"If fortune will favor me as well to-morrow as it did to-day," Ross thought as he listened to the sheriff’s first snores, "I’ll be next to Jones by this time to-morrow night and try to do some talking for Leslie!"
He knew that his roommate was no wiser concerning him than when they started from Meadow Creek, and he most heartily desired a continuation of that ignorance.
In the morning the two were up early and down to breakfast. Ross looked about apprehensively for some one who had seen him on his way into the mountains. He slunk into the dining-room in the wake of the bulkier sheriff and pushing himself unobtrusively into a corner seat bent low over his plate as befitted a young man under arrest. But no sooner was he seated than the proprietor of the house spied him from the other end of the dining-room, and with never a suspicion that he was talking to the sheriff’s prisoner, strode across the room. He slapped the sheriff familiarly on the shoulder:
"What the dickens are you doing up this way? Why don’t ye stay in Basin where ye belong?"
Then he grasped Ross’s hand cordially:
"Bless us if here ain’t Doc back again. Got them claims cleaned up yet, Doc?"
Ross, encountering the puzzled eyes of the sheriff, quaked. "No, we haven’t yet," he muttered and glancing toward the dining-room door, exclaimed in sudden inspiration, "Wonder if that man is motioning to you?"
The proprietor looked around. Several men were in the hall outside the dining-room. "I’ll go and see," he exclaimed.
The sheriff continued to look at Ross. "Bluff!" he announced briefly and understandingly.
The blood flooded Ross’s face guiltily. "It was," he confessed, adding quickly, "Say, don’t give my arrest away where I’m known, will you?"