To-day Reed found the need of vindication. He was fonder of Betty than he was of anything or anybody else in the world, and he knew that he was at the bar of her judgment. She did not approve of what he had done. This would not have troubled him greatly if he had been sure that he approved of it himself. But like many willful men he sometimes had his bad quarter of an hour afterward.
It was easy enough to make excuses. The Diamond Bar K had been troubled a good deal by vagrants on the transcontinental route. They had robbed the smokehouse only a few weeks before. A gang of them had raided the watermelon patch, cut open dozens of green melons, and departed with such ripe ones as they could find. Naturally he had been provoked against the whole breed of them.
But he had been too hasty in dealing with the young scamp he had thrashed. Clint writhed under an intolerable sense of debt. The boy had fought him as long as he could stand and take it. He had gone away still defiant, and had rescued Betty from a dangerous situation. Dragged back at a rope’s end to the ranch by the luckless Dusty, he had scornfully departed before Reed had a chance to straighten out with him this added indignity. The owner of the Diamond Bar K felt frustrated, as though the vagabond had had the best of him.
He was not even sure that the severe punishment he had meted out to the other tramps had been wise. The man Cig had endured the ordeal unbroken in spirit. His last words before he crept away had been a threat of reprisal. The fellow was dangerous. Clint read it in his eyes. He had given orders to Betty not to leave the ranch for the next day or two without an escort. Yet he still felt uneasy, as though the end of the matter had not come.
It was now thirty hours since he had last seen the hoboes. No doubt they were hundreds of miles away by this time and with every click of the car wheels getting farther from the ranch.
He rode back to the stable, unsaddled, and walked to the house. Betty was in the living-room at the piano. She finished the piece, swung round on the stool, and smiled at him.
“Everything fine and dandy, Dad?”
His face cleared. It was her way of telling him that she was ready to forgive and be forgiven.
“Yes.” Then, abruptly, “Reckon I get off wrong foot first sometimes, honey.”
He was in a big armchair. She went over to him, sat down on his knees, and kissed him. “’S all right, Dad,” she nodded with an effect of boyish brusqueness. Betty, too, had a mental postscript and expressed it. “It’s that boy. Nothing to do about it, of course. He wouldn’t let me do a thing for him, but—Oh, well, I just can’t get him off my mind. Kinda silly of me.”