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Updated: June 14, 2025
Then, after a moment, satisfying his curiosity, he wheeled, slashed at the gate with both hoofs, and with a snort, that in the horse language might have meant contempt or derision, cavorted away. Calumet's admiring glance followed him.
It might have been because Dade had not moved. Calumet's lips had tensed over his teeth in a savage snarl; they still held the snarl when he spoke. "You'll swallow that," he said. "Do you sabe my idea?" "Nary swallow," declared Dade. "False alarm goes. I've got you sized up right." Calumet's six-shooter came out. His eyes, blazing with a wanton fire, met Dade's and held them.
In the flashing look she gave him he thought he could detect a knowledge of advantage, a consciousness of power, over him. Her voice emphasized this impression. "Your father's dead," she returned, and watched him narrowly. Calumet's eyelashes flickered once. Shock or emotion, this was all the evidence he gave of it.
The analogy, perhaps, might not have been perceived by anyone less intimately acquainted with Calumet, or by anyone who understood a horse less, but she saw it, and knowing Calumet's innate savagery, his primal stubbornness, his passions, the naked soul of the man, she began to feel that the black was waging a hopeless struggle. He could never win unless some accident happened.
The shadows in the wood near the house grew darker, and to Calumet's ears came the long-drawn, plaintive whine of a coyote, the croaking of frogs from the river, the hoot of an owl nearby. Other noises of the night reached him, but he did not hear them, for he had become lost in meditation. What a home-coming! Bitterness settled into the marrow of his bones.
To the right and left of these rocks was a clear space, flat and open, with not a tree or a bush large enough to conceal danger such as he was in search of. The slope up which he had just driven the horses was likewise free from obstruction, so that if his enemy was behind any of the rocks he was doomed to stay there or offer himself as a target for Calumet's pistol. "Wise, I reckon," he sneered.
"It's Lonesome!" he repeated shrilly; "Bob's Lonesome!" And then, seeing from the expression of Calumet's face that he did not comprehend, he added: "It's Bob's dog, Lonesome! Bob loved him so, an' now you've gone an' killed him you you hellhound! You " His quavering voice was cut short; once more his throat felt the terrible pressure of Calumet's iron fingers.
Ketch my drift?" "Meanin' that I'm nothin', I reckon?" "Meanin' that you was laughin' at it," said the puncher with a deprecatory smile. "I ain't lookin' for trouble I'm it!" Calumet's eyes twinkled. This was a very discerning young man. "Cleaned out, I reckon," he said. "You look old enough to sabe that playin' with a buzz saw is mild amusement compared with buckin' a gambler's game."
Relieved, deflating its lungs with a tremulous heave, and unmindful of Calumet's scorn, the pony gingerly returned to the trail. In thirty seconds it had resumed its drooping shuffle, in thirty seconds Calumet had returned to his unpleasant ruminations.
At the end of the third week the roof had been repaired, and then there were some odds and ends that had to be looked to, so that the fourth week was nearly gone when Dade and Calumet cleared up the débris. It was Dade who, in spite of Calumet's remonstrances, went inside to announce the news to Betty, and she came out with him and looked the work over with a critical, though approving, eye.
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