"Sure that was why. Why else do you suppose?"
"I never thought of the stage passing," said the district attorney.
"No, you wouldn't, of course not. I don't see, Arthur, when you made those tracks so careful in the first place you couldn't have kept off the stage trail. It wasn't necessary, and it mighty near put the kibosh on the whole deal."
"I wanted to end the trail in the west fork of the Wagonjack," defended the district attorney. "It seemed like a good place."
"It was—only for the stage trail being in the way," said Felix warmly. "If that infernal Wildcat Simms had come up half-a-minute earlier he'd seen how those horse tracks lay, same as I did. Oh, lovely! Wouldn't it have been a joke?"
"Well, it ended all right, anyway," offered the district attorney pacifically.
"I didn't like to have that Slike jigger get off that-away," grumbled Sam Larder. "I'd like to see him hung, the lousy murderer! I wish we could have worked it some other way."
"There wasn't any other way," the district attorney hastened to assure him. "We couldn't risk having Slike tried. He'd have snitched on Rafe Tuckleton, sure as fate. It was the only thing for us to do, and you know it."
Sam nodded. "I know, but——" He left the sentence unfinished.
"Now that we've got Dan out of the way," the district attorney pattered on, "we've got to glom onto Bill Wingo, and the sooner the quicker. Me, I'm going out to Walton's to-night and question Hazel some more. You boys don't have to go, you know. I can get hold of somebody, I guess."