“You don’t understand.”  Her voice fell to the lowest murmur.  “He came here for me.”

“For you-all?”

“Oh, don’t you see?  He brought me back here because he—­cared for me.”  A tide of shame flushed her cheeks.  Surely no girl had ever been so cruelly circumstanced that she must tell such things before a lover, who had not declared himself explicitly.

“Cared for you?  As a wolf does for a lamb!”

“At first, maybe—­but not afterward.  Don’t you see he was sorry?  Everything shows that.”

“And to show that he was sorry, he had poor Jesus Menendez killed!”

“No—­he didn’t know about that till I told him.”

“Till you told him?”

“Yes.  When I freed him and took him to my room.”

“So you freed him—­and took him to your room?” She had never heard her father speak in such a voice, so full at once of anger and incredulous horror.

“Don’t look at me like that, father!  Don’t you see—­can’t you see——­Oh, why are you so cruel to me?” She buried her face in her forearm against the rock.

Her father caught her arm so savagely that a spasm of pain shot through her.  “None of that!  Give me the truth.  Now—­this instant!”

Anger at his injustice welled up in her.  “You’ve had the truth.  I knew of the attack on the sheep camp—­heard of it on the way home from school, from Manuel.  Do you think I’ve lived with you eighteen years for nothing?  I knew what you would do, and I tried to save you from yourself.  There was no place where he would be safe but in my room.  I took him there, and slept with Anna.  I did right.  I would do it again.”

“Slept with Anna, did you?”

She felt again that furious tide of blood sweep into her face.  “Yes.  From the time of the shooting.”

“Goddlemighty, gyurl, I wisht you’d keep out of my business.”

“And let you do murder?”

“Why did you save him?  Because you love him?” demanded Sanderson fiercely.

“Because I love you.  But you’re too blind to see it.”

“And him—­do you love him?  Answer me!”

“No!” she flamed.  “But if I did, I would be loving a man.  He wouldn’t take odds of five to one against an enemy.”

Her father’s great black eyes chiselled into hers.  “Are you lying to me, girl?”

Weaver spoke out quietly.  “I expect I can answer that, Mr. Sanderson.  Your daughter has given me to understand that I’m about as mean a thing as God ever made.”

But Phyl was beyond caution now.  Her resentment against her father, for that he had forced her to drag out the secret things of her heart and speak of them in the presence of the man concerned, boiled into words—­quick, eager, full of passion.

“I take it all back then—­every word of it!” she cried.  “You are braver, kinder, more generous to me than my own people—­more chivalrous.  You would have gone to your death without telling them that I took you to my room.  But my own father, who has known me all my life, insults me grossly.”