“But if he never gets any wiser than he is now he won’t set anything on fire. In fifteen feet of th’ Flange an’ never saw a thing! Holy smoke! Some sheriff! An’ yet—can’t blame him—the Flange’d fool th’ devil himself.” CHAPTER VIII BRAND FAIR Nance Allison went back to Blue Stone Cañon. It was as inevitable as the recurrent sun that she should do so. Her whole nature was stirred to the depths by what she had found in the lonely gorge. The mystery of the thing lured her, set her young mind hunting for its solution. And the little ragged boy with his weazened face and bright brown eyes tugged at her tender heart irresistibly. He was a beautiful, small creature despite his thinness and his poverty. There was intelligence in the broad forehead under the long, loose, unkempt, dark curls, capacity for affection in the mobile lips and a terrible hunger for love in the whole little face. For four days, “hand-running” as her mother said, the girl went to the cañon. The friendship ripened with tropical speed, so that she need not search for her quarry now, but found it coming to meet her, peering around this boulder, watching from that vantage point. When she held out her arms to the child these last two times he had come leaping into them to cling to her neck in delirious gladness, while the sedate Collie, fast friend by this time and traitor to his sacred charge, fawned on her knee. But on the fifth golden day trouble was in the atmosphere. Sonny came with drooping head and a pucker of sorrow in his small brows. “Why, what’s the matter with my little man?” said the girl, kneeling and holding him off to scan him searchingly. “Tell Nance, Sonny. What is it?” And Sonny, dissolved in tears upon the instant, hiding his face in Nance’s neck. “I—I had—” he hiccoughed, “to—to tell—Brand—a a—lie! An awful lie! And Brand, he—hates a liar!” “A lie! Why, how—why——” “He found your horse’s tracks down the cañon and—he asked me if I saw—any—any one strange,” wept the child. Nance sat down and took the boy in her lap. The thing was coming to a climax. She was meddling with someone’s private business, of that she was sure, both from her own reasoning and her mother’s warning, and maybe she had no right to do so, but her sweet mouth set itself into stubborn lines as she fell to smoothing the little head, damp with the ardours of its owner’s remorse. “Stop crying, honey,” she wheedled softly, “and let Nance rock you like this.” She tucked her heels under her thighs and, holding the child in the comfortable lap thus formed, began to sway her body back and forth for all the world as if she sat in a cushioned rocker. What is there about a rocking woman with a child’s head on her breast to soothe the sorrows of the world?