“Not this time, I think.”

Phyllis understood that Brill was threatening the nester and that the latter was defying him lightly, but what either meant precisely she did not know.  She proceeded to business without a word except the necessary directions to Becky.  Not until the arm was dressed and the wound on the head washed and bandaged did she address Keller.

“I’ll send you a powder that will help you get to sleep.  The doctor left it here for Phil, and he did not need it,” she said.

“Mebbe I won’t need it, either.”  Keller laughed hardily, at his enemy it seemed to the girl, and with some hint of a sinister understanding between them from which she was excluded.  “Thanks just the same, for that and for everything else you’ve done for me.”

Phyllis said “Good night” stiffly, and followed the old negress out.  She went directly to her bedroom, but not to sleep.  The night was hot, and it had been to her a day full of excitement.  She had much to think of.  Going to the open window, she sat down in a low chair with her arms across the sill.

Two men met beneath her window.

“Gimme the makings, Slim,” one said to the other.

While he was shaking the tobacco from the pouch to the paper, Slim spoke.  “The boys ought all to be here in another hour, Budd.  After that, it won’t take us long.”

“Not long,” the fat man answered uneasily.

There was a silence.  Slim broke it.  “We got to do it, o’ course.”

“Looks like.  Got to make an example.  No peace on the range till we do.”

“I hate like sin to, Budd.  He’s so damn game.”

“Me, too.  But we got to.  No two ways about it.”

“I reckon.  Brill says so.  But I wish the cuss had a chanct to fight for his life.”

They moved off together in troubled silence, Budd’s cigarette glowing red in the darkness.  Behind them they left a girl shocked and rigid.  They were going to lynch him!  She knew it as certainly as if she had been told it in set words.  Her blood grew cold, and she shivered.  While the confused horror of it raced through her brain, she noticed subconsciously that her fingers on the sill were trembling violently.

What could she do?  She was only a girl.  These men deferred to her in the trivial pleasantries, but she knew they would go their grim way no matter how she pleaded.  And it would be her fault.  She had betrayed the rustler to them.  It would be the same as if she had murdered him.  He had known while she was tending his wounds that she had delivered him to death, and he had not even reproached her.

Courage flowed back to her heart.  She would save him if it were possible.  It must be by strategy if at all.  But how?  For of course he was guarded.

She stepped out into the corridor.  All was dark there.  She tiptoed along it to the guest room, and found the door unlocked.  Nobody was inside.  She canvassed in her mind the possibilities.  They might have him outdoors or in the men’s bunk house with them under a guard, or they might have locked him up somewhere until the arrival of the others.  If the latter, it must be in the store, since that was the only safe place under lock and key.