"No; I didn't mean that," I denied warmly. "I do believe every word you have said. No one who knows you could disbelieve you for a moment."
"But you don't know me," she put in quickly.
I saw how near I had come to self-betrayal and tried to fend my little life-raft off the rocks.
"You will say that we have met only once before to-night, and then only casually. Will you permit a comparative stranger to say that that was enough? Your soul looks out through your eyes, Miss Everton, and it is an exceedingly honest soul. I know you must have strong reasons for coming to tell us what Blackwell is doing; and if I didn't quite understand the motive at first—with you your father's daughter, you know, and your father in the service of the——"
"I know," she interrupted. "But you lose sight of the larger things. If you have been telling me the truth about your ownership of this claim, a great wrong is going to be done. I couldn't stand aside and let it be done, could I?"
Something in her manner of saying this recalled most vividly the little girl of the long ago, hot-hearted in her indignation against injustice of every sort.
"No, I am sure you couldn't: I don't believe you know how to compromise with wrong of any kind. But you ought not to take my unsupported word about the matter of ownership. Let me call Barrett."
"It isn't necessary. If you say that you three have an honest right to be here, I believe you implicitly. And what I have done is nothing. My father would have done it if he hadn't—if he didn't——"
"You needn't say it," I helped out. "Your father thinks we are trying to hold the Lawrenceburg people up, and I don't blame him. When he was up here the other day—the day you were both here—he thought he caught us red-handed. It wasn't so; he was quite mistaken; but for reasons which I can't explain just now I couldn't very well take the only course which would have undeceived him."
"I—I think I understand," she returned, guardedly. "You—you haven't been stealing ore from the Lawrenceburg sheds?"