With her back to the window she talked to him again, gesturing with her hands, and almost sobbing under the stress of the emotion that possessed her.
His elation turned swiftly to the old dread as he watched the change in her face.

Apprehension--a grim certainty--gripped hold of him.
Something terrible had happened to her--a thing that had racked her soul and that filled her eyes with the blaze of a strange terror as she struggled to make him understand.

And then she broke down, and with a sobbing cry covered her face with her hands.
Out in the corral Philip heard Bram Johnson's laugh.

It was a mockery--a challenge.

In an instant every drop of blood in his body answered it in a surge of blind rage.