Prisoner she must be--though why, Casey could only guess.
Perhaps she was some desert woman, the widow of some miner who had been shot as these three had tried to shoot him and Barney Oakes.

Mean, malevolent as they were, they would still lack the brutishness necessary to shoot an old woman.

So they had shut her up there in the rock hut, not daring to take her back to civilization where she would tell of the crime.

It was all plain enough to Casey.

The story of the crippled miner made him curl his lip contemptuously when his back was safely turned from Joe.
That day Casey thought much of the old woman in the hut, and of Paw's worse than inferior cooking.