re grown up. Which is it? Are you turnin' into a
woman, Jack?"

She whirled on Pierre in a white fury.

"You see? You see what you've done? He'll never trust me
again--never! Pierre, I hate you. I'll always hate you. And if Hal
were here----"

A storm of sobs and tears cut her short, and she disappeared through
the door. Boone and Pierre stood regarding each other critically.

The boy spoke first: "You're not as big as I expected."

"I'm plenty big; but you're older than I thought."

"Too old for what you want of me. The girl told me what that was."

"Not too old to be made what I want."

And his hands passed through a significant gesture of moulding the
empty air. The boy met his eye dauntlessly.

"I suppose," he said, "that I've a pretty small chance of getting away."

"Just about none, Pierre. Come here."

Pierre stepped closer and looked down the hall into another room.
There, about a table, sat the five grimmest riders of the mountain
desert that he had even seen. They were such men as one could judge at
a glance, and Pierre made that instinctive motion for his six-gun.

"The girl," Jim Boone was saying, "kept you pretty busy tryin' to make
a break, and if she could do anything maybe you'd have a pile of
trouble with one of them guardin' you. But if I'd had a good look at
you, lad, I'd never have let Jack take the job of guardin' you."

"Thanks," answered Pierre dryly.

"You got reason; I can see that. Here's the point, Pierre. I know
young men because I can remember pretty close what I was at your age.
I wasn't any ladies' lap dog, at that, but time and older men molded me
the way I'm going to mold you. Understand?"

Pierre was nerved for many things, but the last word made him stir. It
roused in him a red-tinged desire to get through the forest of black
beard at the throat of Boone and dim the glitter of those keen eyes.
It brought him also another thought.

Two great tasks lay before him: the burial of his father and the
avenging of him on McGurk. As to the one, he knew it would be childish
madness for him to attempt to bury his father in Morgantown with only
his single hand to hold back the powers of the law or the friends of
the notorious Diaz and crippled Hurley.

And for the other, it was even more vain to imagine that through his
own unaided power he could strike down a figure of such almost
legendary terror as McGurk. The bondage of the gang might be a
terrible thing