had long offended him and he was done with the imposition. "I done you wrong—I was as mean as a yeller dog—but, by God!"—looking Tom hard in the eye—"I didn't steal that horse!"
"You couldn't make me believe you did if you swore to it," Tom returned, with earnest and sympathetic expression, although rather equivocal words.
The point of that joke, intended or unintended, hit the spot in that camp at once. The men roared, and Coburn roared, but Tom Simpson stood as solemn and hard-featured through the gust of merriment as if his face had frozen that way, beyond the hope of any warming ray of laughter ever to thaw it out again.
Coburn looked the horses over, the cowboys looked them over, as if they were strange creatures brought from unknown lands. To their questions on how he came to get away with them, right from under that gang's noses, Tom replied that it was a greenhorn's luck, he guessed. They looked at him queerly, letting it go at that.
It was not until after he had been on the road with the sheriff some time, after a good rest at camp, that Simpson told how chance had rushed his plans to a head in the horsethieves' stable and forced his hand. He described the place, and the sheriff said yes, he knew that ranch. It was Henry Werner's place, and Henry Werner was married to a half-breed squaw, sister of Wade Harrison's wife. Harrison's hangout was farther down the river, somewhere back in the hills, just where no peace officer from Kansas ever had been able to find out. But it didn't matter now; that would be the end of the gang. Wade Harrison was dead and in hell; old Noah Hays, his chief
