Burley let go of the hoof and laid the pieces of mud down.  Slowly the other men straightened up.  Some one breathed hard.

“Moore, what do them tracks look like to you?” asked the sheriff.

“They look like mine,” replied the cowboy.

“They are yours.”

“I’m not denying that.”

“I cut them pieces of mud from beside a water-hole over hyar under Gore Peak.  We’d trailed the cattle Belllounds lost, an’ then we kept on trailin’ them, clear to the road that goes over the ridge to Elgeria....  Now Bridges an’ Lindsay hyar bought stock lately from strange cattlemen who didn’t give no clear idee of their range.  Jest buyin’ an’ sellin’, they claimed....  I reckon the extra hoss tracks we run across at Gore Peak connects up them buyers an’ sellers with whoever drove Belllounds’s cattle up thar....  Have you anythin’ more to say?”

“No.  Not here,” replied Moore, quietly.

“Then I’ll have to arrest you an’ take you to Kremmlin’ fer trial.”

“All right.  I’ll go.”

The old rancher seemed genuinely shocked.  Red tinged his cheek and a flame flared in his eyes.

“Wils, you done me dirt,” he said, wrathfully.  “An’ I always swore by you....  Make a clean breast of the whole damn bizness, if you want me to treat you white.  You must have been locoed or drunk, to double-cross me thet way.  Come on, out with it.”

“I’ve nothing to say,” replied Moore.

“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?”