"But you said——"
"No, I didn't say; I merely let you believe that I didn't see them. After that, I knew it would be only a question of time until they would trace you here, and I hurried; oh, I hurried! I made up my mind that before the struggle came, all Wahaska should know you, not as a bank robber, but as you are, and I made it come out just that way. Then Mr. Broffin turned up, and the fight was on. He shadowed you, and I shadowed him—or had Johnnie Fergus do it for me. I knew he'd try Miss Farnham first, and there was only one hope there—that she might fall in love with you and so refuse to give you away. She did, didn't she?"
"Most emphatically, she did not," he denied. "You have greatly misjudged Miss Farnham. The reason—the only reason—why she did not tell Broffin what he wanted to know was a purely conventional one. She did not want to be the most-talked-of woman in Wahaska."
His companion's laugh was not pleasant.
"I'd rather be a spiteful little cat, which is what she once called me, than to be moth-eaten on the inside, like that!" she commented. Then she went on: "With Miss Farnham out of it—and I knew she must be out of it, since Broffin didn't strike—there was still Mr. Galbraith. You didn't know why I was so anxious to have you get acquainted with him, but you know now. And it worked. When Broffin asked him to identify you, he couldn't—or wouldn't. Then came that unlucky drowning accident."
Griswold nodded slowly. "Yes, Mr. Galbraith knows me now."
"He doesn't!" she exulted. "He is a dear old saint, and he will never know you again as the man who held him up. Listen: he sent for Broffin this afternoon, and gave him a new commission—something about bonds in California. And he told him he must go on the first train!"
Once more the castaway was running the gamut of the fiercely varying emotions.
"Let me understand," he said. "You knew I had taken the money, and yet you did all these things to pull me out and make the hold-up a success. Where was your moral sense, all this time, little girl?"
She made a charming little mouth at him.