When he related his emotion during their first meeting—­when he had told Dale that he was her brother, after yielding to the appeal in her eyes—­she smiled.

“There was some excuse for it, after all,” she declared.

“An’ you ain’t blamin’ me—­so much?” he asked.

“No,” she said.  She blushed as she thought of the times she had kissed him.  He was thinking of her kisses, too, and as their eyes met, each knew what the other was thinking about.  Sanderson smiled at her and her eyes dropped.

“It wasn’t a square deal for me to take them, then, ma’am,” he told her.  “But I’m goin’ to stay around here an’ fight Dale an’ his friends to a finish.  That is, if you want me to stay.  I’d like a straight answer.  I ain’t hangin’ around where I ain’t wanted.”

Her eyes glowed as she looked at him.

“You’ll have to stay, now,” she said.  “Will is dead, and you will have to stay here and brazen it out.  They’d take the Double A from me surely, if you were to desert me.  You will have to stay and insist that you are my brother!”

“That’s a contract,” he agreed.  “But”—­he looked at her, a flush on his face—­“goin’ back to them kisses.  It wasn’t a square deal.  But I’m hopin’ that a day will come——­”

She got up, her face very red.  “It is nearly morning,” she interrupted.

“Yes,” he smiled; “things are only beginnin’.”

“You are impudent—­and imprudent,” she said, looking straight at him.

“An’ hopeful,” he answered, meeting her eyes.

Fifteen minutes later, stretched out on his bed, Sanderson saw the dawn breaking in the east.  It reminded him of the morning he had seen the two riders above him on the edge of the arroyo.  As on that other morning, he lay and watched the coming of the dawn.  And when later he heard Mary moving about in the kitchen he got up, not having slept a wink, and went out to her.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

“How could I,” he asked, “with a new day dawnin’ for me?”

CHAPTER XVI

THE HAND OF THE ENEMY

When in the bunkhouse the next morning Sanderson informed Barney Owen of what had occurred during the night, the latter looked fixedly at Sanderson.

“So she didn’t take it hard,” he said.

“Was you expectin’ her to?  For a brother that she hadn’t seen in a dozen years—­an’ which she knows in her secret heart wasn’t any good?” retorted Sanderson.  “Shootin’ your face off in Okar—­or anywhere else—­don’t go any more,” added Sanderson.  “She’s pretendin’, publicly, that I’m her brother.”

“I’m through talking,” declared Owen.

“Or livin’.  It’s one or the other,” warned Sanderson.

Sanderson took the seven thousand dollars that Mary gave him, rode to Lazette—­a town fifty miles eastward from the basin—–­and deposited the money in a bank there.  Then he rode eastward still farther and in another town discovered a young engineer with a grievance against his employers.