Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/81

 Coburn likely would say he never had heard of her loss, as he lived in another county, and his word would go as far as her own. He had the reputation of an honest man, but cattle honesty and bank honesty stood in different sections of the range moral code from horse honesty, she knew too well. Now her horse bore Coburn's brand. If he wanted to be mean about it, she didn't know where she'd come out. Maybe he'd replevin the horse, standing on his brand, with perhaps a bill of sale from the thief, whom nobody ever would see again.

But any honest observer would say the actions of the horse proved its ownership. That stranger with the queer, quick, deep-sounding voice could speak for Frank. Lost in the night, he had given Frank the reins, and Frank had come home, put his head over the gate and called her, as he used to call her on a hot day when he came up, thirsty and fly-plagued, asking her to put him away from his pestering little enemies in the cool dark barn.

So Eudora reflected, the unloaded bones put out of mind while she rubbed the mud from her pet's long slender legs. She had fed him in a corral manger where her father used to finish off his picked cattle on corn, wanting him out in the light so she could look him over for other marks of cruelty he must have suffered aside from the resented brand.

Meantime, Tom Simpson had been called in to breakfast by Mrs. Ellison, who sat at the table with him, as much through her desire to learn something about him, it must be owned, as through a sense of hospitality. Simpson had washed the mud off and combed his hair at the bench on the kitchen porch where many a cowboy before