"Yes!"
"Ted, I swear that you're more excited than I am!"
_Ted scarcely heard. He was here, beside Glory Rock, the day after Smoky
Delbert was shot. Damon and Pythias, always together, and a deer so
badly wounded that it couldn't possibly go on. Damon hadn't gone on.
Only Pythias had. Hurt but not mortally, he had left enough blood on the
leaves to convince Ted that there'd been only one deer._
"When do you suppose he picked that one up?" John Wilson asked.
"I don't know."
_Carl Thornton, who got what he wanted, had decided to get Damon and
Pythias himself._
"He's darn' near as big as a horse," Wilson said.
"Sure is."
_A horse, a friendly, easily caught horse, that had gone down Coon
Valley that night with Damon on its back, then been released to go back
up it._
"You certainly know how to field-dress a buck."
"I've done it before."
_Smoky Delbert, happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thornton couldn't afford to be found out. Smoky would blackmail him._
_Thornton paying Delbert's hospital bills._
"Did I hit him square?"
"A good neck shot."
_Factory-loaded ammunition that almost never failed to mushroom.
Hand-loaded cartridges that might fail._
John Wilson fumbled in his pocket. "Doggone, I seem to have lost my
pipe."
_Al, forever losing his tobacco pouch, had gone to see Carl Thornton the
day Thornton fired Ted._
Ted wiped his knife blade on the snow, stood up and sheathed his knife.
He looped a length of rope around the great buck's antlers.
"He'll be easy to get out of here," he said.
12