Mavericks

"Phil!" she breathed.

"So you bought my freedom for me, did you?" the boy said, his voice trembling.

Phyllis answered in the clearest of low voices. "Yes. Did he tell you?"

"You oughtn't to have done it. I'll have no such bargains made. Understand that!" cried her brother, emotion in his high tones.

"I couldn't help it, Phil. I did it for the best. You don't know."

"I know that you're to keep out of this. I'll fight my own battles. In our family the girls don't sell kisses. Remember that."

Phyl hung her head. She felt herself disgraced, but she knew that she would do it again in like circumstances.

Weaver broke in roughly: "You young fool! She's worth a dozen of you, who haven't sense enough to sabe her kind."

The girl glanced at him involuntarily. At sight of his swollen and beaten face, she started. Her gaze clung to him, eyes wild and fluttering with apprehension.

"I've been taking a massage treatment," he explained.

Phyllis looked at her brother, then back at the ranchman. The thing was beyond comprehension. Ten minutes ago, this ferocious Hercules had left her, sound and unscratched. Now he returned with a face beaten and almost beyond recognition from bloodstains.

"What--what is it?" The appeal was to her brother.

"He let me beat him," Phil explained.

"Let you beat him! Why?"

"I don't know."

What the boy said was true, yet it was something less than the truth. He was dimly aware that this man knew himself to have violated the code, and that he had submitted to punishment because of the violation.

"Tell me," Phyllis commanded.

Phil told her in three sentences. She looked at Weaver with eyes that saw him in a new light. He still sneered, but behind the mask she got for the first time a glimpse of another man. Only dimly she divined him; but what she visioned was half devil and half hero, capable of things great as well as of deeds despicable.

"I'm not going to leave you here in this house," young Sanderson told her. "I'll not go. If you stay, I stay."

She shook her head. "No, Phil--you must go. I'm all right here--as safe as I would be at home. You know, he has a right to send me to prison if he wants to. I suppose he is holding me as a hostage against our friends in the hills."

The boy accepted her decree under protest. He did not know what else to do. Decision comes only with age, and he could hit on no policy that would answer. Reluctantly he gave way.