He locked sharply at her. It seemed to him that a tremor of unevenness had come into her voice.
“Oh, dead as a doornail, Elizabeth. Very neat shot. Youngster that dropped him; boy named Joe Minter. Six thousand dollars for Joe. Nice little nest egg to build a fortune on, eh?”
“Six thousand dollars! What do you mean, Vance?”
“The price on the head of Jack Hollis. That was Hollis, sis. The celebrated Black Jack.”
“But—this is only a boy, Vance. He couldn't have been more than twenty- five years old.”
“That's all.”
“But I've heard of him for ten years, very nearly. And always as a man- killer. It can't be Black Jack.”
“I said the same thing, but it's Black Jack, well enough. He started out when he was sixteen, they say, and he's been raising the devil ever since. You should have seen them pick him up—as if he were asleep, and not dead. What a body! Lithe as a panther. No larger than I am, but they say he was a giant with his hands.”
He was lighting his cigarette as he said this, and consequently he did not see her eyes close tightly. A moment later she was able to make her expression as calm as ever.
“Came into town to see his baby,” went on Vance through the smoke. “Little year-old beggar!”
“Think of the mother,” murmured Elizabeth Cornish. “I want to do something for her.”
“You can't,” replied her brother, with unnecessary brutality. “Because she's dead. A little after the youngster was born. I believe Black Jack broke her heart, and a very pleasant sort of girl she was, they tell me.”
“What will become of the baby?”
“It will live and grow up,” he said carelessly. “They always do, somehow. Make another like his father, I suppose. A few years of fame in the mountain saloons, and then a knife in the back.”
The meager body of Elizabeth stiffened. She was finding it less easy to maintain her nonchalant smile.
“Why?”
“Why? Blood will out, like murder, sis.”
“Nonsense! All a matter of environment.”
“Have you ever read the story of the Jukes family?”
“An accident. Take a son out of the best family in the world and raise him like a thief—he'll be a thief. And the thief's son can be raised to an honest manhood. I know it!”
She was seeing Black Jack, as he had raced down the street with the black hair blowing about his face. Of such stuff, she felt, the knights of another age had been made. Vance was raising a forefinger in an authoritative way he had.
“My dear, before that baby is twenty-five—that was his father's age—he'll have shot a man. Bet you on it!”
“I'll take your bet!”
The retort came with such a ring of her voice that he was startled. Before he could recover, she went on: “Go out and get that baby for me, Vance. I want it.”
He tossed his cigarette out of the window.
“Don't drop into one of your headstrong moods, sis. This is nonsense.”
“That's why I want to do it. I'm tired of playing the man. I've had enough to fill my mind. I want something to fill my arms and my heart.”
She drew up her hands with a peculiar gesture toward her shallow, barren bosom, and then her brother found himself silenced. At the same time he was a little irritated, for there was an imputation in her speech that she had been carrying the burden which his own shoulders should have supported. Which was so true that he could not answer, and therefore he cast about for some way of stinging her.
“I thought you were going to escape the sentimental period, Elizabeth. But sooner or later I suppose a woman has to pass through it.”
A spot of color came in her sallow cheek.
“That's sufficiently disagreeable, Vance.”
A sense of his cowardice made him rise to conceal his confusion.
“I'm going to take you at your word, sis. I'm going out to get that baby. I suppose it can be bought—like a calf!”
He went deliberately to the door and laid his hand on the knob. He had a rather vicious pleasure in calling her bluff, but to his amazement she did not call him back. He opened the door slowly. Still she did not speak. He slammed it behind him and stepped into the hall.
CHAPTER 2
Twenty-four years made the face of Vance Cornish a little better-fed, a little more blocky of cheek, but he remained astonishingly young. At forty-nine the lumpish promise of his youth was quite gone. He was in a trim and solid middle age. His hair was thinned above the forehead, but it gave him more dignity. On the whole, he left an impression of a man who has done things and who will do more before he is through.
He shifted his feet from the top of the porch railing and shrugged himself deeper into his chair. It was marvelous how comfortable Vance could make himself. He had one great power—the ability to sit still through any given interval. Now he let his eye drift quietly over the Cornish ranch. It lay entirely within one grasp of the vision, spilling across the valley from Sleep Mountain, on the lower bosom of which the house stood, to Mount Discovery on
