"Do your infernal thinking somewhere else," snapped Deveril angrily. "Clear out or I'll throw you out!"
"I told him most likely you'd be sassy, so he won't be disappointed, I guess. Well, I'm travelling, so you don't have to mess your place all up throwing me off!" He was still chuckling good-naturedly as he swung his horse about with a light touch of the reins. Over his shoulder he called back: "He said it was important and he'd see you at Gallup's inside the hour!" The voice was taunting; Billy Winch threw his weight into his one stirrup, and even the attitude, though made necessary through his physical handicap, was vaguely irritating, so carelessly nonchalant did it appear. His horse bolted like a shot as he gave the signal and in a moment bore him out of sight among the shadows under the pines. Babe Deveril, hands on hips, stood staring after him. Then he swung about and came back to the cabin, and the girl on his door-step, seeing his face clearly in the candle-light streaming forth, caught her breath sharply at the outward sign she glimpsed of the rage burning high and hot in his breast.
"I'm of half a mind to meet him after all and break his confounded neck!" he cried out, a passionate tremor in his voice.
All along he had intrigued her, with his handsome face and devil-may-care air and light gracefulness; she estimated coolly that if, as he had said of himself, he had a memory for pretty girls it was something more than likely that more than one pretty girl had carried in her heart the memory of him. Now, suddenly, his good looks were sinister; his gaiety was so utterly gone that it was next door to impossible to imagine that he could ever be inconsequentially gay. The innate evil in the man stood up naked and ugly. And all because some man, a certain Bruce Standing, had sent a message commanding a meeting at the Gallup House.
It was not exactly the thing to do to put her question, but interest, mounting above mere curiosity, piqued her, and, certain of an answer in his present mood, she offered innocently:
"It seems to me I have heard the name Bruce Standing. Just who is he?"
Deveril glared at her and for a brief fragment of a second she was afraid of him; it was as though, by the mere mention of the name, she drew on herself something of the hatred he must have felt for this man Standing.
"You heard me read his title clear enough to his one-legged dog Winch," he told her harshly. "He is a man who came into this country with nothing a dozen years ago and who now rolls in the fat of his ill-gotten gains. He's a land hog who has robbed right and left and who has with him the devil's luck. He owns thousands of acres of land out yonder." A wide sweep of his arm indicated the endlessly rolling wilderness land, sombre ridges and ebony cañons, rising into stony barren crests here, thick timbered yonder where they slumbered under the first stars. "He operates mines; he gambles in gold and copper and lumber ... and life, curse him! And in human souls, his own with the rest. He runs half a dozen lumber-camps and has a thousand of the toughest men in the world working for him at one place and another. Men hate him for what he is, a cold-blooded highwayman. They have sent him a warning not to show his face in Big Pine, and being of the devil's spawn he sends me word to meet him at Gallup's! That's his way and his nerve and his colossal conceit. May hell take him!"
"And," suggested the girl, watchful of him as she ventured to probe at his emotions, "on top of all of this ... your cousin?"