"You act amazin' strange fer a cowboy I've knowed to lean toward fightin' at the drop of a hat. I tell you, speak out an' I'll do right by you.... I ain't forgettin' thet White Slides gave you a hard knock. An' I was young once an' had hot blood."
The old rancher's wrathful pathos stirred the cowboy to a straining-point of his unnatural, almost haughty composure. He seemed about to break into violent utterance. Grief and horror and anger seemed at the back of his trembling lips. The look he gave Belllounds was assuredly a strange one, to come from a cowboy who was supposed to have stolen his former employer's cattle. Whatever he might have replied was cut off by the sudden appearance of Columbine.
"Dad, I heard you!" she cried, as she swept upon them, fearful and wide-eyed. "What has Wilson Moore done--that you'll do right by him?"
"Collie, go back in the house," he ordered.
"No. There's something wrong here," she said, with mounting dread in the swift glance she shot from man to man. "Oh! You're--Sheriff Burley!" she gasped.
"I reckon I am, miss, an' if young Moore's a friend of yours I'm sorry I came," replied Burley.
Wade himself reacted subtly and thrillingly to the presence of the girl. She was alive, keen, strung, growing white, with darkening eyes of blue fire, beginning to grasp intuitively the meaning here.
"My friend! He was more than that--not long ago.... What has he done? Why are you here?"
"Miss, I'm arrestin' him."
"Oh!... For what?"