"You need not finish that! Show a little manhood! Oh, Syd, a moment ago you were my dear old companion—my brother, and now——If you knew how I detest you in this! It is not yourself—your dear self, at all, but the very devil that has taken possession of you. Sydney, are you sure there isn't something the matter with your brain? Do you realize how awful it seems? Doesn't it make you feel ashamed of yourself when you think of all the sweetness of our past life? It makes me, Syd. Sometimes at night before I go to sleep I think of the way you've acted lately, and I can feel a hot flush creep all over my face. It makes me so ashamed! I've grown up with you for my brother, I think of you always as my brother, and this makes a new person out of you—a person whom I neither love nor respect. Syd, dear Syd, forget it and I will never think of it again, for I will have my brother back. I loved you, Sydney, you and father, better than anyone else in this world. And now——" She turned her head away from him and began to cry quietly. In an instant he was filled with commiseration and tenderness.
"Don't, Hope!" he exclaimed, bending close to her. "I can't stand anything like that! Don't cry. I'm sorry, girlie. I've been a fool, a brute, a low-lived beggar, but I can't stand tears from you! Here you're hungry, starving, living among a lot of breeds, and I've added more to your misery. It's all a mistake. I know now when I see you crying—don't do it, dear! You've never cried since you were a baby, and now you're such a great big girl. The other feeling's all gone. I guess it must have been because you were the only girl out here and I let myself think of you that way until it grew on me. But you are my sister—my dear little pard!"
He had dismounted and stood beside her. Now he reached up and took her hands away from her face. She was ashamed of her tears, as people are who seldom cry, and hastily mopped her face with her handkerchief.
"I'm so glad, Syd, dear!" she exclaimed in a moment, then reached down and kissed him. "What a baby you must think I am!"
"Your tears woke me up, dear; don't be sorry. Maybe some time they'll make a man out of me."
"Nonsense! you were a man all the time, only you didn't know it. You don't know how happy I was all at once when you called me 'pard' again. I knew then I had my brother back."
The young fellow mounted his horse again. His own eyes were suspiciously moist.
"And I have my sister, which seems better than anything to me," he said. Then they both laughed.
"I was going to the Englishman's," said Hope, "to see if I could help any about the poor herder who was shot."
"They're burying him now," announced her cousin, "right around the bend of this hill just inside the fence. Do you want to go over there?"