“Old man,” said he heartily, “you’ve made a big winning this afternoon. If we’d manufactured the thing to order it could not have turned out better. The old colonel had a chance to strike a balance between you and Jode. His eyes have been opened, and he has seen for himself just what sort of a fellow Jode is.”
“It happened just about right, that’s a fact,” returned Darrel. “The old boy has had a hard blow, but you’d never know it to look at him. That’s his way.”
“That picture he saw of Jode, neck-and-necking it down the hill with the coyote dog,” laughed Clancy, “will live in his memory a good long while.”
“What will he say to Jode?” queried Ballard. “I’d like to be around and hear it.”
“No one can ever tell what the colonel will do,” said Darrel. “Jode, I reckon, will have a hard time explaining why he ran down the hill when he ought to have been yanking that blazing fuse out by the roots.”
“We’d better be starting back to Dolliver’s,” put in Merry. “Where’s your horse, Curly?”
Darrel told where the horse had been left. While Merriwell went after it, Clancy and Ballard climbed the slope to get the three mounts that had been left on top of the gulch wall.
Half an hour afterward all the boys were riding down the gulch, en route to Dolliver’s. They formed about the happiest party that had ever traveled that particular trail. There had been a rift in the black clouds of injustice and suspicion that had hung for so long above Darrel’s head, and through the rift the sun of hope was shining. Darrel’s luck had taken a sudden turn for the better.