"You are old enough now to have a mind of your own, I allow!"
"And he has heard such awful stories about you, Buck. Just terrible things."
That deep rage against Donald Pike struggled again in the heart of the Kansan.
"I think I know who told him. What were the things, anyway?"
He said this with a great dread, for he already knew.
"Oh, I knew you were not guilty, Buck! Never fancy for a moment that I thought you guilty. I told him you were innocent. I knew that it couldn't be true that you were"—she sobbed—"drunk when you went aboard the Crested Foam."
Badger winced as if stabbed. The dying boat-keeper, Barney Lynn, confessed to drugging Badger, but did not tell Winnie that Badger was drunk at the time. The Westerner knew this, and had been, as he had admitted to Merriwell, just coward enough to be glad that Lynn did not tell Winnie the whole truth. Now, as the sweat of a great inward struggle came out on his face, he wished he had been courageous enough to inform her of the real facts, instead of sheltering himself behind that palatial confession of the boat-keeper. It was a virtual falsehood that was coming home to him in a most unpleasant manner.
"I have stood up for you, Buck, against everything that father could say," Winnie artlessly and innocently continued. "When he insisted that you were drunk at the time, I told him I knew it was not so; and I have stood by it. He thinks he has discovered proofs from a saloon-keeper named Connelly, who keeps a vile resort somewhere down in the worst part of New Haven. Connelly says you were intoxicated at his house that night. But I told father that the same fellow who gave him the information against you in the first place must have hired Connelly to say that. A man who will sell liquor will lie, you know, Buck!"
Badger was violently trembling, but Winnie, in the ecstatic joy of meeting him, did not notice it. There was a tempest in the Kansan's soul. Winnie's sweet and trusting faith in him filled him with an anguishing shame. Could he tell her now that he was drunk that night—that all the things said against him by Connelly and that unknown informant were true? Would she not turn against him if he did? Would she not despise him? Would not her love be obliterated? Badger felt as if the ground were reeling under his feet.
Once he was about to give away to the evil impulses that were fighting against him. But he did not. At last, as she chattered on, so strongly asserting her faith in his innocence, he caught her convulsively to him.