He bent above her, his eyes burning.  Slowly he drew her close and kissed her lips.  Her eyelids quivered and lifted.  “Nell!” he whispered.

“Did you mean it?” she murmured, smiling wanly.

He drew his head back and gazed at her up-turned face.  “I’m all right,” she said, and drew herself up beside him.  “Serves me right for putting Challenge down the trail so fast.”

As they rode homeward Corliss told her of the advent of Sundown and what the latter had said about the wreck and the final disappearance of his “pal,” Will Corliss.

The girl heard him silently and had nothing to say until they parted at the ford.  Then she turned to him.  “I don’t believe Will was killed.  I can’t say why, but if he had been killed I think I should have known it.  Don’t ask me to explain, John.  I have always expected that he would come back.  I have been thinking about him lately.”

“I can’t understand it,” said Corliss.  “Will always had what he wanted.  He owns a half-interest in the Concho.  I can’t do as I want to, sometimes.  My hands are tied, for if I made a bad move and lost out, I’d be sinking Will’s money with mine.”

“I wouldn’t make any bad moves if I were you,” said the girl, glancing at the rancher’s grave face.

“Business is business, Nell.  We needn’t begin that old argument.  Only, understand this:  I’ll play square just as long as the other side plays square.  There’s going to be trouble before long and you know why.  It won’t begin on the west side of the Concho.”

“Good-bye, John,” said the girl, reining her pony around.

He raised his hat.  Then he wheeled Chinook and loped toward the ranch.

Eleanor Loring, riding slowly, thought of what he had said.  “He won’t give in an inch,” she said aloud.  “Will would have given up the cattle business, or anything else, to please me.”  Then she reasoned with herself, knowing that Will Corliss had given up all interest in the Concho, not to please her but to hurt her, for the night before his disappearance he had asked her to marry him and she had very sensibly refused, telling him frankly that she liked him, but that until he had settled down to something worth while she had no other answer for him.

She was thinking of Will when she rode in to the rancho and turned her horse over to Miguel.  Suddenly she flushed, remembering John Corliss’s eyes as he had held her in his arms.

CHAPTER VI

THE BROTHERS

As Corliss rode up to the ranch gate he took the mail from the little wooden mail-box and stuffed it into his pocket with the exception of a letter which bore the postmark of Antelope and his address in a familiar handwriting.  He tore the envelope open hastily and glanced at the signature, “Will.”

Then he read the letter.  It told of his brother’s unexpected arrival in Antelope, penniless and sick.  Corliss was not altogether surprised except in regard to the intuition of Eleanor, which puzzled him, coming as it had so immediately preceding the letter.