"By fighting?" She had not been carried away by his argument. She was watching him like a lynx every moment. "Not by that. By bluffing. You see, I was not fool enough to think that you would--particularly notice a fighting bully." He laid his open hand on the table. It was like exposing both strength and weakness; and into such a trap it would have been a singularly hard-minded woman who might not have stepped. Nelly Lebrun leaned a little closer. She forgot to criticize. "It was bluff. I saw that Landis was big and good-looking. And what was I beside him? Nothing. I could only hope that he was hollow; yellow--you see? So I tried the bluff. You know about it. The clock, and all that claptrap. But Landis wasn't yellow. He didn't crumble. He lasted long enough to call my bluff, and I had to shoot in self-defense. And then, when he lay on the floor, I saw that I had failed." "Failed?" He lowered his eyes for fear that she would catch the glitter of them. "I knew that you would hate me for what I had done because I had only proved that Landis was a brave youngster with enough nerve for nine out of ten. And I came tonight--to ask you to forgive me. No, not that--only to ask you to understand. Do you?" He raised his glance suddenly at that, and their eyes met with one of these electric shocks which will go tingling through two people. And when the lips of Nelly Lebrun parted a little, he knew that she was in the trap. He closed his hand that lay on the table--curling the fingers slowly. In that way he expressed all his exultation. "There is something wrong," said the girl, in a tone of one who argues with herself. "It's all too logical to be real." "Ah?" "Was that your only reason for fighting Jack Landis?" "Do I have to confess even that?" She smiled in the triumph of her penetration, but it was a brief, unhappy smile. One might have thought that she would have been glad to be deceived. "I came to serve a girl who was unhappy," said Donnegan. "Her fiancé had left her; her fiancé was Jack Landis. And she's now in a hut up the hill waiting for him. And I thought that if I ruined him in your eyes he'd go back to a girl who wouldn't care so much about bravery. Who'd forgive him for having left her. But you see what a fool I was and how clumsily I worked? My bluff failed, and I only wounded him, put him in your house, under your care, where he'll be happiest, and where there'll never be a chance for this girl to get him back." Nelly Lebrun, with her folded hands under her chin, studied him. "Mr. Donnegan," she said, "I wish I knew whether you are the most chivalrous, self-sacrificing of men, or simply the most gorgeous liar in the desert." "And it's hardly fair," said Donnegan, "to expect me to tell you that." 28