“Yes, call me Bonnie Belle, Carrol Dean,” said the girl sadly.
“Then, Bonnie Belle, let me tell you that I deem the course you have pursued to check the career of your wicked brother all that you could do. You would have been his accomplice, though innocently, in his crimes if you had allowed him to go on in, his desperate deeds of lawlessness.”
“I feel that, Carrol Dean; I know it.”
“Yon know well that when your father, your brother, and yourself lived in luxury upon your plantation home, that Arden was wild, wayward, and dissipated.”
“Alas, yes!”
“He caused your father much suffering, was dismissed from the navy, and had to leave the German university because he killed a fellow student, and your father’s wealth and influence barely saved him from the gallows for taking another life.
“Then came his rivalry of me for the love of Kathleen Clyde, who is now my wife, and you remember how he shot me down in her presence, fled, believing he had killed me, and forging your father’s name, secured a large sum from the bank, and became a fugitive from justice?”
“Alas! I know all.”
“You and your father, with sorrow in your hearts, went abroad, and his failing health brought you back to America, to ranch-life in California. He died there, and then you sought the reformation of your wicked brother, seeking him in these wilds, where few other women would have, or could have, come as you have done.
“You found him at last in Silk Lasso Sam, the leader of an outlaw band, and failing to turn him from his wickedness, you did only right to let him go his way and raise no hand longer to save him. Fortunately, I was driven to this land to make money by digging in the old claim my father had bought, for now you have a friend, a brother, in me, and you must do as I say.”