and Wunpost's trigger-finger relaxed. But it was not
pity, it was just an age-old feeling against shooting a man in a trap.
Or perhaps it was pride and the white man's instinct not to foul his
clean hands with butcher's blood. Wunpost wanted to kill him but he
stepped back instead and looked him in the eye.

"You rattlesnake-eyed dastard!" he hissed between his teeth and the
Indian began to beg. Wunpost listened to him coldly, his eyes bulging
with rage, and then he backed off and sat down.

"Who you working for?" he asked and as the Indian turned glum he rolled
a cigarette and waited. The jaws of the steel-trap had caught him by the
heel, stabbing their teeth through into the flesh, and in spite of his
stoicism the Indian rocked back and forth and his little eyes glinted
with the agony. Yet he would not talk and Wunpost went off and left him,
after gathering up his guns and the knife. There was something about
that butcher-knife and the way it was flung which roused all the evil in
Wunpost's heart and he meditated darkly whether to let the Indian go or
give him his just deserts. But first he intended to wring a confession
from him, and he left him to rattle his chain.

Wunpost cooked a hasty breakfast and fed and saddled his mules and then,
as the Indian began to shout for help, he walked down and glanced at him
inquiringly.

"You let me go!" ordered the Indian, drawing himself up arrogantly and
shaking the coarse hair from his eyes, and Wunpost laughed disdainfully.

"Who are you?" he demanded, "and what you doing over here? I know them
buckskin _tewas_--you're an Apache!"

"_Si_--Apache!" agreed the Indian. "I come over here--hunt sheep.
What for you settum trap?"

"Settum trap--ketch you," answered Wunpost succinctly. "You bad
Injun--maybeso I kill you. Who hired you to come over here and kill me?"

Again the sullen silence, the stubborn turn of the head, the suffering
compression of the lips; and Wunpost went back to his camp. The Indian
was an Apache, he had known it from the start by his _tewas_ and
the cut of his hair; for no Indian in California wears high-topped
buckskin moccasins with a little canoe-prow on the toe. That was a
mountain-Apache device, that little disc of rawhide, to protect the
wearer's toes from rocks and cactus, and someone had imported this buck.
Of course, it was Lynch but it was different to make him _say_
so--but Wunpost knew how an Apache would go about it. He would light a
lit