“You tryin’ to scare me?” demanded West sullenly.

“I’m trying to hammer some common sense into your head.  Your chance for a safe getaway rests on one thing.  You’ve got to have friends in the Lone Lands who’ll hide you till you can slip out of the country.  Can you do that if the trappers—­friends of McRae, nearly all of ’em—­carry the word of what you did to this girl?”

“I’m gonna take her with me.”  West stuck doggedly to his idea.  He knew what he wanted.  His life was forfeit, anyhow.  He might as well go through to a finish.

From where she sat before the great fire Jessie’s whisper reached Whaley.  “Don’t let him, please.”  It was an ineffective little wail straight from the heart.

Whaley went on, as though he had not heard.  “It’s your deal, not mine.  I’m just telling you.  Take this girl along, and your life’s not worth a plugged nickel.”

“Hell’s hinges!  In two days she’ll be crazy about me.  Tha’s how I am with women.”

“In two days she’ll hate the ground you walk on, if she hasn’t killed herself or you by that time.”

Waves of acute pain were pricking into Jessie’s legs from the pink toes to the calves.  She was massaging them to restore circulation and had to set her teeth to keep from crying.

But her subconscious mind was wholly on what passed between the men.  She knew that Whaley was trying to reestablish over the other the mental dominance he had always held.  It was a frail enough tenure, no doubt, likely to be upset at any moment by vanity, suspicion, or heady gusts of passion.  In it, such as it was, lay a hope.  Watching the gambler’s cold, impassive face, the stony look in the poker eyes, she judged him tenacious and strong-willed.  For reasons of his own he was fighting her battle.  He had no intention of letting West take her with him.

Why?  What was the motive in the back of his mind?  She acquitted the man of benevolence.  If his wishes chanced to march with hers, it was because of no altruism.  He held a bitter grudge against Angus McRae and incidentally against her for the humiliation of his defeat at the hands of Morse.  To satisfy this he had only to walk out of the house and leave her to an ugly fate.  Why did he not do this?  Was he playing a deep game of his own in which she was merely a pawn?

She turned the steaming duffles over on the mud hearth to dry the other side.  She drew back the moccasins and the leggings that the heat might not scorch them.  The sharp pain waves still beat into her feet and up her limbs.  To change her position she drew up a stool and sat on it.  This she had pushed back to a corner of the fireplace.

For Bully West was straddling up and down the room, a pent volcano ready to explode.  He knew Whaley’s advice was good.  It would be suicide to encumber himself with this girl in his flight.  But he had never disciplined his desires.  He wanted her.  He meant to take her.  Passion, the lust for revenge, the bully streak in him that gloated at the sight of some one young and fine trembling before him:  all these were factors contributing to the same end.  By gar, he would have what he had set his mind on, no matter what Whaley said.