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But she stood looking out the window after he left, uneasy with a prescience of trouble. She watched with a feverish interest the stir that presently arose about the bunkhouses. That summer a wide space had been cleared between bungalow and camp. She could see moving lanterns, and even now and then hear the voices of men calling to each other.
When they reached the ranchhouse, Harlan loped Purgatory toward one of the bunkhouses, in front of which he saw Red Linton standing. Barbara directed Billy to the patio entrance, and dismounted, her face flushed, to meet a man who came out of the open gateway to greet her, his face wreathed in a delighted smile. "So you came at last?"
Every loose and breakable thing had been ground to splinters as though by iron slugs in a whirling cylinder. To this day, from Dawson to the Straits, from Unga to the Arctics, men tell of the combat wherever they foregather at flaring camp- fires or in dingy bunkhouses; and although some scout the tale, there are others who saw it and can swear to its truth.
It went, rumbling up the valley, the dust cloud hovering over it, blotting out its movements. It roared past the Circle L bunkhouses, leaving behind it a number of Circle L cowboys who had been awakened by the thunderous noise. The Circle L men had plunged outside in various stages of undress all bootless, unprepared, amazed, and profane. "Stampede!" yelled a hoarse voice.
The men, tired, dusty, and hungry, swarmed into one of the bunkhouses immediately after they had turned their horses into the corral and cared for their saddles.
Shorty had approached the cabin from the rear, having cut across the space behind the bunkhouses when he heard the shooting. He could not be seen by Selden and Krell as they plunged out of the door; but he had seen Lawler when the latter dodged behind the corner of the cabin, and as he ran toward Lawler he drew his guns. As yet Shorty had seen no one but Lawler.
"The store" she checked them off upon her fingers "the schoolhouse, two bunkhouses, we can leave off the bathrooms, the river and the lake will serve until winter." Lapierre nodded, and the girl continued. "We can do without the laundry and the carpenter-shop, and the individual cabins. The Indians can set up their teepees in the clearing, and build the cabins and the other buildings later.
Somewhere near, within a mile or two, was the first settlement with its sawmill and its bunkhouses, its one store and its few cabins, with flat mountains of sawdust on one side of it, and the evergreen forest creeping up to its doors on the other. Surely they would find life here, where there had been man power to hold fire back from the clearing.
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