Maw did worry, however. She would have worried more if she could have seen and heard what was going on in Smoky Ford that morning. Old Palmer--who must have been old in sin, since he was not more than forty-five--had ridden in early with Johnson, White and two others of similar type. He did not go to the sheriff, as a man would have done whose cause was unassailable, but had talked in the saloons, his listeners for the most part those men who had joined in the search for the lost boy. "Smallpox, my eye!" Palmer cried thickly. "There ain't a case in the country. It was my son's boy that they had hid away in that room--and us all huntin' the hills for him! It's like the Meddalark--an outlaw bunch if ever there was one. Look at old man Larkin! If ever a man deserved stringin' up, he did. And Lark and that kid nephew ain't any better. Stealin' calves from me right along--and now they take the boy and hide him away in a room--" There was a great deal of the same kind of talk, for Palmer was not the man to let anything slip away from him. Smoky Ford men should have stopped to wonder why Palmer the tight-fisted was buying whisky for every man that joined the listening group around him. It never had happened before that any one could remember, nor was it likely to happen again. But men do not as a rule stop to ask why, when the bartender is busy and makes no sign that he expects pay for every filled glass. Palmer's money was good that morning; he had a grievance and the men who had turned out to search for a lost child discovered that Palmer was a human kinda cuss, after all, and that it looked as if a crime had been committed boldly, in broad daylight. Then Bat Johnson artfully crystallized the growing sentiment born of whisky and Palmer's loud-mouthed denunciations. "Hell, if it was a horse that was stole, that p'ticular Meddalark bunch would be busted up in short order. Being a kid that's made 'way with--" he stopped there to empty his glass "--why, mebby we oughta let 'em get away with it. Some places, though, folks count humans worth as much as horses, anyway." "Damn' right," a Palmer man muttered. "I'm goin' t' ride up river, t'night, and ask how about it. Bat an' me figures we c'n clean out that nest by our lonely, an' git the kid back. Rest of you folks better pull the blankets over your heads t'night er you might hear shootin'." "Rope beats that," suggested another, his tongue thickened by what had been poured over it. Two or three grunted approval--a bit uncertainly, because in normal times they liked the Meadowlark outfit, Lark himself in particular, and they did _not_ like Palmer. "Better send the sheriff after the kid," one level-headed cowpuncher advised. "Lark just done it fer a josh, most likely." "Yeah, better send the sheriff up there," some one agreed.