and rushing about with hands in her hair as if she would leap out of her door in a frenzy of despair and fling her life away under a train.
Burnett's plan had been so simply dishonest in its intention as to make its success all the more astonishing. He had made a big front, with his cowboy band and handful of diamonds, before the bankers, who are about as gullible as anybody else, it often appears, if played with the right sort of bait. These sharp fellows, who would have given a cold eye to an honest grocer unless he could have piled up convertible securities to twice the amount of the loan desired, had Ient money freely on Burnett's herds.
These herds it was now revealed, were neither as numerous nor as large as had been represented. By quick shifts of cattle from range to range, Burnett had placed as many as three mortgages on a single herd.
All this came out when the young men sent to the range by the bankers, whose suspicions had been roused at last, no man knew how, got together and compared paper and looked at the security. It was the biggest fraud ever put through in the history of the livestock business on the western range. It had been so simply crooked from the very start that the duped bankers connived in the fraud as accomplices after the fact to the extent of trying to smother the news and choke off further revelations, fearing public confidence might weaken and bring them down to ruin.
It was said the bankers knew where Burnett had gone, but were the last people on earth to want him back. They would rather absorb their loss than have their simplicity revealed in the story Burnett could tell.
