“Wouldn't it be better to live it down?” she asked with a quietness that belied her terror. For there had been in his manner a threat, not against her but against the man whom her heart acknowledged as her lover.
He laughed. “Y'u're still hoping to make a Sunday school superintendent out of me, I see. Y'u haven't forgot all your schoolmarm ways yet, but I'll teach y'u to forget them.”
The other cousin watched him with a cool, quiet glance that never wavered. The outlaw was heavily armed, but his weapons were sheathed, and, though there was a wary glitter behind the vindictive exultation in his eyes, his capable hands betrayed no knowledge of the existence of his revolvers. It was, he knew, to be a moral victory, if one at all.
“Hope I'm not disturbing any happy family circle,” he remarked, and, taking two limping steps forward, he lifted the book from the girl's unresisting hands. “H'm! Barrie. I don't go much on him. He's too sissy for me. But I could have guessed the other Ned Bannister would be reading something like that,” he concluded, a flicker of sneering contempt crossing his face.
“Perhaps y'u'll learn some time to attend to your own business,” said the man on the couch quietly.
Hatred gleamed in the narrowed slits from which the soul of the other cousin looked down at him. “I'm a philanthropist, and my business is attending to other people's. They raise sheep, for instance, and I market them.”
The girl hastily interrupted. She had not feared for herself, but she knew fear for the indomitable man she had nursed back to life. “Won't you sit down, Mr. Bannister? Since you don't approve our literature, perhaps we can find some other diversion more to your taste.” She smiled faintly.
The man turned in smiling divination of her purpose, and sat down to play with her as a cat does with a mouse.
“Thank y'u, Miss Messiter, I believe I will. I called to thank y'u for your kindness to my cousin as well as to inquire about you. The word goes that y'u pulled my dear cousin back when death was reaching mighty strong for him. Of course I feel grateful to y'u. How is he getting along now?”
“He's doing very well, I think.”
“That's ce'tainly good hearing,” was his ironical response. “How come he to get hurt, did y'u say?”
His sleek smile was a thing hateful to see.
“A hound bit me,” explained the sheepman.
“Y'u don't say! I reckon y'u oughtn't to have got in its way. Did y'u kill it?”
“Not yet.”
“That was surely a mistake, for it's liable to bite again.”
The girl felt a sudden sickness at his honeyed cruelty, but immediately pulled herself together. For whatever fiendish intention might be in his mind she meant to frustrate it.
“I hear you are of a musical turn, Mr. Bannister. Won't you play for us?”
She had by chance found his weak spot. Instantly his eyes lit up. He stepped across to the piano and began to look over the music, though not so intently that he forgot to keep under his eye the man on the lounge.
“H'm! Mozart, Grieg, Chopin, Raff, Beethoven. Y'u ce'tainly have the music here; I wonder if y'u have the musician.” He looked her over with a bold, unscrupulous gaze. “It's an old trick to have classical music on the rack and ragtime in your soul. Can y'u play these?”
“You will have to be the judge of that,” she said.
He selected two of Grieg's songs and invited her to the piano. He knew instantly that the Norwegian's delicate fancy and lyrical feeling had found in her no inadequate medium of expression. The peculiar emotional quality of the song “I Love Thee” seemed to fill the room as she played. When she swung round on the stool at its conclusion it was to meet a shining-eyed, musical enthusiast instead of the villain she had left five minutes earlier.
“Y'u CAN play,” was all he said, but the manner of it spoke volumes.
For nearly an hour he kept her at the piano, and when at last he let her stop playing he seemed a man transformed.
“You have given me a great pleasure, a very great pleasure, Miss Messiter,” he thanked her warmly, his Western idiom sloughed with his villainy for the moment. “It has been a good many months since I have heard any decent music. With your permission I shall come again.”
Her hesitation was imperceptible. “Surely, if you wish.” She felt it would be worse than idle to deny the permission she might not be able to refuse.
With perfect grace he bowed, and as he wheeled away met with a little shock of remembrance the gaze of his cousin. For a long moment their eyes bored into each other. Neither yielded the beat of an eyelid, but it was the outlaw that spoke.
“I had forgotten y'u. That's strange, too because it was for y'u I came. I'm going to take y'u home with me.
“Alive or dead?” asked the other serenely.
“Alive, dear Ned.”
“Same old traits cropping out again. There was always something feline about y'u. I remember when y'u were a boy y'u liked to torment wild animals y'u had trapped.”
“I play with larger game now—and find it more interesting.”
“Just so. Miss Messiter, I shall have to borrow a pony from y'u, unless—” He broke off and turned indifferently to the bandit.
“Yes, I brought a hawss along with me for y'u,” replied the other to the unvoiced question. “I thought maybe y'u might want to ride with us.”
“But he can't ride. He couldn't possibly. It would kill him,” the girl broke out.
“I reckon not.” The man from the Shoshones glanced at his victim as he drew on his gauntlets. “He's a heap tougher than y'u think.”
“But it will. If he should ride now, why—It would be the same as murder,” she gasped. “You wouldn't make him ride now?”
“Didn't y'u hear him order his hawss, ma'am? He's keen on this ride. Of course he don't have to go unless he wants to.” The man turned his villainous smile on his cousin, and the latter interpreted it to mean that if he preferred, the point of attack might be shifted to the girl. He might go or he might stay. But if he stayed the mistress of the Lazy D would have to pay for his decision.
“No, I'll ride,” he said at once.
Helen Messiter had missed the meaning of that Marconied message that flashed between them. She set her jaw with decision. “Well, you'll not. It's perfectly ridiculous. I won't hear of such a thing.”
“Y'u seem right welcome. Hadn't y'u better stay, Ned?” murmured the outlaw, with smiling eyes that mocked.
“Of course he had. He couldn't ride a mile—not half a mile. The idea is utterly preposterous.”
The sheepman got to his feet unsteadily. “I'll do famously.”
“I won't have it. Why are you so foolish about going? He said you didn't need to go. You can't ride any more than a baby could chop down that pine in the yard.”
“I'm a heap stronger than y'u think.”
“Yes, you are!” she derided. “It's nothing but obstinacy. Make him stay,” she appealed to the outlaw.
“Am I my cousin's keeper?” he drawled. “I can advise him to stay, but I can't make him.”
“Well, I can. I'm his nurse, and I say he sha'n't stir a foot out of this house—not a foot.”
The wounded man smiled quietly, admiring the splendid energy of her. “I'm right sorry to leave y'u so unceremoniously.”
“You're not going.” She wheeled on the outlaw “I don't understand this at all. But if you want him