"Not exactly, though I'd like Lynch to think I'd been taken on there. Do you suppose, if I put Tenny wise to what I was after, that he'd let me have a cayuse and pack-horse, and stake me to enough grub to keep me a week or two in the mountains back of the Shoe-Bar?" "He might, especially when he knows you're buckin' Tex; he never was much in love with Lynch." Jessup paused, eyeing his companion curiously. "Say, Buck," he went on quickly, "What makes yuh so keen about this, anyhow? Yuh ain't no deputy sheriff, or anythin' like that, are yuh?" For a moment Stratton was taken aback by the unexpectedness of the question. He had come to regard Jessup and himself so completely at one in their desire to penetrate the mystery of Lynch's shady doings that it had never occurred to him that his intense absorption in the situation might strike Bud as peculiar. It was one thing to behave as Bud was doing, especially as he frankly had the interest of Mary Thorne at heart, and quite another to throw up a job and plan to carry on an unproductive investigation from a theoretical desire to bring to justice a crooked foreman whom he had never seen until a few weeks ago. "Why, of course not," parried Buck. "What gave you that notion?" "I dunno exactly. I s'pose mebbe it's the way you're plannin' to give yore time to it without pay or nothin'. There won't be a darn cent in it for yuh, even if yuh do land Tex in the pen." "I know that," and Buck smiled; "but I'm a stubborn cuss when I get started on anything. Besides, I love Tex Lynch well enough to want to see him get every mite that's comin' to him. I've got a little money saved up, and I'll get more fun spending it this way than any other I can think of." "There's somethin' in that," agreed Jessup. "Golly, Buck! I wisht I could go along with yuh. I never was much on savin', but I could manage a couple of weeks without a job." Stratton hesitated. "I'd sure like it, kid," he answered. "It would be a whole lot pleasanter for me, but I'm wondering if you wouldn't do more good there on the Shoe-Bar. With nobody at all to cross him, there's no tellin' what Lynch might try and pull off. Besides, it seems to me somebody ought to be there to sort of look after Miss--" He broke off, struck by a sudden possibility. "You don't suppose he'll get really nasty about what you--" "Hell!" broke in Bud sharply. "I wasn't thinking about that. He'll be nasty, of course, but he can't go more than so far. I reckon you're right, Buck. Miss Mary oughtn't to be left there by herself." "Of course, there's Manning--" Bud disposed of the aristocratic Alfred with a forceable epithet which ought to have made his ears burn. "Besides, that bird ain't goin' to stay forever, I hope," he added. This settled, they passed on to other details, and by the time they reached Paloma, everything had been threshed out and decided, including a possible means of communication in case of emergency.