I slipped down as
soon as I could."

"I knew you were true as steel," he fervently declared. "Nothing
whatever could ever have made me believe otherwise."

"Did father write to you?"

"Yes. He told me never to come here again, and that I must not try to
see you. I came to the house, and the servant said you were not in, and
would not admit me even when I asked for Elsie and Inza. I have had an
awful time."

"I have nearly died!" she confessed. "Oh, it has simply been terrible! I
thought once I was going crazy. Father does not understand how he has
tortured me, or he would not do it, I know. He cannot realize what it
means. He simply thinks I am still a child, and that I ought to submit
to him in this matter, as I have always done in all other things."

"You are old enough now to have a mind of your own, I allow!"

"And he has heard such awful stories about you, Buck. Just terrible
things."

That deep rage against Donald Pike struggled again in the heart of the
Kansan.

"I think I know who told him. What were the things, anyway?"

He said this with a great dread, for he already knew.

"Oh, I knew you were not guilty, Buck! Never fancy for a moment that I
thought you guilty. I told him you were innocent. I knew that it
couldn't be true that you were"--she sobbed--"drunk when you went aboard
the _Crested Foam_."

Badger winced as if stabbed. The dying boat-keeper, Barney Lynn,
confessed to drugging Badger, but did not tell Winnie that Badger was
drunk at the time. The Westerner knew this, and had been, as he had
admitted to Merriwell, just coward enough to be glad that Lynn did not
tell Winnie the whole truth. Now, as the sweat of a great inward
struggle came out on his face, he wished he had been courageous enough
to inform her of the real facts, instead of sheltering himself behind
that palatial confession of the boat-keeper. It was a virtual falsehood
that was coming home to him in a most unpleasant manner.

"I have stood up for you, Buck, against everything that father could
say," Winnie artlessly and innocently continued. "When he insisted that
you were drunk at the time, I told him I knew it was not so; and I have
stood by it. He thinks he has discovered proofs from a saloon-keeper
named Connelly, who keeps a vile resort somewhere down in the worst part
of New Haven. Connelly says you were intoxicated at his house that
night. But I told father that the same fellow who gave him the
information against