If so, why?  Because he was a spy come to get evidence against her people for the express company.

The eyes of the girl blazed.  The man had come to ruin her father, to send her brothers to prison, and he was accepting their hospitality while he moled for facts to convict them.  To hear the shout of his gay laughter as a calf upset him in the dust was added fuel to the fire of her anger.  If he had looked as villainous as Dave Meldrum, she could have stood it better, but any one would have sworn that he was a clean, decent young fellow just out of college.

She called to him.  Roy glanced up and came across the corral.  His sleeves were rolled to the elbows and the shirt open at the throat.  Flowing muscles rippled under the white skin of his forearms as he vaulted the fence to stand beside her.  He had the graceful poise of an athlete and the beautiful, trim figure of youth.

Yet he was a spy.  Beulah hardened her heart.

“I found your hat in the dust, Mr. Street.”  She held it out to him upside down, the leather pad lifted by her finger so that the letters stood out.

The rigor of her eyes was a challenge.  For a moment, before he caught sight of the initials, he was puzzled at her stiffness.  Then his heart lost a beat and hammered wildly.  His brain was in a fog and he could find no words of explanation.

“It is your hat, isn’t it, Mr.—­Street?”

“Yes.”  He took it from her, put it on, and gulped “Thanks.”

She waited to give him a chance to justify himself, but he could find no answer to the charge that she had fixed upon him.  Scornfully she turned from him and went to the house.

Miss Rutherford found her father reading a week-old newspaper.

“I’ve got fresher news than that for you, dad,” she said.  “I can tell you who this man that calls himself Cherokee Street isn’t.”

Rutherford looked up quickly.  “You mean who he is, Boots.”

“No, I mean who he isn’t.  His name isn’t Cherokee Street at all.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he is wearing a hat with the initials ‘R.B.’ stamped in it.  I gave him a chance to explain and he only stammered and got white.  He hadn’t time to think up a lie that would fit.”

“Dad burn it, Jess Tighe is right, then.  The man is a spy.”  The ranchman lit a cigar and narrowed his eyes in thought.

“What is he spying here for?”

“I reckon he’s a detective of the express company nosing around about that robbery.  Some folks think it was pulled off by a bunch up in the hills somewhere.”

“By the Rutherford gang?” she quoted.

He looked at her uneasily.  The bitterness in her voice put him on the defensive.  “Sho, Boots!  That’s just a way folks have of talking.  We’ve got our enemies.  Lots of people hate us because we won’t let any one run over us.”

She stood straight and slender before him, her eyes fixed in his.  “Do they say we robbed the express company?”