But at last, upon the evening of the fourth day, when her spirit was ready for some desperate measure unless fate came to help her, fate did help and young Bud King called.  He had spent the day in Hill’s Corners upon the quest of any information which might tell him who the man was who had run off his father’s cattle.  Having learned nothing, and being a wise young man after his fashion, he had determined not to go home entirely profitless, and so came to see Pollard’s niece.

She saw him as he rode slowly down the street.  In a flash she guessed that he came to see her, divined too that Pollard would give her little opportunity of talking to young King or any other man, alone.  She was at her window where she sat so often.  Before Bud King’s horse had been tied at the gate she had written a hasty note, had thrust it into an envelope, and had scrawled on the outside: 

“Please carry this right away to Buck Thornton.  Don’t let any one see.  It is very important.”

Then she ran down stairs, slipping the note into the bosom of her dress, hastening to be at the door when the Bar X man knocked lest Henry Pollard turn him away, saying that she was not at home.

As she opened the door, and Bud entered, hat in hand and flushed of face, Pollard came to the door of his office.  Winifred, shaking hands warmly, asked King in, and remarking that her uncle was only reading, invited him into the office.  Pollard, she knew, had no reason to suspect what she had in mind, and she would give him no reason.  Before Bud left she would find a way to give him the note.

The three sat down, and Bud, never letting his wide hat out of his hands, sat twirling it and shifting his boots and looking and talking for the most of the time at Pollard.  He was a young man, was Bud; girls had been few in his life, and this calling upon a young woman in broad daylight was a daring if not quite a devilish thing.

Winifred found room here for smiling amusement.  Pollard did not want to be bothered with King and showed it so plainly that had King not been so alive to the presence of the girl at whom he looked with the tail of his eye and so nearly oblivious of the presence of the man whom he sat facing, he must have noted it before he had been in the room five minutes.  Bud did not care to talk with Pollard, whom he agreed perfectly with Buck Thornton in calling a rattlesnake, and yet he talked rather wildly to him of branding and fence building and stray horses and hold-up men and the weather and last year’s politics.  And Winifred, for a little, watched both men with mirthful understanding.

But as the minutes slipped by and Pollard gave no sign of leaving the room, as silences fell which were too awkward to go unnoticed and which the girl had to fill, she began to be afraid that Pollard’s watchfulness was going to prove too much for her and that she would fail in the plan which had seemed so simple.  But she must not fail!  Four days of the ten had gone.  She must find some way to keep Bud King here until something carried Pollard out of the room if only for a moment, and during that moment she must give the note to King.