The lank prospector might have been surprised on the following morning had he known that within an hour after his departure David and Goliath were driving away over the hills in the opposite direction in a creaking old buckboard behind a pair of fat mules that philosophically and leisurely trotted as if they had knowledge of a long journey ahead. It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when the partners left their mules in a feed stable, brushed the dust from their clothes, and after a brief stop at a restaurant presented themselves at the county jail and asked for the sheriff. And the sheriff, being an old friend of theirs, granted their request for permission to interview his prisoner and as a further evidence of confidence gave them the use of his private office. “I’ve got just one condition, David,” he said, “and that is that if you hear of anything I’d ought to know you’ll tell me. Because, between us three, I can’t get this thing quite straight in my own mind, and if this young chap Ray is a criminal my judgment of human nature isn’t worth a cuss any more. I can’t make myself believe, in spite of the fact that we’ve got him shut up, that he held up that stage; and that’s the honest-to-God truth!” Ray was brought into the office and started in surprise when he recognized his visitors. He had the look of a helpless and hunted animal and when David and Goliath thrust out their hands and said, “No use in asking questions, because we’ve come to help you,” threatened to break down. At first he could tell them nothing that they did not already know and made the same protestations of ignorance and innocence that had been made at the time of his arrest. “We’ve heard all that and believe you,” David said at last. “But what we want to learn--who are your enemies?” “But I haven’t any, that I know of,” Ray insisted. “I came West from Iowa and worked in two or three mines and watched and picked up all I could because I want to be a miner. Then I went to Wallula and was one of the first to stake a claim on Torren’s Gulch, and since then have been too busy trying to find gold on it to fool around the camp, or make enemies. I’ve kept my mouth shut, and women don’t come in my catalogue because”--he stopped, flushed, looked embarrassed and then boyishly added--“because the reason I came West was to try to make money enough to marry a girl I grew up with back there in Iowa. And now--my God! What will she think when she hears of this!” He rested his head in his arms on the table by which he sat and for a moment gave way to despair. “There! There! Don’t take it to heart, son,” Goliath rumbled, laying his huge hand on the prisoner’s bent shoulders. “That girl is too good to hold anything against you if you’re proved innocent, and my pardner and me are goin’ to do that, or go the limit tryin’ to do it.” But David sat apparently unmoved and with his eyes fixed absently on the window beyond.