“You’re dead!” the chief deputy called out at his approach. “Lafe phoned a hour ago that you was drownded in the flood. He’s still huntin’ for your body.” “Not quite drowned, but almost,” Otis grinned. “You see, I’d promised Lafe I wouldn’t attempt to escape, so here I am.” “Damn fool!” snorted the chief deputy. “Why didn’t you beat it while the beatin’ was good?” “I preferred to have the Sheriff turn me loose himself,” Otis replied, smiling. “He’ll do it, too, when he hears what Gus Bernat has to say.” “Gus Bernat?” repeated the chief deputy. “Why, he was drownded in the flood hisself. The coroner stopped for his body on the way back with Fyffe’s.” CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VII Bernat was dead! His alibi was gone! With Bernat had died his last chance for freedom—for life itself, perhaps! What chance remained for him to convince a jury of his innocence? He was enmeshed in a net of overwhelming circumstantial evidence. Who would believe his story now? Who, in the face of Fyffe’s written message, of the empty shells in Otis’ revolver, of the widely known enmity between the cattle men and the rangers, would hold his weak defense as anything more than a crude and hastily conceived fabrication? The shock of the discovery of Fyffe’s condemning scrawl and of his subsequent arrest had been great, indeed. But through it all he had been buoyed up by the confidence that Bernat could provide an ironclad alibi. Years before, one of his father’s cowhands had been cornered by a grizzly in the Snake River valley south of the Yellowstone. The man had raised his rifle to fire, and the rifle had jammed. Otis, then a boy, had been one of the party which had found the torn and mutilated body, with the jammed rifle by its side. Now he knew how the cow-hand must have felt at the instant the rifle jammed, with the towering grizzly approaching. For he, Otis, was left helpless before the blind fury of the law. Sheriff Ogden had returned to Jackson an hour after his chief deputy had led Otis to his cell. “Yep, Gus Bernat’s dead as a doornail,” he announced with some evidence of sympathy. “Between you and me, looks like you’re outa luck.” Otis shrugged, and tried to
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