Then Devine made a little gesture. "Hadn't you better sit down? We're not quite through yet."
Brooke did as he suggested.
"Still——" he said.
Devine smiled again. "You don't quite understand? Well, I'll try to make it plain. You make about the poorest kind of claim-jumper I ever ran up against, and I've handled quite a few in my time. It's not your fault. You haven't it in you. If you had, you'd have stayed right with it, and not let the dam-building get hold of you so that you scarcely remembered what you came here for. You couldn't help that either."
To be turned inside out in this fashion was almost too disconcerting to be exasperating, and Brooke sat stupidly silent for a moment or two.
"After all, we need not go into that," he said. "I suppose what I meant to do requires no defence in this country, but while I am by no means proud of it, I should never have undertaken it had you not sold me a worthless ranch. I purposed doing nothing more than getting my six thousand dollars back."
"You figure that would have contented the man behind you?"
Brooke was once more startled, for Devine's penetration appeared almost uncanny, but he remembered that he, at least, owed a little to his confederate.
"You think there was another man?" he said.
Devine laughed. "I guess I'm sure. You don't know enough to fix up a thing of this kind. Who is he?"