But she resisted and looked up. The forms of the street remained obscurely in the bottom of her vision, and made her think of something she had seen in the woods--a colony of ants around a dead beetle. Presently the door opened and Vance came back. He still seemed very worried, but she forced herself to smile at him, and at once his concern disappeared; it was plain that he had been troubled about her and not in the slightest by the fate of the strange rider. She kept on smiling, but for the first time in her life she really looked at Vance without sisterly prejudice in his favor. She saw a good-natured face, handsome, with the cheeks growing a bit blocky, though Vance was only twenty-five. He had a glorious forehead and fine eyes, but one would never look twice at Vance in a crowd. She knew suddenly that her brother was simply a well-mannered mediocrity. "Thank the Lord you're yourself again, Elizabeth," her brother said first of all. "I thought for a moment--I don't know what!" "Just the shock, Vance," she said. Ordinarily she was well-nigh brutally frank. Now she found it easy to lie and keep on smiling. "It was such a horrible thing to see!" "I suppose so. Caught you off balance. But I never knew you to lose your grip so easily. Well, do you know what you've seen?" "He's dead, then?" He locked sharply at her. It seemed to him that a tremor of unevenness had come into her voice. "Oh, dead as a doornail, Elizabeth. Very neat shot. Youngster that dropped him; boy named Joe Minter. Six thousand dollars for Joe. Nice little nest egg to build a fortune on, eh?" "Six thousand dollars! What do you mean, Vance?" "The price on the head of Jack Hollis. That was Hollis, sis. The celebrated Black Jack." "But--this is only a boy, Vance. He couldn't have been more than twenty- five years old." "That's all." "But I've heard of him for ten years, very nearly. And always as a man- killer. It can't be Black Jack." "I said the same thing, but it's Black Jack, well enough. He started out when he was sixteen, they say, and he's been raising the devil ever since. You should have seen them pick him up--as if he were asleep, and not dead. What a body! Lithe as a panther. No larger than I am, but they say he was a giant with his hands." He was lighting his cigarette as he said this, and consequently he did not see her eyes close tightly. A moment later she was able to make her expression as calm as ever. "Came into town to see his baby," went on Vance through the smoke. "Little year-old beggar!" "Think of the mother," murmured Elizabeth Cornish. "I want to do something for her." "You can't," replied her brother, with unnecessary brutality. "Because she's dead. A little after the youngster was born. I believe Black Jack broke her heart, and a very pleasant sort of girl she was, they tell me." "What will become of the baby?"