“Great head, Pink!” approved Clancy.
“But, of course,” observed Blunt, “the juniper we thought was Lenning couldn’t have been Lenning at all. Looked a heap like him, though.”
“Um!” grunted Burke; “I don’t know about that. Lenning left the mine yesterday and hadn’t returned up to something like an hour ago. He took my horse when he went—and my horse is a sorrel, with a white stocking foot.”
Frank was sorry the superintendent had thought it necessary to throw in any comments about Lenning. The only result would be to crowd suspicion upon the absent watchman, when, in all likelihood, he was as blameless of the robbery as Burke himself.
The superintendent, however, was never backward about airing his views. Ballard stared as he listened to Burke, and then turned and looked at Barzy Blunt.
Blunt’s face was a study. Up to the time of that ball game with Gold Hill, the cowboy had had no sort of use for Jode Lenning. In fact, right to Lenning’s face, Blunt had declared that no respectable fellow would take part in a game in which a crook like Lenning was booked to play.
But the game itself had changed all that. Blunt, and all the players, had been won over by Lenning’s clever work, and by his meeting in masterly fashion that thrilling moment when victory or defeat for Ophir hung on his efforts alone.
Had the enthusiasm inspired by Lenning’s splendid work in a crisis developed a friendship that could not last? Frank watched Blunt critically.
“I reckon you haven’t got it right, Burke,” said the cowboy finally. “It wasn’t so mighty long ago when I’d have believed Lenning equal to any sort of skullduggery. It used to make me sore to see Chip, there, standing up for the fellow, getting him a job, and all that; but, on the day of that ball game, I made up my mind that Chip Merriwell’s judgment was warranted not to come out in the wash. ‘What’s good enough for Chip,’ I said to myself, ‘is good enough for me, and right here’s where I quit handing it to Lenning every time a chance comes my way.’ I’d be a pretty measly sort of a coyote if I shook hands with Lenning on Saturday and then turned against him Monday. Sorrel horse or no, that couldn’t have been Lenning we saw in the cañon.”
“Bully for you, Barzy!” exclaimed Merriwell, deeply gratified by the stand the cowboy had taken.