The only thing he claimed to have done and could not possibly have done, was to see Aleck Douglas riding into the coulee.

Aleck himself had branded that a lie before Lite had ever uttered it.
The result was just what was to be expected.

Aleck Douglas was placed under arrest, and as a prisoner he rode back to town alongside the sheriff,--an old friend of his, by the way,--to where Jean waited impatiently for news.
It was Lite who told her.

"It'll come out all right," he said, in his calm way that might hide a good deal of emotion beneath it.

"It's just to have something to work from,--don't mean anything in particular.
It's a funny way the law has got," he explained, "of arresting the last man that saw a fellow alive, or the first one that sees him dead." Jean studied this explanation dolefully.