Healy glanced at Phil swiftly, covertly, as the latter adjusted the glasses.  “She’s right about the fire and the man.  I can see as much with my naked eyes,” he cut in.

The boy looked long, lowered the glasses, and met his friend’s eye with a kind of shamefaced hesitation.  But apparently he gathered reassurance from the quiet steadiness with which the other’s gaze met him.  He handed the glasses to Healy.  When the latter lowered them his face was grave.  “There’s a man and a fire and a cow and a calf.  When these four things meet up together, what does it mean?”

“Branding!” cried the girl.

“That’s right—­branding.  And when the cow is dead what does it mean?” Brill asked, his eyes full on Phil.

“Rustling!” she breathed again.

“You’ve said it, Phyl.  We’ve got one of them at last,” he cried jubilantly.

Phil, hanging between doubt and suspicion and shame, brightened at the enthusiasm of the other.

“Right you are, Brill.  We’ll solve this mystery once for all.”

Healy, unstrapping the case in which lay his rifle, shot a question at the boy.  “Armed, Phil?”

The lad nodded.  “I brought my six-gun for rattlesnakes.”

“Are you going to—­to——­” cried Phyllis, the color gone from her face.

“We’re going to capture him alive if we can, Phyl.  You’re to wait right here till we come back.  You may hear shooting.  Don’t let that worry you.  We’ve got the drop on him, or will have.  Nobody is going to get hurt if he acts sensible,” Healy reassured.

“Don’t you move from here.  You stay right where you are,” her brother ordered sharply.

“Yes,” she said, and was aware that her throat was suddenly parched.  “You’ll be careful, won’t you, Phil?”

“Sure,” he called back, as he put his horse at a canter to follow his friend up the draw.

The sound of the hoofs died away, and she was alone.  That they were going to circle in and out among the tangle of hills until they were opposite the miscreant, she knew, but in spite of Brill’s promise she had a heart of water.  With trembling fingers she raised the glasses again, and focused them on that point which was to be the centre of the drama.

The man was moving about now, quite unconscious of the danger that menaced him.  What she looked at was the great crime of Cattleland.  All her life she had been taught to hold it in horror.  But now something human in her was deeper than her detestation of the cowardly and awful thing this man had just done.  She wanted to cry out to him a warning, and did in a faint, ineffective voice that carried not a tenth of the distance between them.

She had promised to remain where she was, but her tense interest in what was doing drew her forward in spite of herself.  She rode along the ridge that bordered the park, at first slowly and then quicker as the impulse grew in her to be in at the finish.