Coburn was in a wild state of desperation. The loss of that money meant dishonor and ruination. More than half of it was owing to a Wichita bank, the mortgagor having such faith in his honor as to permit him to ship his cattle and make his own collection, something unusual in range procedure. The general program was for a representative of the mortgagor to accompany the shipment, collect the returns, take his cut and hand the remainder, if any, to the cattleman.
Sid had been gloating over the pleasure and dignity that would be his when he deposited that money in the morning, wrote a check for twenty-one thousand dollars, scratched a brief line and mailed it to the Wichita banker who had trusted him to the limit because he had trusted his father before him in the days when the old man speculated in cattle driven up the Chisholm Trail from Texas. In his gloomy rage Coburn overlooked everything that had gone before the moment of excitement and peril at the livery stable which would tend to disprove his sudden and vindictive opinion of Tom Simpson. He even believed the row in the saloon, and Simpson's arrest and escape from the marshal, all a part of the plot. That wall-eyed little lizard of a marshal was in on it, he easily convinced himself, making a mental reservation of a day of reckoning in that quarter.
All night they rode southward, following the cattle trail most used by cattlemen in that section of the Cherokee leases, stopping at cow-camps to roust out sleepy punchers, who became alert and avid for the news with the first eager inquiry; clamoring at the doors of Indian and negro cabins to demand information of a wild rider who
