r.

"Murdered!" he challenged. "You've heard just one side of it, of
course. Bisbee got drunk and insulted Mr. Rickard. They call him the
Kid, you know. Say, Sis, he's had a life for you! Full of adventure,
all kinds of sport. And Bisbee shot first, too. But the Kid got him!"
he concluded triumphantly. "Galloway told me all about it . . . and
what a blundering rummy the fool sheriff is."

"Galloway?" queried Virginia uneasily. "You know him too, already?"

"Sure," replied Elmer. "He's a good sort, too, You'll like him. I
asked him around."

"For goodness' sake, Elmer, when did you get to San Juan? Have you
been here a week or just a few hours?"

"Got in on the stage at noon, of course. But it doesn't take a man all
year to get acquainted in a town this size."

"A man!" giggled Florrie.

"I can see," laughed Virginia, "that you two are going to be more kin
than kind to each other; you'll be quarrelling in another moment."

Florrie looked delighted at the prospect; Elmer yawned and brooded over
his pipe. But out of the tail of his eye he took stock again of her
blonde prettiness, and she, ready from the beginning to make fun of
him, repeated to herself the words she had used to Virginia:

"But he is handsome . . . and distinguished looking!"

CHAPTER X

A BRIBE AND A THREAT

Virginia Page found time passing swiftly in San Juan. Within two weeks
she came almost to forget how she had heard a rattle of pistol-shots,
how the slow sobbing of a bell in the Mission garden had bemoaned a
life gone and a fresh crime upon a man's soul; at the end of a month it
seemed to her that she had dreamed that ride through the night with
Roderick Norton, climbing the cliffs, ministering to a stricken man in
the forsaken abode of ancient cliff-dwellers. She was like one
marooned upon a tiny island in an immense sea who has experienced the
crisis of shipwreck and now finds existence suddenly resolved into a
quiet struggle for the maintenance of life . . . that and a placid
expectation. As another might have waited through the long, quiet
hours for the sign of a white sail or a black plume of smoke, so did
she wait for the end of a tale whose beginning had included her.

That the long days did not drag was due not so much to that which
happened about her, as to that which occurred within her. She carried
responsibility upon each shoulder; her life was in the shaping and she
and none other must make it what