“Some one cut the rope and freed him,” he said, confounded at the impossibility of the thing that had occurred.

“Must of slipped his hands out of the cuffs, looks like,” the guard suggested.

“He got me to give him a bigger size—­complained they chafed his wrists.”

“Some trick that, if he has got kid hands.”

The chill eyes of Goodheart gimleted into those of his assistant.  “Did you do this, Brad?  God help you if you did.”

A light step sounded on the threshold.  Pauline came into the room.  “I did it, Jack,” she said.

“You!”

“I came up through the trapdoor when I was in the cellar.  I cut the rope and told him there was a horse saddled in the aspens.”

Thoughts raced in his bewildered mind.  She had planned all this carefully.  Almost under his very eyes she had done it.  Then she had lured him from the house to give Clanton a better chance.  She had let him make love to her so that she could keep him at the corral while the prisoner escaped.  It was all a trick.  Even now she was laughing up her sleeve at the way she had made a fool of him.

“You saddled the horse and left it there.”  His statement was a question, too.

“Yes.  I had to save him.  I knew he was innocent.”

All the explanations she had intended shriveled up before the scorn in his eyes.  He brushed past her without a word and strode out of the house.

Pauline went to her room and flung herself on the bed.  After a time her father came in and sat down beside the girl.  He put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“I know what you think, dad,” she said without turning her head.  “But I couldn’t help it, I had to do it.”

“It may make you trouble, ma petite.”

“I can’t help that.  Jim didn’t kill Mr. Webb.  I know it.”

“After a fair trial a jury said he did, Polly.  We have to take their word for it.”

“You think I did wrong then.”

“You did what you think was right.  In my heart is no blame for you.”

He comforted her as best he could and left her to sleep.  But she did not sleep.  All through the night she lay and listened.  She was miserably unhappy.  Her head and her heart ached.  Jack had promised that she should be the judge of what was right for her to do, and at the first test he had failed her.  She made excuses for him, but the hurt of her disappointment could not be assuaged.

In the early morning she heard the clatter of horses’ hoofs in the yard.  During the night she had not undressed.  Now she rose and went out to meet her lover.  He was at the stable, a gaunt figure, hollow-eyed, dusty, and stern.  He had failed to recapture his prisoner.

“Jack,” she pleaded, reaching out a hand timidly toward him.

Again he rejected her advance in grim silence.  Swinging to the saddle, he rode out of the gate and down the road toward Live-Oaks.