A sinister laugh from the man beside her brought the girl back to the present.
She looked at him and then looked quickly away again. There was something absolutely repulsive in the creature--in the big ears that stood out from the close-cropped head, in the fishy eyes that saw everything without ever looking directly at anything, in the crooked mouth with its irregular rows of stained teeth from which several were missing. She had often wondered about her brother, but never at the worst had she imagined anything so bad as this. The memory would be enough to give one the shudders for years.
"Guess I ain't next to all that happened there in the mesquite," he sneered, with a lift of the ugly lip.
She did not look at him. She did not speak. There seethed in her a loathing and a disgust beyond expression.
"Guess you forgot that a fellow can sometimes hear even when he can't see. Since I'm chaperooning you I'll make out to be there next time you meet a good-looking lady-killer. Funny, the difference it makes, being your brother. You ain't seen me since you was a kid, but you plumb forgot to kiss me."
There was a note in his voice she had not heard before, some hint of leering ribaldry in the thick laugh that for the first time stirred unease in her heart. She did not know that the desperate, wild-animal fear in him, so overpowering that everything else had been pushed to the background, had obscured certain phases of him that made her presence here such a danger as she could not yet conceive. That fear was now lifting, and the peril loomed imminent.
He put his arm along the back of the seat and grinned at her from his loose-lipped mouth.
"But o' course it ain't too late to begin now, my dearie."
Her fearless level eyes met squarely his shifty ones and read there something she could dread without understanding, something that was an undefined sacrilege of her sweet purity. For woman-like her instinct leaped beyond reason.
"Oh, I don't know, sis. I reckon your brother--"
"You're no brother of mine," she broke in. "At most it is an accident of birth I disown. I'll have no relationship with you of any sort."
"Is that why you're driving with me to Mexico?" he jeered.
"I made a mistake in trying to save you. If it were to do over again I should not lift a hand."