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"Then you don't believe in penitence?" "Well," said the Colonel dryly, "I am, I hope, a Christian man, but it would be difficult to convince me that the gambler, cattle-thief, and whisky-runner who ruined every man and woman who trusted him will be admitted to the same place as clean-lived English gentlemen. There are, my dear, plenty of them still."
The penalty is heavy, and when a man becomes a whisky-runner he has no intention of being taken alive. Think of all that, and see where your imagination carries you. Then think of Charlie as we know him. An artist. A warm-hearted, gentle creature, whose only sins are against himself." But the younger girl's face displayed skepticism. "Yes as we know him," she replied quickly.
He felt convinced that it was his brother. Kate was wrong, and everybody else was right. Charlie was indeed the whisky-runner whom the police were after. Any purpose he had had before was promptly abandoned. He hurried away, sick at heart, and hastily returned to the ranch to find Charlie still out.
He was a whisky-runner. He was against the law. His ultimate goal was the penitentiary. Good God, the thought was appalling! This was where drink had led him. This was the end of his spoiled and wayward brother's career. What a cruel waste of a promising life. His good-natured, gentle-hearted brother. The boy he had always admired and loved in those early days. It was cruel, terrible.
The hardness abruptly died out of Kate's eyes. A faint sigh, perhaps of relief, escaped her. "They'll never do that," she declared firmly. "Everybody's making a mistake about Charlie. I'm sure. With all his failings Charlie's no whisky-runner. He's too gentle. He's too too honest to descend to such a traffic." Suddenly her eyes lit.
All mystery was banished. The whole thing, in spite of Kate's denial, was as plain as daylight. Charlie was a whisky-runner. The head of the gang. His little "one-eyed" ranch was the merest blind. His prosperity, if prosperity he possessed at all, was the prosperity of successful defiance of the law. To the simple brother this realization was a terrible one.
Charlie Bryant was no longer a mere offender against the law in his mind. In concentrating his official efforts against him he realized the jeopardy in which his own regard for Kate Seton placed him. He saw that his success now in ridding the district of the whisky-runner would, at the same time, rob him of all possible chance of ever obtaining the regard of this woman he loved.
All this, of course, was strictly against the peace and dignity of the powers that were, and so the red-coated men rode the high divides with their eagle eye peeled for any one who looked like a whisky-runner.
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