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A flying bullet might find a target and it might not; at any rate the sound of the shots volleyed and boomed echoingly between the stone wails imprisoning them, and Barbee or one of Barbee's men should hear.
Blenham's eyes followed him, seeming fascinated by the whip in Barbee's hand. "Listen a minute, Bill," said Steve when Barbee had done. "I want to tell you something."
Seven steers dead, some more sick. An'," the explanation coming quickly, "Barbee's got the hunch Blenham had rode on ahead an' had poisoned the water-holes an' " "Damn him!" cried Steve, a sudden fury seeming to leap out upon him and take him by the throat. "Am I to stand everything from that man and from my old fiend of a grandfather?
The voice was as nearly dead and expressionless as a human voice can be; only the words themselves carried his insolence. 'Please, can I play in your game? To Barbee's youth it was plain challenge and, though he hated the man with his whole soul, Barbee's youth answered hotly: 'I'll take you on, Jim Courtot, any day. Thereafter Courtot ignored Barbee.
Plain to be read by anyone with a claim to eyesight was Yellow Barbee's devotion; equally plainly decipherable, thought Helen, was the fact of Mrs. Murray's amusement at Barbee's infatuation. It meant nothing to her; she was playing with him as, no doubt, she had played with many another susceptible youngster.
So, at the last, matters had come to this: There lay a man over yonder, dead, with Barbee's lead in him. And old man Packard was coming to-night, now of all times when Steve's heart was hard, when his brain was hot with his fury, when he had just come upon men stealing his stock and had learned that his own grandfather, the old mountain-lion from the north, was one of them.
And, as briefly as might be, he told Royce of the ten dollar bills substituted for the real legacy, of the results of his evening in Red Creek, of Barbee's trapping Blenham, of the recovery of the ten thousand dollars, of a horse shot dead on the Red Creek road. "Then," said Royce at the end of it, his mind catching eagerly one outstanding fact, "I was right, Steve?
Such was the thought springing full-fledged into Terry's brain, into Steve's, into Yellow Barbee's. A chain of fires had been started across the whole width of the feeding grounds.
And while I am away you're foreman, Barbee." A flickering light danced in Barbee's blue eyes. "Orders from you, if Blenham shows up at night " "To throw a gun on him and run him out! The quickest way. To-night I want you to squat out under a tree and keep awake all night. For which you can have two days off if you want."
A glance showed him one horse only at the rack, a lean sorrel that he recognized. It was Yellow Barbee's favourite mount, and it struck him that if there were further hard riding to be done, here was the horse to satisfy any man. He threw himself from the saddle, left his own horse balancing upon its trembling legs, and stepped into the saloon. Moraga was dozing behind his bar.
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