"According to anybody's way of thinking, as long as they was thinking right. And d'you know who we've got here with us now? Could you guess it in a thousand years? Why, the kid that come tonight. Black Jack as sure as if he was a picture out of a book, and me a blind fool that didn't know him. Kate, here's the second Black Jack. Terry Hollis. Give him your hand agin and say you're glad to have him for his dad's sake and for his own! Kate, he's done a man's job already. It's him that dropped old foxy Minter!" The last of these words faded out of the hearing of Terry. He felt the lowered eyes of the girl rise and fall gravely on his face, and her glance rested there a long moment with a new and solemn questioning. Then her hand went slowly out to him, a cold hand that barely touched his with its fingertips and then dropped away. But what Terry felt was that it was the same glance she had turned to him when she stood leaning against the post earlier that evening. There was a pity in it, and a sort of despair which he could not understand. And without saying a word she turned her back on them and went out of the room as slowly as she had come into it. CHAPTER 26 "It don't mean nothing," Pollard hastened to assure Terry. "It don't mean a thing in the world except that she's a fool girl. The queerest, orneriest, kindest, strangest, wildest thing in the shape of calico that ever come into these parts since her mother died before her. But the more you see of her, the more you'll value her. She can ride like a man--no wear out to her--and she's got the courage of a man. Besides which she can sling a gun like it would do your heart good to see her! Don't take nothing she does to heart. She don't mean no harm. But she sure does tangle up a gent's ideas. Here I been living with her nigh onto twenty years and I don't savvy her none yet. Eh, boys?" "I'm not offended in the least," said Terry quietly. And he was not, but he was more interested than he had ever been before by man, woman, or child. And for the past few seconds his mind had been following her through the door behind which she had disappeared. "And if I were to see more of her, no doubt--" He broke off with: "But I'm not apt to see much more of any of you, Mr. Pollard. If I can't stay here and work off that three-hundred-dollar debt--" "Work, hell! No son of Black Jack Hollis can work for me. But he can live with me as a partner, son, and he can have everything I got, half and half, and the bigger half to him if he asks for it. That's straight!" Terry raised a protesting hand. Yet he was touched--intimately touched. He had tried hard to fit in his place among the honest people of the mountains by hard and patient work. They would have none of him. His own kind turned him out. And among these men--men who had no law, as he had every reason to believe--he was instantly taken in and made one of them.