nd over
to the woman, all out of breath:

"It's F'ank, Nita! He didn't go home. I saw him in the bushes!"

"It's your mother, too," she said. "Come after you." She tried to smile.
"I told you it would be to-day--didn't I?" She snatched him to her and
kissed him fiercely. She opened the door. "Good-bye, old scout," she
whispered. Then she turned to Frank. "Go!" she panted and her lips
trembled. "Go!"

Outside the car Frank stood by, quivering with pride while the boy
passed from the mother's high up into the father's arms. He saw the
light in their faces, the flash of the sun on the boy's curls, the
smiles of the men who looked on. Then the shadow of terrible days and
nights fell across his happiness and for the second time that day he saw
red. For the woman had stepped out of the car, and the big sheriff had
caught her by the arm.

The dog glanced up, bewildered, into the faces about him. But none of
them had seen. He ran to the woman; he took his stand beside her,
looking up at the sheriff with fierce, pleading eyes. But the sheriff
still held her arm, and the dog growled, partly in anger, partly in
trouble. Then Tommy saw, too. He wriggled loose from his father; he
came running to their help.

"Let go of her!" he screamed, and caught the woman's skirt with both
hands, "Papa, make him let her go!"

But it was his mistress who understood, who came to them with shining
face and caught the woman by both hands. He knew it was all right now,
even when the woman sank down on the car step and sobbed brokenly, her
face buried in her hands. For the sheriff had stepped back, and his
mistress was at her side, an arm about her shoulder.

"No, Sheriff," she said, looking up at him, and the sun sparkled in her
eyes.

"We won't say anything about this, gentlemen," Earle said quietly to the
men.

That night Frank lay in the crowded lobby of the hotel, ears pricked
toward the wide-screened dining-room door. He had already had his
supper, out in the rear courtyard near the kitchen where many dishes
rattled.

"Two porterhouse steaks--raw," Steve Earle had said.

"And a big dish of ice cream," Marian Earle had added with a smile, for
old Frank was an epicure in his way.

And now the sheriff was telling the crowd about him.

"He followed that car for two hundred miles. That was nothin'--been
huntin' all his life. But he kept out of sight--that's the thing! They
never saw him, and he never left them. That's what put us on