old
people before him, "let me go, and quit that, I didn't come here to be
strangled! I want some money--money, you hear! Devilish quick, too, for
I've got to be off again before daylight. So look sharp, will you?"

"But, Stevy dear, when you didn't come that time three months ago, but
wrote from Los Angeles, you said you'd made a strike at last, and"--

"What are you talking about?" he interrupted violently. "That was just
my lyin' to keep you from worryin' me. Three months ago--three months
ago! Why, you must have been crazy to have swallowed it; I hadn't a
cent."

"Nor have we," said the old woman, shrilly. "That hellish sister of
yours still keeps us like beggars. Our only hope was you, our own boy.
And now you only come to--to go again."

"But SHE has money; SHE'S doing well, and SHE shall give it to me,"
he went on, angrily. "She can't bully me with her business airs and
morality. Who else has got a right to share, if it is not her own
brother?"

Alas for the fatuousness of human malevolence! Had the unhappy couple
related only the simple facts they knew about the new guest of Burnt
Ridge Ranch, and the manner of his introduction, they might have spared
what followed.

But the old woman broke into a vindictive cry: "Who else, Steve--who
else? Why, the slut has brought a MAN here--a sneaking, deceitful,
underhanded, crazy lover!"

"Oh, has she?" said the young man, fiercely, yet secretly pleased at
this promising evidence of his sister's human weakness. "Where is she?
I'll go to her. She's in her room, I suppose," and before they could
restrain him, he had thrown off their impeding embraces and darted
across the hall.

The two old people stared doubtfully at each other. For even this
powerful ally, whose strength, however, they were by no means sure
of, might succumb before the determined Josephine! Prudence demanded a
middle course. "Ain't they brother and sister?" said the old man, with
an air of virtuous toleration. "Let 'em fight it out."

The young man impatiently entered the room he remembered to have been
his sister's. By the light of the moon that streamed upon the window
he could see she was not there. He passed hurriedly to the door of her
bedroom; it was open; the room was empty, the bed unturned. She was not
in the house--she had gone to the mill. Ah! What was that they had said?
An infamous thought passed through the scoundrel's mind. Then, in what
he half believed was an access of virtuous