mind of
his innocence in itself.

"Oh!"--impatiently--"I can't hurt you, I'm alone. You'd just as well
tell me how much money you're going to demand, so I can set their
minds at rest."

Macdonald's face was hot; his eyes felt as if they swam in fire. He
put out his hand in a gesture almost a command, his heavy eyebrows
gathered in a frown, an expression of sternness in his homely face
that made it almost majestic.

"If you'll be good enough to tell me what your veiled accusations
point to, Miss Landcraft, then I can answer you by either yes or no."

She unbent so far as to relate briefly what she believed they knew
better than herself already. But behind her high air as she talked
there was a secret warm feeling for the strength of this man. It was a
quality of fine steel in the human mind and body such as she never had
seen so beautifully blended before. In her own father there was
something of it, but only a reflection on water compared to this. It
seemed the temper of the desert, she thought, like that oriental
spirit which spread Islam's dark creed over half the world.

When she had finished the relation of Nola's ravishment, he sat with
head drooped in dusty silence a moment. Then he looked her in the eyes
with such a steady blaze of indignation that she felt her own rage
kindle to meet it. His clear, steady gaze was an arraignment, an
accusation on the ugly charge of perversion of the truth as she knew
it to be in the bottom of her conscience when she had laid the crime
at the homesteaders' hands. If he saw her at all, she thought, it was
as some small despicable thing, for his eyes were so unflinching, as
they poured their steady fire into her own, that he seemed to be
summing up the final consequences which lay behind her, along the
dusty highway to the ranchhouse by the river.

"In the first place," said he, speaking slowly, "there are no cattle
thieves among the homesteaders in the settlement up the river, Miss
Landcraft. I have told you this before. Here, I want you to meet some
of them, and judge for yourself."

He beckoned to Tom Lassiter and the three with him, and they joined
him there before her. In a few words he told them who she was and the
news that she carried, as well as the accusation that went with it.

"These men, their neighbors, and myself not only had no hand in this
deed, but there's not one among us that wouldn't put down his life to
keep that young woman from harm and give her b