The face of the other man she saw.  His hat was far back upon his head and as he come on his dark features fascinated her.  He was tall, as tall or nearly as tall as the Kid or Buck Thornton, she thought, slender, full of the grace of perfect physical manhood.  There was a dash to him that, to the girl, was not without its charm.  It spoke from the finely chiselled lips, curved to a still, contemptuous smile, from the eyes, long lashed, well set far apart, from the swinging careless stride.  A handsome devil, as handsome in his own way as the Kid in his, as defiant an insolence in his smiling eyes, as cool an assurance and a vague added charm which was not so readily classified.

The two men came to the door.  She heard Pollard greet them, calling them by name, and thus learned that one was Cole Dalton, the sheriff, one Broderick.  Then there came up to her the hum of voices from her uncle’s office, the heavy, rasping voice which she was certain belonged to the thicker-set man, the light, careless pleasant tones of the taller man.  She found herself listening, not for the words which were lost in the indistinct hum, but to the qualities of tone, idly speculating as to which man was the sheriff, which Broderick.  She wondered if now they were going to arrest Buck Thornton and if Broderick were a deputy?  And again she hated herself with a quick spurt of contemptuous indignation that she allowed a feeling of sympathy for the tall cattleman to slip into her heart.

For a long time the low toned conversation in the room below her continued.  At first it was her uncle who did the greater part of the talking, his utterances at once emphatic and yet guarded.  She had the uneasy feeling that the tones were hushed less because of Mrs. Riddell whom she could hear clattering with her pots and pans in the kitchen, than because of herself.  A little hurt, half angry that he should think of her as a possible eavesdropper, she took up her book again, turning the pages impatiently in search of the place which she had a great deal of trouble in finding since she had understood so little of what she had read that day.  And even then one half of her mind was on the men below as she wondered why they should not want her to know what it was they said.

Evidently Pollard had finished what he had to say.  She supposed that he had been telling them of his loss and her robbery.  Then the heavy, rasping voice, Cole Dalton’s she was right in guessing it to be, as guarded as Pollard’s had been, broke in and for several minutes it was the only sound that came to her, save twice when a low laugh from Broderick interrupted.  She frowned at that; to her it seemed that in this stern discussion which had for theme crime and retribution there was no place for a man’s laughter; even then her dislike for Ben Broderick had begun.