soon as we heard at the ranch about your arrest, I learned from the boys about the meeting last night. They told me how they’d drawn lots to choose the man to run the ranger out of the country. And they told me it had fallen to you, and you’d gotten hot under the collar and told ’em to go to blazes—that you wouldn’t do it.”

“Doesn’t that bear out what I say? I told ’em I wouldn’t do it, and I didn’t!”

Sterling Carr shook his head.

“How about what old man Foster says?”

“What’s that? I didn’t know he had anything to do with it.”

“Just this: he saw you early this mornin’, ridin’ down the trail from the ranger station to the Buffalo Forks road. Couldn’t be mistaken. Described your hat and your shirt and your vest and your hoss. And that isn’t all. Frog-legs Ferguson of the Flying A saw you farther down the trail. Now don’t you think you’d better tell your old Dad the truth?”

Otis was dumfounded.

“It’s a lie!” he burst out. “I tell you it’s a lie. I was never near the ranger station till I went there with Lafe Ogden. Who told you about Foster and Frog-legs Ferguson? Did you talk to them yourself?”

“No, but Sheriff Ogden did. And he told me about it just before I come in here to see you.”

A sudden suspicion leaped into Otis’ mind. Was the Sheriff trying to “frame” him with manufactured evidence? And if so, why? Why had he come to Otis, begging him to say nothing of the incident of the handcuffs, but concealing the information about the identifications which Otis knew were false?

Why should Sheriff Ogden seek to “railroad” him? What could be the man’s motive? He and Otis, while not close personal friends, had always been on friendly terms.

Could it be that the Sheriff was in some way identified with the cattle rustlers? The thought startled him. Perhaps the Sheriff deliberately was trying to get rid of him, because of his activity against the rustlers!

And mightn’t that theory explain the action of Ogden in chaining him to the tree in the path of the flood? Maybe he had done it deliberately, hoping Otis would be drowned. Maybe he feared that Otis possessed some information against him in connection with the cattle-rustling, which Otis might disclose if he ever came to trial.

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