Then Falcon the Flunky took the glass and looked.
“I guess that’s the sheriff riding with three others in the direction taken by those two who galloped off,” was his first report. “They’re not hurrying, though. And now the others are getting their horses out of the corral. Here they come straight toward us—all in a bunch. M’m-m! I’d say everybody’s crazy down there!”
A sniffle.
“Cheer up! Cheer up! So long as they’re hunting over the desert there’s the chance of another of your messages being found. We’ll sit here and watch while they’re in sight. Maybe we can find out what they’re up to.”
“If we d-don’t we’re likely to starve,” the girl said sobbingly, wretched over the defeat of her clever plans.
The tents of the Jeddos that had been swept down by the wind were up again. Jeddo the Crow had slept throughout the greater part of the storm, and when conscious again had been in no condition to return to his camp from Stlingbloke to help repair the damage. Consequently he managed to get drunk again and forgot it.
On the slender shoulders of Wing o’ the Crow, then, had descended in violence one catastrophe after another. Her father was incapacitated, and she was in charge of the work as well as cook and dishwasher for the outfit. Halfaman had been arrested on suspicion of highway robbery and the killing of a man. On her hands he had left extra stock to be cared for, with no one to do it or to work them and make them earn their keep. Her friend, Manzanita, and The Falcon were fugitives in the mountains. Then the storm had swooped down and devastated the camp. And Wing o’ the Crow was only a girl of twenty-two.
Nevertheless the tents were up again, and everything was put to rights. Out on the job the few men at her command were following the teams, with the most dependable one among them acting as foreman. Stolidly the girl cooked for them, fed and watered the extra teams, and then went out to help with the dirt moving, dully wondering if ever there would be an end to her calamities.
Then the tide of her fortunes suddenly began to change.
To this wonderful little black-eyed girl at noon came Fred Glenn, sheriff, with three deputies, on horseback.