"I'd like to help you out, all right.

Maybe I'd better kill you, Bill; they _might_ stretch a point and call it manslaughter--and I could use the bounty to help pay a lawyer, if it ever come to a head as a trial." Whereat Bill almost wept.
Ford pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked away, sneering openly at Bill, the marshal, the jail, and the town which owned it, and at wives and matrimony and the world which held all these vexations.
He went straight to the shack, drank a cup of coffee, and packed everything he could find that belonged to him and was not too large for easy carrying on horseback; and when Sandy, hovering uneasily around him, asked questions, he told him briefly to go off in a corner and lie down; which advice Sandy understood as an invitation to mind his own affairs.
Like Bill, Sandy could have wept at the ingratitude of this man.

But he asked no more questions and he made no more objections.

He picked up the story of the unpronounceable count who owned the castle in the Black Forest and had much tribulation and no joy until the last chapter, and when Ford went out, with his battered, sole-leather suitcase and his rifle in its pigskin case, he kept his pale eyes upon his book and refused even a grunt in response to Ford's grudging: "So long, Sandy.".