“I’d say not this evening,” King’s dry voice answered him.  “Good-night to you.”

“That’s a fine way to treat a man,” cried Summerling truculently.  “Here I ride all this way in the dark, and without stoppin’ for so much as supper; here I ain’t had a bite to eat since dinner-time, and it’s good-night and get out!  And that hundred dollars I was to get so fast, how about that?  Think I’m the man to let folks trample on me and——­”

“Maybe Jim will give you a hand-out at his cabin,” King told him.  “As for your money, get it out of Gratton if he promised it to you—­or,” he added with a flash of heat, “take it out of his hide, for all I care.”

“Wait for me outside, Summerling,” muttered Gratton. “I haven’t said you won’t be needed, have I?”

“Just the same, I wouldn’t mind takin’ what’s comin’ to me now——­”

“Man alive!” shouted Gratton, whirling on him.  “Haven’t I got enough on my hands without you yelping at me?”

“Just the same——­”

“Jim,” called King above the incoherent mouthings, “slip your arm through Summerling’s and lead him off with you.  Feed him if you feel like it, and let him stick around for a word with Gratton if he wants.  And you, Steve Jarrold, Ben Gaynor isn’t here, but just the same you can take it from me that neither you nor any other of Swen Brodie’s hangdogs is wanted in Ben Gaynor’s house.  Out you go.”

Jarrold’s eyes slanted off to Gratton.  Then, seeing himself ignored and forgotten, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled on his hat, and went out.  Behind him, arm in arm, one smiling widely and the other pulling back and still sputtering, went Jim and the “judge.”

To all this Gloria had given scant attention.  The spell no longer lay over her; she was keenly awake to the demands of the present; she was thinking, thinking, thinking!  It seemed that she had walked on quicksands; that a hand had drawn her up and placed her where she was now, with solid ground underfoot; but that still all about her were quicksands.  What temporary sense of security was hers was due to Mark King, to his presence.  As long as he stood there, where she could put out a hand and touch him, she could rest calmly, assured of safety.  But when he went, there remained Gratton and his venom.  Quicksands all about her in which she would be floundering at this moment but for Mark King——­

* * * * *

Her heart was beating normally again, the pallor left her face, which became delicately flushed.  Her eyes, large and humid, a sweet grey and once more almost childlike—­eyes to remind a man that here, after all, was no woman of the world, but only a young girl—­rose to King’s and met his long and searchingly.  Yet there was that in their expression that made him understand that she was not looking at him, the physical man, so much as through him.  For the first time in her pampered life the day had come when she was face to face with