“You ... here?  Yet?” she found herself stammering at him.

“Yes,” he answered heavily.  “I have been all this time looking for the horses.  The corral was broken; they had gotten out into the pasture.”

“A likely tale!” she cried with a sudden heat of passionate fury at the man and his cold manner and his mad thought that she was fool enough to be beguiled from her knowledge of what he was.  And then a fresh fear made her draw back and widened her eyes.  She had not thought of madness but ... if the man were mad....

But he was not mad and she knew it.  His were the clear eyes of perfect sanity.  He was simply ... an unthinkable brute.

“Look,” she said as his horse moved nervously.  “Your horse does limp!”

His answer came quickly.  And there was a queer note in his voice, harsh and ugly, which sent a shiver through her shaken nerves: 

“A man did that while we were in the cabin.  With a knife.”  The moon shone full in his face; she had never seen such a transformation, such a semblance of quiet, cold rage.  If the man were just acting....

“I’ve just got the hunch,” he said bluntly, “that I know who he is, too.  And, for the last time, Winifred Waverly, I am interfering in your business and advising you the best way I know how to turn back right here and right now and forget that you’ve got an uncle named Pollard!”

CHAPTER X

IN THE MOONLIGHT

She stood there in a bright patch of moonlight looking up into his face, seeing every line of it in the rich flood of light from the full moon, wondering dully if she had lost her sense of the real and the unreal.  It seemed to her so rankly absurd, so utterly preposterous that he should seek to pretend with her.  For, now that she had seen the limping gait of his big sorrel, was she more than certain that this was the man whom she had seen following her in the afternoon.  And as she noted again the sinewy bigness of him, the garb of grey shirt, open vest and black chaps, she told herself angrily that he was a fool, or that he thought her a fool, to pretend that he knew nothing of that thing which had just happened in the lonely cabin.  Even the grey neck-handkerchief, now knotted loosely about the brown throat, was there to give him the lie....  With shame and anger her cheeks burned until they went as crimson as hot blood could make them.

It was all so clear to her.  She had refused to believe that he had robbed Hap Smith’s mail bags.  Why?  She bit her lip in sudden anger:  because he had fitted well in a romantic girl’s eye!  Fool that she was.  She should have put sterner interpretation upon the fact that Thornton, coming rudely into the banker’s private office, had admitted hearing part of her conversation with Mr. Templeton.  Now she had no doubt that he had heard everything.

“Have you ever been over this trail?  As far as the next ranch, seven miles further on?” he asked at last, his hard eyes coming away from the horse that stood with one foot lifted a little from the ground, the quick twitching of the foot itself, the writhing and twisting of the foreleg, speaking of the pain from the deep cut.