“Yes,” said the girl.

“You’re not afraid?”

“Oh, no.”

Donnegan settled his hat a little more firmly upon his head.  He had been on the verge of attributing her gentleness to a blank, stupid mind; he began to realize that there was metal under the surface.  He felt that some of the qualities of the father were echoed faintly, and at a distance, in the child.  In a way, she made him think of an unawakened creature.  When she was roused, if the time ever came, it might be that her eye could become a thing alternately of fire and ice, and her voice might carry with a ring.

“This business has to be gotten through quickly,” he went on.  “One meeting with Jack Landis will be enough.”

She wondered why he set his jaw when he said this, but he was wondering how deeply the colonel’s ward had fallen into the clutches of Nelly Lebrun.  If that first meeting did not bring Landis to his senses, what followed?  One of two things.  Either the girl must stay on in The Corner and try her hand with her fiance again, or else the final brutal suggestion of the colonel must be followed; he must kill Landis.  It was a cold-blooded suggestion, but Donnegan was a cold-blooded man.  As he looked at the girl, where she sat on the boulder, he knew definitely, first and last, that he loved her, and that he would never again love any other woman.  Every instinct drew him toward the necessity of destroying Landis.  There was his stumbling block.  But what if she truly loved Landis?

He would have to wait in order to find that out.  And as he stood there with the sun shining on the red stubble on his face he made a resolution the more profound because it was formed in silence:  if she truly loved Landis he would serve her hand and foot until she had her will.

But all he said was simply:  “I shall be back before it’s dark.”

“I shall be comfortable here,” replied the girl, and smiled farewell at him.

And while Donnegan went down the slope full of darkness he thought of that smile.

The Corner spread more clearly before him with every step he made.  It was a type of the gold-rush town.  Of course most of the dwellings were tents—­dog tents many of them; but there was a surprising sprinkling of wooden shacks, some of them of considerable size.  Beginning at the very edge of the town and spread over the sand flats were the mines and the black sprinkling of laborers.  And the town itself was roughly jumbled around one street.  Over to the left the main road into The Corner crossed the wide, shallow ford of the Young Muddy River and up this road he saw half a dozen wagons coming, wagons of all sizes; but nothing went out of The Corner.  People who came stayed there, it seemed.