Less than so blunt and unexpected a question would have sufficed to take her aback. And she was conscious in the fading light of his strangely bright eyes fixed steadily on her. "I don't remember anybody ever did. I----" "Somebody did. You told Belle once." "It must have been long ago----" "Is that the reason you never acted natural with me?" She flushed with impatience. But if she tried to get away he brought her back to the subject. Cornered, she grew resentful: "I can't tell who told me," she pleaded, after ineffectual sparring. "I've forgotten. Are you a gambler?" she demanded, turning inquisitor herself. He did not move and it was an instant before he replied: "What do you mean," he asked, "by gambler?" Kate's tone was hard: "Just what anybody means." "If you mean a man that makes his living by gambling--or hangs around a gambling house all the time, or plays regularly--then I couldn't fairly and squarely be called a gambler. If you mean a man that plays cards _sometimes_, or _has_ once in a while bet on a game in a gambling house, then, I suppose"--he was so evidently squirming that Kate meanly enjoyed his discomfort--"you might call me that. It would all depend on whether the one telling it liked me or didn't like me. I haven't been in Tenison's rooms for months, nor played but one game of poker." "I despise gambling." "Why didn't you tell me?" "Why should I?" "In one sense everybody's a gambler. Everybody I know of is playing for something. Take your father and me: He's playing for my life; I'm playing for you. He's playing for a small stake; I'm playing for a big one." She could not protest quick enough: "You talk wildly." "No," he persisted evenly, "I only look at it just as it is." "Don't ask me to believe all the cruel things said of my father any more than you want me to believe the things said of you. I am terribly sorry to see you wounded. And now"--her words caught in her throat--"Belle blames me even for that." "How on earth does she blame you for that?" Despite her efforts to control herself, Kate, as she approached the unpleasant subject, began to tremble inwardly with the fear that it must after all be as Belle had rudely asserted--that her father was behind these efforts against Laramie's life. For nothing had shaken her tottering faith in her father more than the blunt words Laramie himself had just now indifferently spoken. "If I am in any way to blame, it is innocently," she hurried on. "I will tell you everything; you shall judge. My father was bitterly angry when he learned I had been seen at Abe Hawk's funeral. I told him about my getting lost, about falling into the place at the bridge--how you did everything you could and how Abe Hawk had done all he could. He was so angry he would listen to nothing----" she stopped, collected herself, tried to go on, could not.