She did not answer, but threw herself into his arms, sobbing.
“What is it? What has happened, child? Tell me!”
Her sobs choked her, and she could not speak. Putting his arm about her, her father led her up the steps and to her room. There he sat down and held her, and tried to comfort her, while he endeavored to extract a coherent statement from her.
Little by little, word by word, she managed at last to tell him.
“You mustn’t cry, dear,” he said. “You did a foolish thing to go up there alone, but you did nothing wrong. As for what that fellow told you about Guy, I don’t believe it.”
“But it’s the truth,” she sobbed. “I know it is the truth now. Little things that I didn’t think of before come back to me, and in the light of what that terrible man told me I know that it’s true. We always knew that Custer was innocent. Think what a change came over Guy from the moment that Custer was arrested. He has been a different man since. And the money—the money that we were to be married on! I never stopped to try to reason it out. He had thousands of dollars. He told me not to tell anybody how much he had; and that was where it came from. It couldn’t have come from anything else. Oh, popsy, it is awful, and I loved him so! To think that he, that Guy Evans, of all men, would have let my brother go to jail for something he did!”
Again her sobs stifled her.
“Crying will do no good,” the colonel said. “Go to bed now, and to-morrow we will talk it over. Good night, little girl. Remember, we’ll all stick to Guy, no matter what he has done.”
He kissed her then and left her, but he did not return to his room. Instead, he went down to the stables and saddled his horse, for the stableman, when Eva came in with the missing animal, had put it in its box and returned to the bunk house.
The colonel rode immediately to the sleeping camp in Jackknife Cañon. His calls went unanswered for a time, but presently a sleepy man stuck his head through the flap of a tent.