"You know I meant to jump the claim?" he said. "I had a notion that you meant to try." Then there was a curious silence, and the two men remained motionless, looking at one another for a space, the younger one leaning somewhat heavily upon the table, with the crimson showing through the bronze in his face, the elder one watching him with a little grim smile. There was also a suggestion of sardonic amusement in it at which the other winced, as he would scarcely have done had Devine struck him. "And you let me stay on?" he said at length. "I did. It was plain you couldn't hurt me, and there was a kind of humor in the thing. I had just to put my hand down and squelch you when I felt like it." Brooke recognized that he had deserved this, but he had never felt the same utter sense of insignificance that he did just then. His companion evidently did not even consider it worth while to be angry with him, and he wondered vacantly at his folly in even fancying that he or Saxton could prove a match for such a man. Then Devine made a little gesture. "Hadn't you better sit down? We're not quite through yet." Brooke did as he suggested. "Still----" he said. Devine smiled again. "You don't quite understand? Well, I'll try to make it plain. You make about the poorest kind of claim-jumper I ever ran up against, and I've handled quite a few in my time. It's not your fault. You haven't it in you. If you had, you'd have stayed right with it, and not let the dam-building get hold of you so that you scarcely remembered what you came here for. You couldn't help that either." To be turned inside out in this fashion was almost too disconcerting to be exasperating, and Brooke sat stupidly silent for a moment or two. "After all, we need not go into that," he said. "I suppose what I meant to do requires no defence in this country, but while I am by no means proud of it, I should never have undertaken it had you not sold me a worthless ranch. I purposed doing nothing more than getting my six thousand dollars back." "You figure that would have contented the man behind you?" Brooke was once more startled, for Devine's penetration appeared almost uncanny, but he remembered that he, at least, owed a little to his confederate. "You think there was another man?" he said. Devine laughed. "I guess I'm sure. You don't know enough to fix up a thing of this kind. Who is he?" "That," said Brooke, drily, "is rather more than I feel at liberty to tell you. I have, however, broken with him once for all." Devine made a little gesture which implied that the point was of no great importance. "Well," he said, "I guess I've no great cause to be afraid of him, if he was content to have you for a partner. The question is--Are you going to take my offer?" "You are asking me seriously?"