowed upon his hireling, "you really have a most remarkable skull."
"It's claimed that it's double by people what have tried to work me over. Onct I crawled in a winder and et up a batch of 'son-of-a-gun-in-a-sack' that the feller who lived there had jest made. He come in upon me suddent, and the way he hammered me over the head with the stove-lifter didn't trouble _him_, but," declared Tubbs proudly, "he never even knocked me to my knees."
"It is of the type of dolichocephalic," mused McArthur.
"A barber told me that same thing the last time I had a hair-cut," observed Tubbs blandly. "'Tubbs,' says he, 'you ought to have a massaj every week, and lay the b'ar-ile on a-plenty.'"
"It is remarkably suggestive of the skulls found in the ancient paraderos of Patagonia. Very similar in contour--very similar."
"There's no Irish in me," Tubbs declared with a touch of resentment. "I'm pure mungrel--English and Dutch."
"It is an extremely curious skull--most peculiar." He felt of Tubbs's head with growing interest. "This bump behind the ear, if the system of phrenology has any value, would indicate unusual pugnacity."