Art sat looking at her with a queer intensity. "Your father!" he repeated. "Aleck! I never knew that, Jean. Take my word, I never knew that!" He seemed to be thinking pretty fast. "Where's Carl at?" he asked irrelevantly.
"Uncle Carl? He's home, running both ranches. I—I never could make Uncle Carl see that you must have been the one."
"Been the one that shot Crofty, you mean?" Art gave a short laugh. He got up and stood in front of her. "Thanks, awfully. Good reason why he couldn't see it! He knows well enough I didn't do it. He knows—who did." He bit his lips then, as if he feared that he had said too much.
"Uncle Carl knows? Then why doesn't he tell? It wasn't dad!" Jean took a defiant step toward him. "Art Osgood, if you dare say it was dad, I—I'll kill you!"
Art smiled at her with a brief lightening of his eyes. "I believe you would, at that," he said soberly. "But it wasn't your dad, Jean."
"Who was it?"
"I—don't—know."
"You do! You do know, Art Osgood! And you ran off; and they gave dad eight years—"
Art spoke one word under his breath, and that word was profane. "I don't see how that could be," he said after a minute.
Jean did not answer. She was biting her lips to keep back the tears. She felt that somehow she had failed; that Art Osgood was slipping through her fingers, in spite of the fact that he did not seem to fear her or to oppose her except in the final accusation. It was the lack of opposition, that lack of fear, that baffled her so. Art, she felt dimly, must be very sure of his own position; was it because he was so close to the Mexican line? Jean glanced desperately that way. It was very close. She could see the features of the Mexican soldiers lounging before the cantina over there; through the lighted window of the customhouse she could see a dark-faced officer bending over a littered desk. The guard over there spoke to a friend, and she could hear the words he said.