“So you’ve been inquiring?” she said, her face suffused with color.
“Why, sure! Somebody’s got to do it. It’s my job.”
A little later they mounted their ponies and rode along the edge of the timber. When they reached the tree to which he had tied her pony on the night she had hurt her ankle, he called her attention to it.
“That’s where I lost the bandanna,” he told her. “It fell off my neck an’ got tangled in the knot.”
“Then you know!” she exclaimed.
“Sure,” he said, grinning; “Uncle Jepson told me.”
“I think Uncle Jep has been your right hand man all through this,” she charged.
“Why shouldn’t he be?” he retorted. And she could give him no reason why it should have been otherwise.
“It was a rather mean trick to play on me,” she charged pretending indignation.
“If you’d have thought it mean, you’d have told me about it before now,” he answered. “Patches was reliable.”