Forbes stopped on the bluff and came down. “Left the fellow with Burwell tied up in the bunkhouse. Got both the sheriff and Doc Rayburn. How’s the leg, Clint?”
Reed grunted a “’S all right,” and showed the foreman how to support him up the incline to the wagon.
Five minutes later they were moving back toward the ranch house. The fired stacks had burned themselves out, but smoke still rolled skyward.
“Keller’s watchin’ to see everything’s all right there,” Forbes said. “I don’t aim to take chances till we get the whole crop threshed.”
“Might ’a’ been worse,” Clint said. “If that fellow’d known how to go at it, he could have sent half the crop up in smoke. We’re lucky, I’ll say.”
“Luckier than he is. I’ll bet he gets ten years,” the foreman said with unction.
Neither father nor daughter made any answer to that prophecy.
CHAPTER XI
MR. NE’ER-DO-WELL
Tug walked to the bunkhouse beside the foreman, the latter’s fingers fastened like steel bands to his wrist. If Forbes said anything to his prisoner during the tramp through the wheatfield, the young fellow scarcely heard it. His mind was full of the girl who had defended him. In imagination she still stood before him, slim, straight, so vitally alive, her dark eyes begging him to deny the charge that had been made against him.
The low voice rang in his brain. He could hear the throb in it when she had cried, “Tell him you didn’t do it,” and the joyous lift of her confident “I knew it—I knew it all the time.”