“Well, if this one—the one they call Tug—if he did it, why didn’t he have a gun when Lon found him? Lon says he came on him unexpectedly. He had no time to get rid of it. Where is it?”
“Maybe he dropped it while he was running.”
“You know you don’t believe that, Dad,” she scoffed. “He’d have stopped to pick it up. Don’t you see he had to have that gun—the man that shot you did—to make sure of getting away? And when Lon found him he would have killed Lon, too. He’d have had to do it—to save himself from the hangman. The fact that this Tug didn’t have a gun proves that he didn’t shoot you.”
“Say he didn’t, then. Does it prove he wasn’t in cahoots with the man who did? What was he hiding here on the ground for?”
“You didn’t give him a chance to tell. He was ready to, if you’d let him.”
“I asked him, didn’t I?”
“Oh, Dad, you know how you asked him,” she reproached. “He’s got his pride, same as we have. If he wasn’t in this—and I know he wasn’t—you can’t blame him for getting stubborn when he’s badgered. His explanations would have tumbled out fast enough if he’d been guilty.”
This struck Reed as psychologically true. The fellow had not acted like a guilty man. He had held his head high, with a scornful and almost indifferent pride.
“What did I say, for him to get his back up so quick?” the ranchman grumbled.
“It’s the way you said it, and the way Lon acted. He’s quick-tempered, and of course he’s fed up with our treatment of him. Wouldn’t you be?”