"Sure," replied Elmer. "He's a good sort, too, You'll like him. I asked him around." "For goodness' sake, Elmer, when did you get to San Juan? Have you been here a week or just a few hours?" "Got in on the stage at noon, of course. But it doesn't take a man all year to get acquainted in a town this size." "A man!" giggled Florrie. "I can see," laughed Virginia, "that you two are going to be more kin than kind to each other; you'll be quarrelling in another moment." Florrie looked delighted at the prospect; Elmer yawned and brooded over his pipe. But out of the tail of his eye he took stock again of her blonde prettiness, and she, ready from the beginning to make fun of him, repeated to herself the words she had used to Virginia: "But he is handsome . . . and distinguished looking!" CHAPTER X A BRIBE AND A THREAT Virginia Page found time passing swiftly in San Juan. Within two weeks she came almost to forget how she had heard a rattle of pistol-shots, how the slow sobbing of a bell in the Mission garden had bemoaned a life gone and a fresh crime upon a man's soul; at the end of a month it seemed to her that she had dreamed that ride through the night with Roderick Norton, climbing the cliffs, ministering to a stricken man in the forsaken abode of ancient cliff-dwellers. She was like one marooned upon a tiny island in an immense sea who has experienced the crisis of shipwreck and now finds existence suddenly resolved into a quiet struggle for the maintenance of life . . . that and a placid expectation. As another might have waited through the long, quiet hours for the sign of a white sail or a black plume of smoke, so did she wait for the end of a tale whose beginning had included her. That the long days did not drag was due not so much to that which happened about her, as to that which occurred within her. She carried responsibility upon each shoulder; her life was in the shaping and she and none other must make it what it would be; her brother's character was at that unstable stage when it was ready to run into the mould. She had brought him here, from the city to the rim of the desert--the step had been her doing, nobody's but hers. And she had come here far less for the sake of Elmer Page's cough than for the sake of his manhood. She wanted him to grow to be a man one could be proud of; there were times when his eyes evaded her and she feared the outcome. "He is just a boy," she told herself, seeking courage. It seemed such a brief time ago that she had blown his nose for him and washed his face. She made excuses for him, but did not close her eyes to the truth. The good old saw that boys will be boys failed to make of Elmer all that she would have him.