"According to anybody's way of thinking, as long as they was thinking
right. And d'you know who we've got here with us now? Could you guess it
in a thousand years? Why, the kid that come tonight. Black Jack as sure
as if he was a picture out of a book, and me a blind fool that didn't
know him. Kate, here's the second Black Jack. Terry Hollis. Give him your
hand agin and say you're glad to have him for his dad's sake and for his
own! Kate, he's done a man's job already. It's him that dropped old foxy
Minter!"

The last of these words faded out of the hearing of Terry. He felt the
lowered eyes of the girl rise and fall gravely on his face, and her
glance rested there a long moment with a new and solemn questioning. Then
her hand went slowly out to him, a cold hand that barely touched his with
its fingertips and then dropped away.

But what Terry felt was that it was the same glance she had turned to him
when she stood leaning against the post earlier that evening. There was a
pity in it, and a sort of despair which he could not understand.

And without saying a word she turned her back on them and went out of the
room as slowly as she had come into it.



CHAPTER 26


"It don't mean nothing," Pollard hastened to assure Terry. "It don't mean
a thing in the world except that she's a fool girl. The queerest,