Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/77

 Simpson put down the saddle and told the story, beginning with his encountering Coburn on the train and accepting the provisional offer of a job, and ending with the adventure of Wallace Ramsey and his detective badge in Eddie Kane's saloon. He did not recount that story in detail, telling only as much as he did not figure in, and as he fancied would be agreeable to their ears. It had ended up with the row responsible for their hasty exit, and the confusion in horses, he explained.

"Why, it sounds reasonable, Eudora," Mrs. Ellison declared. "I believe he's telling the truth. So Sid Coburn had Frank all the time, did he?"

"I don't know whether he's had him all the time, but he had him," the girl replied, still sour and suspicious.

"And you've been ridin' all night in the rain, and without a slicker, as I live!" Mrs. Ellison said, looking Simpson over with motherly concern. "You come right in and get your breakfast—I'll rummage around and find you a change of clothes. Why, you're so soaked you wouldn't dry out all day!"

Eudora joined her mother, but somewhat coldly, in this offer of hospitality, a concession for which Simpson was not as grateful to her as he might have been under happier conditions. He was a bit scuffed in his tenderest place—that thin skin overlying his honor—by the girl's silly persistence, implied if not outright spoken, that he had borne a hand in the sequestration of her horse. Just as if a thief would ride a horse up to its owner's gate. Silly little hobble-de-hoy that she looked like, strutting around that way in man's pants, damn it all!