Chapter XXV. Lite Comes Out of the Background - Page 2

have a little home." His eyes went surreptitiously to her face, and lingered there wistfully. "So after the trouble I buckled down to work and saved a little faster, if anything. It looked to me like there wasn't much hope of doing anything for your dad till his sentence ran out, so I never said anything about it. Long as Carl didn't try to sell it to anybody else, I just waited and got together all the money I could. I didn't see as there was anything else to do."

Jean was chewing a corner of her lip, and was staring out of the window. "I didn't know I was stealing your thunder, Lite," she said dispiritedly. "Why didn't you tell me?"

'Wasn't anything to tell--till there was something to tell. Now, this telegram here,--this is what I started out to talk about. It'll be just as well if you know it before we get to Helena. I showed it to Art, and he thought the same as I did. You know,--or I reckon you don't, because I never said anything,-- away last summer, along about the time you went to work for Burns, I got to thinking things over, and I wondered if Carl didn't have something on his mind about that killing. So I wrote to Rossman. I didn't much like the way he handled your dad's case, but he knew all the ins and outs, so I could talk to him without going away back at the beginning. He knew Carl, too, so that made it easier.

"I wrote and told him how Carl was prowling around through the house nights, and the like of that, and to look up the title to the Lazy A--"

"Why wouldn't you wait and let me buy it myself?" Jean asked him with just a shade of sharpness in her voice. "You knew I wanted to."

"So I got Rossman started, quite a while back. He thought as I did, that Carl was acting mighty funny. I was with Carl more than you was, and I could tell he had something laying heavy on his mind. But then, the rest of us had things laying pretty heavy on our minds, too, that wasn't guilt; so there wasn't any way to tell what was bothering Carl." Lite made no attempt to answer the question she had asked.

"Now, here's this wire Rossman sent me. You don't want to get the wrong idea, Jean, and feel too bad about this. You don't want to think you had anything to do with it. Carl was gradually building up to something of this kind,--has been for a long time. His coming over to the ranch nights, looking for that letter that he had hunted all over for at first, shows he wasn't right in his mind on the subject. But--"

"Well, heavens and earth, Lite!" Jean's tone was exasperated more than it was worried. "Why don't you say what you want to say? What's it all about? Let me read that telegram and be done with it. I--I should think you'd know I can stand things, by this time. I haven't shown any weak knees, have I?"

"Well, I hate to pile on any more," Lite muttered