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 for him outside respected them. They shook his hand, slapped him with mighty blows on the back, and then drifted cheerfully and delicately away.

"Drop in at the hotel if you can, Tom. Ray Masterson's got a room there."

"Maybe, later on."

He fairly ached to go, to meet the boys again, to sit in Ray Masterson's room on the bed, the floor, anywhere, and hear noisy commonplace talking going on around him. To talk himself; shop talk, of cattle and horses and riders; of how the Potters were making out with their new property; of the new oil field just opening up south near Easton. But there was Clare, making her silent demand on him; a proper demand too, he realized.

"Mom's expecting you to supper, Tom."

"I'll have to see Mrs. Mallory first."

"She might have come today, after all you've done for her."

"She's not well. Nellie was there. I saw her."

Clare sniffed.

"I'll tell the world she was!" she said. "If the whole court room doesn't know she's crazy about you it's not her fault."

"That's silly. She's only a kid."

He was irritable when she insisted on going with him to the Mallory house, a small two-story frame affair on a back street, and even on following him upstairs to where Mrs. Mallory, still broken by Jake's death, lay in bed propped up with pillows. But in spite of Clare's frozen silence and her downright rudeness to Nellie, he relaxed under their gratitude and their relief at his acquittal.

"God keeps some sort of a balance sheet, Tom. And the way you've acted this winter sure paid off a lot of scores."

"I only did what any white man would have done," he said, awkwardly.

But she had some news for him, too. Her nephew from Colorado was coming up. He had been a cow-hand, and he had agreed to work through the spring and summer,