“If you don’t mind, suppose you untie me and let me get down. I don’t like to be hung up this way ’cause it gets tiresome.”
“I reckon you will have plenty of time to rest, young fellow,” answered the rancher, grinning sardonically. “Let him down. Has he guns on him?”
A member of the party said that they had taken his weapons from the boy, and explained in detail how they happened to discover him helping himself to food in the chuck-house up on the range, to all of which Rancher Crawley listened attentively. He turned to Stacy again.
“Tell me what you wish about yourself and I’ll listen,” he said.
“What’s the use? You won’t believe me,” protested Stacy.
“As you wish. It doesn’t make much difference what you say. You will have to tell your story to the sheriff at Carrago, for we’re going to send a man for him today.”
“I belong to the Overland Riders. We ride somewhere every summer,” began Stacy hurriedly. “This summer we chose the Bad Lands in the Cosos, but I reckon that, had we known how bad they are, we should have stayed away. We have been hanging out with Joe Bindloss, and the rest of my party is over there now. We have a camp pitched just back of his house where the garden ought to be, but isn’t.”
“How about it, Skip?” interrupted the rancher, turning to one of his men. “You was over there this morning.”
The man replied that there was no camp back of Bindloss’s house, and that, further, no one was there when he dropped in.
Bill Crawley smiled sarcastically.