ght
Larkin come?"

"Yes."

"Well, I heard him blackmail Larkin for five hundred dollars back by the
corral fence. An' Larkin knew what he had to do as soon as Caldwell showed
up. Didn't yuh see him turn yaller at the table?"

As a matter of fact Larkin's perturbation at that time had been puzzling
and inexplicable to Juliet. Also the disappearance of the two men
immediately after supper had mystified her. But without admitting this to
Stelton she asked:

"What was it all about?"

"I don't know exactly, Miss Julie, but it worked in somethin' he done back
in Chicago a year or so ago. From what I heard 'em say, Larkin just dodged
the calaboose. Now there ain't no disgrace in that--that's really
credit--but that don't clear him of the crime noways. Why, I even heard
'em talk about two thousand dollars that Larkin give this Caldwell a
couple of years back."

"How did you learn all this?" she asked.

"I was a goin' back to the corral for a rope I left hangin' on a post
there, an' I heard 'em talkin'."

"And you listened, I suppose," remarked Julie contemptuously.

"Mebbe I did," he retorted, stung by her tone. "But you can be thankful
for it. I'd be plenty mad if you throw'd yourself away on a man
like-a-that. A hoss that'll kill one puncher'll kill another. Same with a
man."

"What are you saying, Mike?" cried the girl, frightened out of her
attitude of aloof reserve. "Kill a man! He's never killed a man, has he?"

"He didn't say so in so many words, no ma'am, but that talk o' their'n was
mighty suspicious."

Unwittingly Stelton had struck his hardest blow. To him, as to other rough
and ready men in the West, life was a turbulent existence conducted with
as few hasty funerals as was absolutely necessary. But in the girl who had
absorbed the finer feelings of a civilized community, the horror of murder
was deep-rooted.

She knew that to a man in Larkin's former position the slightest
divergence from the well-defined tenets of right and wrong was
inexcusable. Crime, she knew, was a result of poverty, necessity,
self-defense or lack of control, and she also knew that Bud Larkin had
never been called upon to fall back on any of these. How much of truth,
therefore, was there in Stelton's innuendoes?

"Would you swear on the Bible that you overheard what you have told me?"
she asked suddenly.

"Yes, ma'am, I shore would," Stelton answered with solemn conviction.

There was no question now in her mind but that