“Let’s not go into that again, Dot. It’s your ranch all right, but don’t forget I’m your guardian until yuh are of age an’ that I do the hirin’ an’ firin’,” Spur said tolerantly with the touch of authority in his voice that one uses to an unruly child.
The girl flushed. Allen rose to his feet and picked up his hat. A moment before, he had been irritated that Spur Treadwell had entered before the girl had time to tell him what her father wrote before he died, but he now felt that it made no difference, for he was certain that he knew what John Reed had written, or at least what Spur Treadwell had said was written.
“Well, anyway, it was my fault the boy stayed here to talk,” Dot said after a pause.
“Talk?” Again Spur glanced from the girl to Allen.
“He was tellin’ me about his home,” she said. She cast a quick glance at Allen as if to beg him not to contradict her lie.
CHAPTER XX
SHORTY TALKS
Later, while the outlaw was watering and feeding his horse, he went over his talk with the girl. He knew from her last lie that she feared Spur and that for some reason all talk to strangers about her father’s death was taboo. He decided he would like to see that last note written by John Reed. The whole thing sounded natural enough, for two of the rustlers had been killed—yet he felt there was something wrong. He believed in Slivers, believed the boy had been framed by some one; and the fact that Spur Treadwell had taken trouble to fasten on Slivers this second killing and rustling went to prove that perhaps the boy was right in his belief that the big manager of the Double R was the one who had framed him. If he had not known Slivers, Allen would have unquestionably accepted, as others had apparently done, Spur Treadwell’s story of the killing of John Reed.
Two of the rustlers had been killed, and if a murder is committed and you produce the bodies of the murderers, people will usually accept your story and not inquire further. Allen told himself grimly, that he had known other men who had double crossed their tools. Perhaps these two rustlers knew too much, and Spur Treadwell had killed two birds with one stone, shut their mouths and got rid of John Reed.
“Shucks, it’s plumb easy to talk an’ figger out things for yourself, but it’s a cow of another color makin’ other folks see along with yuh. An’, Mr. Jim-twin Allen, if that there hombre, Spur, gets one little suspicion yuh’re snoopin’, you’ll take a ride one day an’ never come back,” he told himself seriously.
Later, Spur Treadwell turned Allen over to Bill McAllister, the boss horse wrangler, and told him to put the boy to work with the cavvy. The Double R was a large outfit and employed between twenty to forty men, depending on the season, so there were always two or three hundred horses in the cavvy.