“Ask him!” repeated Bud emphatically. “There’s a fine man to listen to, coming here with a larkum story that he can’t follow up.”
“Come on, Stelton, loosen yore jaw,” suggested Billy Speaker. “What did this here Caldwell do with the money?”
Stelton, his face black with a cloud of rage and disappointment, glared from one to another of the men, who were eagerly awaiting his replies. Larkin, watching him closely, saw again those quick, furtive flicks of the eye in his direction, and the belief grew upon him that Stelton was suspicious and afraid of something as yet undreamed of by the rest. Larkin determined to remember the fact.
“I don’t know what he done with the money,” growled the foreman at last, admitting his defeat. 174
“Why did you give Caldwell five hundred in the first place, Larkin?” asked Bissell suddenly.
“That is a matter between himself and me only,” answered Bud freezingly, while at the same time he sat in fear and trembling that Stelton would leap before the cowmen at this new cue and retail all the conversation of that night at the corral.
But for some reason the foreman let the opportunity pass and Bud wondered to himself what this sudden silence might mean.
He knew perfectly well that no gentle motive was responsible for the fellow’s attitude, and wrote the occurrence down on the tablets of his memory for further consideration at a later date.
After this there was little left to be done. Stelton’s testimony had failed in its chief purpose, to compass the death of Larkin, but it had not left him clear of the mark of suspicion and he himself had little idea of absolute acquittal. Under the guard of his sharpshooting cow-puncher he was led back to his room in the ranch house to await the final judgment.
In an hour it was delivered to him, and in all the history of the range wars between the sheep and cattle men there is recorded no stranger sentence. In a land where men were either guilty 175 or innocent, and, therefore, dead or alive, it stands alone.