“Then you won’t——”
“I’ll not discuss this any longer with you,” snapped the colonel, and flung himself into a chair and picked up a paper.
Later in the day news came to Gold Hill that the two road agents who had held up the stage had been seen in Bitter Root Cañon, and one of them rode a sorrel horse with a white stocking foot and was believed to be Lenning.
“I don’t doubt it,” growled the colonel. “Is there no depth to Lenning’s baseness? If he is bound to pile disgrace upon disgrace, I wish, for the sake of the rest of us, he would migrate to some other part of the country.”
“I doubt the report, colonel,” said Darrel stoutly. “Jode has turned over a new leaf and he is trying honestly to live down the past. He had no hand in that robbery.”
“What means his absence from the mine?” cried the colonel heatedly. “Put two and two together, Ellis! For Heaven’s sake, don’t try to appear so dense. Lenning was seen in the cañon, near where the stage was robbed—and he was riding a horse that answers the description of Burke’s.”
“Blunt and Ballard thought Lenning was the fellow they saw,” qualified Darrel. “They weren’t sure of it.”
“Well, I’m sure of it, so we’ll let it go at that.”
The irascible old colonel went to bed that night in a bad temper. He did not sleep, however, but lay and tossed restlessly. Visions came to him—visions of Jode and of his only sister, Jode’s mother. In these midnight fancies the face of Jode was haggard and repentant, and the face of the mother was pitiful and pleading. Finally, along toward morning, the colonel could bear his thoughts no longer.
He got up and, for two or three hours, he paced the confines of his bedroom. Something was urging him to probe the facts in Jode’s case. He remembered that he had promised Burke he would visit the mine and settle for the horse and the riding gear. Why not go to the mine that morning?