When she had finished the relation of Nola's ravishment, he sat with head drooped in dusty silence a moment. Then he looked her in the eyes with such a steady blaze of indignation that she felt her own rage kindle to meet it. His clear, steady gaze was an arraignment, an accusation on the ugly charge of perversion of the truth as she knew it to be in the bottom of her conscience when she had laid the crime at the homesteaders' hands. If he saw her at all, she thought, it was as some small despicable thing, for his eyes were so unflinching, as they poured their steady fire into her own, that he seemed to be summing up the final consequences which lay behind her, along the dusty highway to the ranchhouse by the river. "In the first place," said he, speaking slowly, "there are no cattle thieves among the homesteaders in the settlement up the river, Miss Landcraft. I have told you this before. Here, I want you to meet some of them, and judge for yourself." He beckoned to Tom Lassiter and the three with him, and they joined him there before her. In a few words he told them who she was and the news that she carried, as well as the accusation that went with it. "These men, their neighbors, and myself not only had no hand in this deed, but there's not one among us that wouldn't put down his life to keep that young woman from harm and give her back to her home. We have our grievances against Saul Chadron, God knows! and they are grave enough. But we don't fight that way, Miss Landcraft." "If you're innocent, then prove it by forcing the men that carried her off, or the man, if there was only one, to bring her back home. Then I'll believe you. Maybe others will, too. What are you riding the road so early for, all armed and suspicious, if you're such honest men?" "We're goin' to the agency after ammunition to defend our homes, and our wives and children--such of us as Saul Chadron and his hired hounds has left children to, colonel's daughter," Tom Lassiter answered, reproof in his kind old eyes. Frances had unrolled the bit of evidence that she had picked up from the bushes, and was holding it on the horn of her saddle now, quite unconscious of what her hands were doing, for she had forgotten the importance of her find in the heat of that meeting. Macdonald spurred forward, pointing to the thing in her hand. "Where did you get that?" he asked, a sharp note of concern in his voice that made her start. She told him. He took it from her and turned to his comrades. "It's Mark Thorn's cap!" he said, holding it up, his fingers in the crown. Tom Lassiter nodded his slow head as the others leaned to look. "Saul Chadron's chickens has come home to roost," he said. Frances understood nothing of the excitement that sprung out of the mention of the outlaw's name, for Mark Thorn and his bloody history were alike unknown to her. Her resentment mounted at being an outsider to their important or pretended secret.