The pale-eyed, hawk-faced Cliff Shipton spoke for the first time.
"Not half a dozen miles out of Big Pine! I told you last year, Gallup...."
Deveril, the keenest of them all, the one who knew her best, suspected her from the beginning. His eyes never once left her face.
"How do we know," he said quietly, "that there's any gold there? That Joe's gold is not somewhere else?"
"You will have to make your own decision," she told him as coolly as she could. "If you think that I am mistaken or that I am trying to play with you as Joe did, you are free to go where you please."
Taggart began cursing; his grip tightened on her arm so that he hurt her terribly as he shouted at her:
"I'll give you one word of warning, little one! If you put up a game on us now, you cut your own throat. In the first place I'll make it my business that if we get shut out, you get shut out along with us. And in the second place when I'm through with you no other man in the world will have any use for you. Got that?"
She knew what he had done to Mexicali Joe; she could guess what other unthinkable things he would have done. And she knew that if now she tricked Jim Taggart and he found her out ... before Bruce Standing came ... she could only pray to die.
And yet at this, the supreme test in her life, she held steady to a swiftly taken purpose. She would not put the game into these men's hands. And she held steadfastly to her certainty, knowing the man, that Bruce Standing would come. Therefore, though her face went a little pale, and her mouth was so dry that she did not dare speak, she shrugged her shoulders.