Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/148

 body else?" Louise inquired, affecting a cold indifference, as if the complicity of one man more or less in this affair was nothing to her. "I'm not going to shirk on you my last day."

Mrs. Cowgill looked at her curiously, not understanding her in the least. Goosie turned her back, tossing her head a little, the sound of a sniff coming out of her stubby, musical nose. That's what one got for associating with jerries, her unsympathetic attitude seemed to say.

Two little spots of color came into Louise's pale cheeks, a flash into her sorrowful, shocked eyes, lighting her face up defiantly, at this pantomime on the part of Miss Goosie. Yet Goosie's attitude was only a concrete expression of the public belief, as Louise was soon to learn. As the crowd dissolved from the square, scattering in close-talking groups, she heard the term "cow jerry" pass from lip to lip.

Tom Laylander was gone, on a horse brought there by the raiders for him, it was said. And the sheriff, a chicken-faced man with a shallow, slanting forehead and a big mustache that seemed to drag him down to anemic lankness, was gathering a posse to pursue him.