Carmena had not exaggerated. Elsie was sweet as honey and cuddlier than a kitten. He felt tempted to put a finger under her dainty up-tilted chin.
"Now that I look more like a matinee idol, just how much more do you like me?" he bantered.
"Oh, heaps more than I liked the first pard Mena brought in. He was a cowman, and after they made him pay a whole lot to get loose, Mena set Cochise on him 'cause he wanted me to go away to live with him—like Slade. They filled him up with tizwin and left him out in the middle of the Basin, with only tizwin in his canteen. Mena said it served him right and dead men tell no tales."
Lennon stiffened.
"You can't mean to say your father and sister were parties to such an outrage—that they helped to rob a man and then abandon him to die of thirst?"
"Why not?" demanded Elsie, with unexpected spirit. "He wasn't what Mena thought him. He was a bad cowman. He wanted to bring his bunch and shoot up the Hole and kill us all and make me go with him. You see how it was, don't you?"
"Yes," agreed Lennon, certain that he understood.
His surmise was that Carmena had sought help from a neighbouring rancher, and the man had proved himself a scoundrel. Elsie had not mentioned any proposal of marriage. Whatever the lawlessness of Farley's Indian associates, they had apparently put the guilty man to ransom and then turned him loose to die in the desert, merely by way of vengeance for his attempted wrong against the girl.
Yet both of the girls had given out that the partnership with the Apaches and the unknown Slade was by no means satisfactory. Farley feared his associates, and they would permit him and Carmena to leave the Hole only one at a time.
On the other hand, when he first met Carmena, she had been alone on the trail, only a few miles from the railway. Why had she not galloped to the nearest station and led a sheriff's posse to free her father and sister? She knew that Cochise and his fellows were "bronchos."