Don’t ask me. I don’t know what there was between them. That was before my time. A woman probably--a woman’s generally blamed anyhow. Anyway, one night Perley got the drop on Breed and marched him down the street in front of his pistol and out of the town. After that, Clancy kept away from Big Cloud. As I say, that part was before my time. I only know there was bad blood between them; wicked bad blood on one side, as you’ll see. Clancy disappeared from Big Cloud, and the two didn’t foul each other again until Coyote Bend started. Breed Clancy hit the Bend with the first inrush of the miners, and before any of them had time to much more than get a pick into the ground he was busy knocking together a bit of a shack he called a hotel, and was ordering the furnishings--liquid furnishings, you understand--from Big Cloud. There were three barrels of it, the hardest kind of fire water that ever went into the mountains waybilled to Clancy at Coyote Bend by the local, on the first trip that Charlie Lee ever made with Matt Perley. I’m getting back to Lee now, you see. Well, it was about noon when they whistled for the Bend that day, and Lee, riding the brake wheels on the front end, could see about a dozen “blankets” squatting alongside the right of way about where the train would stop. Grouped behind these were a number of stragglers from the camp, among whom was a big fellow in a red shirt you could see farther than a semaphore arm. Now, I don’t say those Indians were attracted by the gold rush to Coyote Bend. Coyote Bend, or any other place, old or new, stale or prosperous, would get its share of the redskins. Where they came from or where they went nobody knew. They’d drop in from nowhere, and, if they liked the place, they’d grunt and settle down for a spell; if they didn’t like it, they’d grunt, in benediction or otherwise, and leave. I’m not saying they smelled the whisky in that train. I’m not saying they knew Clancy was importing fire water, and they were just there to feast their eyes on the barrels and meditate on what was inside. I’m not saying anything at all about that, or what followed. There’s only one man that perhaps might have explained it---I say “perhaps” because he never did; and also, because he knew Indian nature as well as any white man in the West. That was Perley. Whether Perley even knew that Clancy was at the Bend or not, I don’t know. I only know that he could have known it if he’d bothered to read the waybills; and it was likewise on the cards that he might have learned the day before, down at Big Cloud, that the whisky was going up the following morning. I don’t know, and that’s straight. Sometimes I think he did; sometimes I think he didn’t. I don’t know.