The girl glanced at him involuntarily.  At sight of his swollen and beaten face, she started.  Her gaze clung to him, eyes wild and fluttering with apprehension.

“I’ve been taking a massage treatment,” he explained.

Phyllis looked at her brother, then back at the ranchman.  The thing was beyond comprehension.  Ten minutes ago, this ferocious Hercules had left her, sound and unscratched.  Now he returned with a face beaten and almost beyond recognition from bloodstains.

“What—­what is it?” The appeal was to her brother.

“He let me beat him,” Phil explained.

“Let you beat him!  Why?”

“I don’t know.”

What the boy said was true, yet it was something less than the truth.  He was dimly aware that this man knew himself to have violated the code, and that he had submitted to punishment because of the violation.

“Tell me,” Phyllis commanded.

Phil told her in three sentences.  She looked at Weaver with eyes that saw him in a new light.  He still sneered, but behind the mask she got for the first time a glimpse of another man.  Only dimly she divined him; but what she visioned was half devil and half hero, capable of things great as well as of deeds despicable.

“I’m not going to leave you here in this house,” young Sanderson told her.  “I’ll not go.  If you stay, I stay.”

She shook her head.  “No, Phil—­you must go.  I’m all right here—­as safe as I would be at home.  You know, he has a right to send me to prison if he wants to.  I suppose he is holding me as a hostage against our friends in the hills.”

The boy accepted her decree under protest.  He did not know what else to do.  Decision comes only with age, and he could hit on no policy that would answer.  Reluctantly he gave way.

“If you so much as touch her, you’ll die for it,” he gulped at Weaver, in a sudden boyish passion.  “We’ll shoot you down like a dog.”

“Or a coyote,” suggested Buck, with a swift glance at Phyllis.  “It seems to be a family habit.  I’m much obliged to you.”

Phyl was in her brother’s arms, frankly in tears.

It was all very well to tell him to go; it was quite another thing to let him go without a good cry at losing him.

“Just say the word, and I’ll see it out with you, sis,” he told her.

“No, no!  I want you to go.  I wouldn’t have you stay.  Tell the boys it’s all right, and don’t let them do anything rash.”

Sanderson clenched his teeth, and looked at Weaver.  “Oh, they’ll do nothing rash.  Now they know you’re here, they won’t do a thing but sit down and be happy, I expect.”

The twins whispered together for a minute, then the boy kissed her, put her from him suddenly, and strode away.  From the door he called back two words at the cattleman.

“Don’t forget.”

With that, he was gone.  Yet a moment, and they heard the clatter of his horse’s hoofs.