The rumble of wagon wheels going over disintegrated quartz drifted to them. “Lon’s coming,” her father said. Presently they heard his voice talking to the horses. “Get over there, Buckskin, you got plenty o’ room. What’s eatin’ you, anyhow?” Forbes stopped on the bluff and came down. “Left the fellow with Burwell tied up in the bunkhouse. Got both the sheriff and Doc Rayburn. How’s the leg, Clint?” Reed grunted a “’S all right,” and showed the foreman how to support him up the incline to the wagon. Five minutes later they were moving back toward the ranch house. The fired stacks had burned themselves out, but smoke still rolled skyward. “Keller’s watchin’ to see everything’s all right there,” Forbes said. “I don’t aim to take chances till we get the whole crop threshed.” “Might ’a’ been worse,” Clint said. “If that fellow’d known how to go at it, he could have sent half the crop up in smoke. We’re lucky, I’ll say.” “Luckier than he is. I’ll bet he gets ten years,” the foreman said with unction. Neither father nor daughter made any answer to that prophecy. CHAPTER XI MR. NE’ER-DO-WELL Tug walked to the bunkhouse beside the foreman, the latter’s fingers fastened like steel bands to his wrist. If Forbes said anything to his prisoner during the tramp through the wheatfield, the young fellow scarcely heard it. His mind was full of the girl who had defended him. In imagination she still stood before him, slim, straight, so vitally alive, her dark eyes begging him to deny the charge that had been made against him. The low voice rang in his brain. He could hear the throb in it when she had cried, “Tell him you didn’t do it,” and the joyous lift of her confident “I knew it--I knew it all the time.” The vagrant’s life was insolvent in all those assets of friendship that had once enriched it. He had deliberately bankrupted himself of them when he had buried his identity in that of the hobo Tug, driven to it by the shame of his swift declension. It had been many months since any woman had clung so obstinately to a belief in him regardless of facts. He had no immediate family, no mother or sister with an unshakable faith that went to the heart of life. But this girl who had crossed his path--this girl with the wild-rose color, the sweetness that flashed so vividly in her smile, the dear wonder of youth in every glance and gesture--believed in him and continued to believe in spite of his churlish rejection of her friendliness. Though he was one of the lost legion, it was an evidence of the divine flame still flickering in him that his soul went out to meet the girl’s brave generosity. In his bosom was a warm glow. For the hour at least he was strong. It seemed possible to slough the weakness that rode him like an Old Man of the Sea. His free hand groped its way to an inner pocket and drew out a package wrapped in cotton cloth. A fling of his arm sent it into the stubble. “What you doin’?” demanded Forbes.