I'm very much obliged to you. I think you will
find him in fairly good condition."
Jim Reid repeated whatever it was that he had muttered to himself.
The Dean chuckled. "Jim," he said to the big cattleman, "I want to
introduce my friend, Mr. Lawrence Knight, one of Sheriff Gordon's
deputies. It looks like he had been busy over in the Tailholt Mountain
neighborhood."
The two men shook hands silently. Mrs. Reid greeted the officer
cordially, while Mrs. Baldwin, to the Dean's great delight, demonstrated
her welcome in the good old-fashioned mother way.
"Will Baldwin, I could shake you," she cried, as Patches stood, a little
confused by her impulsive greeting. "Here you knew all the time; and you
kept pesterin' me by trying to make me believe that you thought he had
run away because he was a thief!"
It was, perhaps, the proudest moment of the Dean's life when he admitted
that Patches had confided in him that morning when they were so late to
breakfast. And how he had understood that the man's disappearance and
the pretense of stealing a horse had been only a blind. The good Dean
never dreamed that there was so much more in Honorable Patches' strategy
than he knew!
"Mr.
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