uts of "Patches has come back! Patches has
come back! Nick Cambert is with him--so's Yavapai Joe!"

Jim Reid sprang to his feet. But the Dean calmly kept his seat, and
glancing up at his big friend with twinkling eyes, said to the boys,
with pretended gruffness, "Aw, what's the matter with you kids? Don't
you know that horse thief Patches wouldn't dare show himself in
Williamson Valley again? You're havin' bad dreams--that's what's the
matter with you. Or else you're tryin' to scare us."

"Honest, it's Patches, Uncle Will," cried Littly Billy.

"We seen him comin' from over beyond the corral," said Jimmy.

"I saw him first," shouted Conny. "I was up in the grand stand--I mean
on the fence."

"Me, too," chirped Jack.

Jim Reid stood looking toward the corral. "The boys are right, Will," he
said in a low tone. "There they come now."

As the three horsemen rode into the yard, and the watchers noted the
peculiarity of their companionship, Jim Reid muttered something under
his breath. But the Dean, as he rose leisurely to his feet, was smiling
broadly.

The little procession halted when the horses evidenced their dislike of
the automobile, and Patches came stiffly forward on foot. Lifting his
battered hat courteously to the company, he said to the Dean, "I have
returned your horse, sir. 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 Ho