Unconsciously she hugged Sonny tighter, making of her body, as it were, a bulwark between him and all harm, seeming to challenge the world for his possession. It was astonishing how the child had crept into her heart in these few short days—how hungrily her arms had closed about him. She had made his cause her own high-handedly—perhaps without reason. She was thinking of these things when the Collie barked sharply and leaped away in welcome. Nance flung a startled glance over her shoulder—and got to her feet, sliding the boy down beside her, an arm still about his ragged shoulders. A man stood at the corner of the jut of stone beyond the pool. He was tall, somewhere around six feet, a horseman born by his build, narrow of hip and flat of thigh. He was clad in garments almost as much the worse for wear as Sonny’s—a blue flannel shirt and corduroy tucked into boots. But Nance saw in that first swift glance that these habiliments were different from those of their like which McKane sold in Cordova, that seemed made for the man who wore them, so perfectly had they fitted him once. Under a peaked sombrero with a chin-strap run in a bone slide, a pair of dark eyes bored into Nance’s, unsmiling. A very dark face, almost Indian in clean-cut feature and contour, with repressed lips and thin nostrils, completed the picture. The newcomer did not speak, but stood holding the bit of a handsome, huge, black horse. “Brand!” called the boy, “Oh, Brand!” At that name Nance Allison found her tongue. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said calmly, “I’m glad you’ve come.” “Yes?” he said in a singularly deep, sweet voice. That voice disconcerted Nance upon the instant, stole some of her fire, so to speak. She had been ready to tackle him on the issue at once, to fight, if necessary, with a flood of reasons and protests against his treatment of Sonny. Now, suddenly, she felt a vague sense of having intruded, of meddling with another’s affairs. But she was not one to back down from any righteous stand—and Sonny’s cause was righteous in every sense, it seemed to her. So she gazed steadily into the direct dark eyes and nodded decidedly. “Yes—I am,” she repeated, “I—want to talk to you.” The man dropped the rein over the black’s head and came forward a step or two. “Quite a rare experience,” he said, smiling, as he removed his hat and ran his brown fingers through the thick black hair that stood up from his sweated forehead, “it’s been a long time since any woman has wanted to talk to us—eh, Sonny?” “But—Oh, she talks sweet, Brand!” cried the child eagerly, “and she—holds me on her lap!” At the profound awe in the small voice the man’s face grew quickly grave. “We must be pretty far gone as vagabonds!” he said, “that makes me think what a woman’s love must mean to a child. You have been a gift of God, dropped out of the blue to Sonny, Miss Allison, and I ought to thank you.” “Why—you—you know who I am?” cried the girl, astounded.