This Brand fellow, now—he must be cold-blooded as they made them, cruel—no, Sonny loved him. He could not be exactly that.
But what sort of man could he be?
She held the child close in her warm arms as she rocked again and pondered the problem. She did not know what she intended to say to him, once she faced him, but of one thing she was certain—he would know, in no uncertain terms, indeed, what a monstrous thing it was to leave a child alone in Blue Stone Cañon—alone, to listen to its mysterious voices, to feel its chill and its menace of shadows!
Why, it was a wonder the little mind did not crack with strain, the small heart break with fear!
Unconsciously she hugged Sonny tighter, making of her body, as it were, a bulwark between him and all harm, seeming to challenge the world for his possession. It was astonishing how the child had crept into her heart in these few short days—how hungrily her arms had closed about him. She had made his cause her own high-handedly—perhaps without reason.
She was thinking of these things when the Collie barked sharply and leaped away in welcome. Nance flung a startled glance over her shoulder—and got to her feet, sliding the boy down beside her, an arm still about his ragged shoulders.
A man stood at the corner of the jut of stone beyond the pool.
He was tall, somewhere around six feet, a horseman born by his build, narrow of hip and flat of thigh. He was clad in garments almost as much the worse for wear as Sonny’s—a blue flannel shirt and corduroy tucked into boots. But Nance saw in that first swift glance that these habiliments were different from those of their like which McKane sold in Cordova, that seemed made for the man who wore them, so perfectly had they fitted him once.
Under a peaked sombrero with a chin-strap run in a bone slide, a pair of dark eyes bored into Nance’s, unsmiling. A very dark face, almost Indian in clean-cut feature and contour, with repressed lips and thin nostrils, completed the picture.
The newcomer did not speak, but stood holding the bit of a handsome, huge, black horse.