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"I've been handing out money as it is till I'm about broke," Luck confessed, "making presents to those fellows that came in with bullets in their legs and arms. Funny nobody got hit in the body except one poor devil that got shot in the shoulder." "We-ell, now, you kin blame Lite's dang tender heart fer that there," Applehead accused, pulling at his sunbrowned mustache.
'N' if they's a crooked move made towards Luck, you cut loose 'n' say! You shoot to kill, this time!" He shook his finger in Lite's face admonishingly. "'S all right t' nip "em here 'n' take a hunk out there jest t' kinda take their minds off'n us -'s all right enough so fur, 'n' I ain't kickin' none 'cause yuh ain't killed off yuh hit. But if this here's a trick t' git Luck, you KILL that Injun.
Which showed what were Jean's ideas, at least on the subject of which was the master. "What you going to call it a The Perils of the Prairie, say?" Burns abandoned further argument on the subject of Lite's ability. "Oh, no! That's awfully cheap. That would stamp it as a melodrama before any of the picture appeared on the screen."
"You seem to forget that Lite's got a wife on his hands," he reproved as he went. "Lite's a-comin' right now," Applehead retorted, peering at the ridge a couple of hundred yards distant. "Git back down the draw 's fur's yuh kin b'fore yuh take out into the open agin. I'll wait a minute 'n' see "
Lite stood in the doorway and looked at the two of them for a moment. "I'm going down to see about things. I'll be back in a little while. And, Jean, will you be ready?" Jean looked up at him understandingly, and with a certain shyness in her eyes. "If it's all right with dad," she told him, "I'll be ready." "Lite's a man!"
"How'n hell do I know?" Lite retorted irritably. "I didn't see it done." Jim studied awhile, an ear cocked for the signal that the coroner was ready to begin the inquest. "Say," he leaned over and whispered in Lite's ear, "where was Aleck at, all day yesterday?" "Riding over in the bend, looking for black-leg signs," said Lite promptly. "Packed a lunch, same as I did."
She did what you might not expect Jean to do, after all her strong-mindedness and her independence: She made an uncertain movement toward sitting up and facing things calmly, man-fashion; then she leaned and dropped her very independent brown head back upon Lite's shoulder, and behind her handkerchief she cried quietly while Lite held her close.
Close beside him Lite's rifle spoke, its little steelshod message flying straight as a homing honeybee for the spitting flash he had glimpsed up there among the rocks. Whether he did any damage or not, a dozen rifles answered venomously and flicked up tiny spurts of sand in the close neighborhood of the four.
She almost recovered her spirits under the stimulus of Lite's presence, and she quite forgot that he had threatened her with Hepsibah Atwood. But when he had wiped the dishes and had taken up his hat to go, Lite proved how tenaciously his mind could hold to an idea, and how even Jean could not quite match him for stubbornness. "That mattress in the little bedroom looks all right," he said.
She would have to use her gun; perhaps even call on Lite, since Lite had followed her. She might have felt easier in her mind had she seen how Lite was standing just within the glass-paneled door behind the dimity curtain, listening to every word, and watching every expression on Art Osgood's face. Lite's hand, also, was close to his gun, to be perfectly sure of Jean's safety.
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