Jim considered this, his gaze upon the far-away range.  When he brought it back to Keller, he was smiling incredulously.

“I hear you say so, seh.  But what a man with, a halter round his neck says don’t go far before a court.”

“I expected you to say about that.”

“Then I haven’t disappointed you.”  He continued presently, with cold hostility:  “That story you cooked up is about the only one you could spring.  What surprises me is that a man with as good a head as yours took twenty-four hours to figure out your explanation.  I want to tell you, too, that it don’t make any hit with me that you’re trying to throw the blame on a boy I’ve known all my life.”

“Who happens to be a brother of Miss Sanderson,” Keller let himself suggest.

Yeager flushed.  “That ain’t the point.”

“The point is that I’m trying to clear this boy, and I want your help.”

“Looks to me like you want to clear yourself.”

“If I prove to you that I’m not a rustler, will you padlock your tongue and help me clear young Sanderson?”

“I sure will—­if you prove it to my satisfaction.”

Keller drew from his pocket the two letters he had just received.  “Read these.”

When he had read, Yeager handed them back, and offered his hand.  “That clears you, seh.  Truth is, I never was satisfied you was a rustler.  My mind was satisfied; but, durn it, you didn’t look like a waddy.  It’s lucky I hadn’t spoke to the boys yet.”

“I want to keep this quiet,” the Bear Creek settler explained.

“Sure.  I’m a clam, and at your service, seh.”

“Then find out the truth about the knife.”

Yeager’s eye chiselled into that of Keller.  “Mind, I ain’t going to help you bring trouble to Phyllie, and I ain’t going to stand by and see it, either.”

The other smiled.  “I don’t ask it of you.  What I want is to clear the boy.”

“Good enough,” agreed Yeager, and led the way back.

Before they had yet reached the house, a figure dropped from the foliage of the live oak under which they had been standing, and rolled like a ball from the fence into the deep dust of the corral.  It picked itself up in a gray cloud, from which shone as a nucleus a black face with beady eyes and flashing-white teeth.  Swiftly it scampered across the paddock, disappeared into the rear of the stable, and reappeared at the front door.

“Here you, ’Rastus, where you been?” demanded the wrangler.  “Didn’t I tell you to clean Miss Phyl’s trap?  I’ve wore my lungs out hollering for you.  Now, you git to work, or I’ll wear you to a frazzle.”

’Rastus, general alias for his baptismal name of George Washington Abraham Lincoln Randolph, grinned and ducked, shot out of the stable like a streak of light, and appeared ten seconds later in the kitchen presided over by his rotund mother, Becky.

His abrupt entrance disturbed the maternal after-dinner nap.  From the rocking-chair where she sat Becky rolled affronted eyes at him.