"It's a fact that I can set out the best bait you ever throwed a lip over," he confessed. "You're a man of excellent tastes and it's a real pleasure to have you about."
Billie Warren opened the door and motioned to Harris. He went into the big front room that answered for both living room and sleeping quarters. A fire burned in the rough stone fireplace; tanned pelts, Indian curios and Navajo rugs covered the walls; more rugs and pelts lay on the floor. Indian blankets partitioned off one end for her sleeping room.
"You had something to tell me," she observed, after he had remained silent for the space of a minute, sitting in the chair she had indicated and gazing into the fire.
"And I'll have to start it a little different from the way I first counted on," he said. "Have any of the boys mentioned my name to you?"
She shook her head and waited for him to go on.
"You won't care much to hear it," he announced. "I'd thought some of spending two years here under some other name—but perhaps it's better to come out in the open—don't you think?"
The girl had straightened in her chair and was leaning toward him, her face white and her gray eyes boring straight into the man's. She knew now who he was,—the man she had more reason to despise than all others on earth combined. Of the Harris family she knew nothing at all except that her father's lifelong regret had been the fact that the partnership between himself and his oldest friend, William Harris, had never been brought to pass. And this regret had, in the end, led him to try and cement that arrangement in the second generation. Five years before his trail had crossed that of the elder Harris for the first time since he had taken over the Three Bar brand; and when his will had been read she had known that on the occasion of that visit his old friend had played upon this sentiment to trick him into making it. On all sides of her she had evidence that men were wolves who preyed upon the interests of others, and there was not a doubt that the father of the man before her had preyed upon her interests through the sentiment of her parent; no other possible theory could account for the strange disposal of his property, the will dated and signed at the exact time of his visit to the Harrises.
The tenseness of her pose was replaced by lethargic indifference and she relaxed into her chair.
"I've known all the time you would come," she said.
"It's too bad, Billie," he said. "It's tough having me wished on to you this way."