"You can lend me a revolver if you want. I have none."
"Not on your life!" sneered Delehanty.
Pen shrugged. She had only mentioned the revolver as a bit of stage business anyway.
"Go and find him if you want," said Delehanty, "but excuse me from taking any chances of having my gun slipped to him."
Pen went back to the house and made up a packet of sandwiches. As she was setting out the second time she ran into Riever coming in by the drive. He had evidently been with Delehanty, and under his forced air of politeness an extraordinary conflict of feelings was suggested; hope, distrust and a gnawing curiosity. He would not speak of what was in his mind, of course. "Where are you setting out for so busily?" he asked with a false air of blitheness.
Pen was blunt enough. "I believe this man is starving somewhere on the place, and I'm going to find him if I can."
Riever put on a look of gladness and delight. The guiding rule of his kind is that by assuming a thing to be so you make it so. He therefore assumed that Pen had come over to his side, that the millions had won out, that he and she were now one in sympathy. It need hardly be mentioned though, that his eye still rolled with a hideous doubt.
"Oh, that's fine of you!" he said ... "But it's dangerous!"
"He wouldn't hurt me," said Pen.
Riever ground his teeth secretly. "How can you be sure?" he said with a great air of solicitude.