"Why did you save him? Because you love him?" demanded Sanderson fiercely.
"Because I love you. But you're too blind to see it."
"And him—do you love him? Answer me!"
"No!" she flamed. "But if I did, I would be loving a man. He wouldn't take odds of five to one against an enemy."
Her father's great black eyes chiselled into hers. "Are you lying to me, girl?"
Weaver spoke out quietly. "I expect I can answer that, Mr. Sanderson. Your daughter has given me to understand that I'm about as mean a thing as God ever made."
But Phyl was beyond caution now. Her resentment against her father, for that he had forced her to drag out the secret things of her heart and speak of them in the presence of the man concerned, boiled into words—quick, eager, full of passion.
"I take it all back then—every word of it!" she cried. "You are braver, kinder, more generous to me than my own people—more chivalrous. You would have gone to your death without telling them that I took you to my room. But my own father, who has known me all my life, insults me grossly."
"I was wrong," Sanderson admitted uneasily.
Keller climbed the pasture fence, and came running up at the same time as Phil and Slim.