orning paper. His step
was hurried, his eyes eager. When he spoke there was the lift of
excitement in his voice.

"Bee, I've got bad news."

"Is the Bird Cage flooded?" asked Beatrice. "Or have the miners called
a strike again?"

"Worse than that. Lindsay's been arrested. For murder."

The bottom fell out of her heart. She caught at the corner of a desk
to steady herself. "Murder! It can't be! Must be some one of the
same name."

"I reckon not, honey. It's Clay sure enough. Listen." He read the
headlines of a front-page story.

"It can't be Clay! What would he be doing in a gambling-dive?" She
reached for the paper, but when she had it the lines blurred before her
eyes. "Read it, please."

Whitford read the story to the last line. Long before he had finished,
his daughter knew the one arrested was Clay. She sat down heavily, all
the life stricken from her young body.

"It's that man Durand. He's done this and fastened it on Clay. We'll
find a way to prove Clay didn't do it."

"Maybe, in self-defense--"

Beatrice pushed back her father's hesitant suggestion, and even while
she did it a wave of dread swept over her. The dead man was the same
criminal "Slim" Jim Collins whom the cattleman had threatened in order
to protect the Millikan girl. The facts that the man had been struck
down by a chair and that her friend claimed, according to the paper,
that the gunman had fired two shots, buttressed the solution offered by
Whitford. But the horror of it was too strong for her. Against reason
her soul protested that Clay could not have killed a man. It was too
horrible, too ghastly, that through the faults of others he should be
put in such a situation.

And why should her friend be in such a place unless he had been trapped
by the enemies who were determined to ruin him? She knew he had a
contempt for men who wasted their energies in futile dissipations. He
was too clean, too much a son of the wind-swept desert, to care
anything about the low pleasures of indecent and furtive vice. He was
the last man she knew likely to be found enjoying a den of this sort.

"Dad, I'm going to him," she announced with crisp decision.

Her father offered no protest. His impulse, too, was to stand by the
friend in need. He had no doubt Clay had killed the man, but he had a
sure conviction it had been done in self-defense.

"We'll get the best lawyers in New York for him, honey," he said.
"Nobody wil