"I can arrest her, I tell you," insisted the district attorney.
"No," said Craft firmly. "Miss Walton," he went on, turning to the
girl, "we were a li'l excited when we came in here. Seeing that horse
outside and all, we got the idea that maybe Bill was here. Will you
give us your word he isn't?"
"Why, certainly," she said. "Bill isn't here, I give you my word."
"Fair enough," said Craft. "We'll be going. Come along, Arthur, move."
He and Sam hustled the district attorney out between them. Craft
called in the cordon of horsemen that had surrounded the ranch-house.
"Crawl your horse, Arthur," ordered Craft. "What you waiting for?"
Arthur, swearing heartily, did as directed. "I don't see why you don't
want me to have her arrested," he said in part as they rode townward.
"A few days in the cooler----"
"No sense in it," declared Craft. "A lot of folks in the county
wouldn't like it either, she being a woman and a good-lookin' one
besides. You leave her alone."
"Yeah," slipped in Sam, "wait till you get some real evidence against
her. Suspicion ain't anything."
"It would be enough for me to arrest her all right," persisted the
district attorney.
"Blah! You couldn't hold her a week," averred Craft, "and you know it.
And lemme tell you, I don't believe she knows any more about Bill Wingo
than I do. You know they busted up this winter some time."
"Changed your tune mighty sudden," sneered the district attorney. "On
the way out you were as sure as the rest of us we'd get some kind of a
clue at Walton's. Those cartridges----"
"Dry up about those cartridges!" exclaimed Felix. "You got cartridges
on the brain."
Then the wrangle became general.
Hazel, standing in the doorway, watched the cavalcade disappear around
the bend in the draw.
"I guess," she said, taking a box of cartridges from the top shelf and
snicking open the sealing with a finger nail, "I guess I'd better load
this rifle."