Some girls, some men ... perhaps most girls and most men ... would have remained in the protection of the four walls, resigned to uncertainty, until daybreak. Of their number was not Lynette Brooke, a girl little given to fear and greatly moved by a desire to know! She waited as long as she could bear to wait. Then, holding Taggart's revolver well before her and walking with one silent footfall distanced patiently from the other, she gained the door and stepped outside. She was trembling; that she could not help. But she was determined to go on. And on she did go, cautiously, until she had gone ten steps toward the sound which she had heard. She paused, turning in all directions, ready to fire and ready to run....
"Sh! Come here!"
A whisper through the dark. And one man's whisper is much like another's. It could have been Deveril's or Taggart's or even Mexicali Joe's.
"Who are you?" her own whisper answered him.
"Is Standing in there?"
"Who are you?" she insisted.
There was a pause, a silence; a long silence. Then:
"Come with me ... just a few feet. So we won't be overheard."
She found herself frowning. Was it Babe Deveril? She did not fancy a man's whispering; she could not imagine a man like Bruce Standing whispering at a moment like this! More like him, like any man who was a man, to roar out what he had to say rather than whisper in the dark. But that curiosity of hers, that inborn desire to know, lured her on. But under guard. She held her weapon so that it menaced the vague form so close to her and she whispered again, not realizing that she, too, whispered, but because she was under the spell of the moment.
"I'll go with you another ten steps ... count them! And I have a revolver in my hand, aimed at the middle of your body!"