in her eyes and bit through his assumption of ease as acid bites
through skin, eating its way on. He burned to wipe out his own
trickeries, his cowardice, his failures, to wreak a vile satisfaction on
this girl who sat so disdainfully, with her chin lifted, her lips firm,
oblivious of him. She baffled him. A mind like Plimsoll's never had the
clarity of prevision to see the strength of character that had been in
the prospector's child, even as he had never suspected her unfolding to
beauty. It roused the vandal in him--he longed to break her, mar her.

The return of Butch and Hahn brought him back to the fact that he was
not playing this deal alone. While they might allow him some personal
license, to them the girl represented so much money. Plimsoll's
reprisals were only partly theirs, they would not permit him to balk
them of their share. There is Berserker madness latent in every one that
breaks out sometimes in the child that torments a kitten and ends by
torturing it, maiming--killing. There had been nothing in what stood for
Plimsoll's manhood to change such instinct, to restrain it where he held
the will and power. But here he had to go carefully.

He cut short Butch's boast of the way they had scared young Keith. Both
Hahn and Parsons felt a coil of embarrassment at the silence, almost the
serenity, of their captive. They had expected her to act far
differently, to rage, threaten, cry out. She almost abashed them.

"See if you can round up that damned dog, Butch," said Plimsoll. "I
plugged him but we want to be sure he don't get away. He might help
Keith's kid, for one thing. And he clamped my arm."

Parsons rode into the chaparral until he was barred by its thickness,
trying to stir out the dog, without success.

"Dead, I reckon," he reported. "Crawled in somewheres. You hit him
hard, Plim. Plenty blood on the leaves."

Molly bit her lips and paled a little, but turned away her head so that
they could not see. She winked back the tears that came to her thought
of Grit helpless, panting, bleeding.

They rode on up the rocky ravine that gradually closed in on either side
with the rock walls set with cactus here and there, carved into great
masses superimposed upon one another for a hundred feet. Presently they
turned aside from the stony trail that left no record of hooves, and,
Plimsoll in the lead, Molly next, walked their horses over a precarious
ledge that zigzagged back and forth up to where a notch in