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Something in the cattleman's eye, in the curtness of his speech, brought Dillon back to earth. He had divined that his boss did not like him, had employed him only because Blister Haines had made a personal point of it. Harshaw was a big weather-beaten man of forty, hard, keen-eyed, square as a die. Game himself, he had little patience with those who did not stand the acid test.
The cattleman's steady eyes were level with those of the unhappy man making the confession. "Did you at any time hear the sound of a shot?" "Well, I I heard somethin'. At the time I thought maybe it was a tire in the street blowin' out. But come to think of it later we figured it was a shot." "You don't know for sure." "Well, come to that I I don't reckon I do. Not to say for certain sure."
And I'm going to tell him so." The cattleman's arm slid round her warm young body and drew her close. She was to him the dearest thing in the world, a never-failing, exquisite wonder and mystery. Sometimes even now he was amazed that this rare spirit had found the breath of life through him. "You wanta remember you're a li'l lady," he reproved.
It was at this point that Morgan suggested Stilwell turn to the soil instead of range cattle as a future business, a thing that called down the cattleman's scorn and derision, and citation of the wreckage that country had made of men's hopes.
He had caught the fever; and the cattleman's fever is not easily shaken off. As McLagan would show no mercy to his own brother were he a proven cattle-thief, so Jim loathed the crime in little less degree. And he was about to face the world, his world, branded with that crime.
"I suppose," said the Dean, and a slightly curious tone colored the remark, "that mebby you've been used to automobiles. Buck and Prince here, an' this old buckboard will seem sort of slow to you." Patches was stepping into the rig as the Dean spoke. As the young man took his seat by the cattleman's side, the Dean nodded to Phil who was holding the team.
The cattleman's tone was rich in disgust, but even more keen was his intense disappointment at this failure of his hopes. "Would you mind telling me, Senator, just what the purpose of your company is?" "Certainly not. It's no secret," Rexhill replied briskly.
The cattleman's hand gripped that of Dillon firmly. "Shucks! Tha's foolishness," Bob murmured, embarrassed. "I'm scared stiff if you want to know." "I reckon that's why you're aimin' for to make a target of yorese'f again," Hawks suggested ironically. "Damn 'f I'd do it for the best man alive, let alone Jake Houck. No, sir. I'll go a reasonable way, but I quit this side of suicide. I sure do."
"Which man do you mean, Mrs. Hull?" asked the lawyer. "The big brown man sittin' at the end of the front bench, the one right behind you." Kirby rose. "Think prob'ly she means me," he suggested. An officer in uniform passed down the aisle and laid a hand on the cattleman's shoulder. "You're under arrest," he said. "For what, officer?" asked James Cunningham. "For the murder of your uncle, sir."
The Lincoln County New Mexico "War," in which it is believed that first to last over 200 men were killed, was purely a cattleman's war, but the most terrible and bloody that ever took place in the West. New Mexico was at that time probably the most lawless country in the world.
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