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Kate's face, that had gone scarlet, was a grayish white as she got up slowly from her knees. Her breathing was labored as she demanded: "You mean that you'll not tell me anything more unless I do what you ask?" "You got it right." Kate's nerves and self-control gave way as a taut string snaps. In the center of a black disc she saw only the mocking eyes and evil face of Mullendore.
"You'd better get them packs off," she replied, curtly. "Looks like you'd got on three hundred pounds." "Wouldn't be surprised. Them bear traps weigh twenty poun' each, and green hides don't feel like feathers, come to pack 'em over the trail I've come." Kate looked at him for the first time. "I wisht I was a man! I bet I'd work you over for the way you abuse your stock!" Mullendore laughed.
"Yes, I'd like to tan hides for you, Pete Mullendore! When I get frost bit in August I'll go, but not before." He replied easily: "You ain't of age yet, Katie, and you have to mind your maw. I've got an idee that she'll tell you to go if I say so." "A whole lot my mother would mind what you say!" Yet in spite of her defiance a look of fear crossed the girl's face.
She slipped her arm through the harness and started towards the shed, Mullendore following with his slouching walk, an unprepossessing figure in his faded overalls, black and white mackinaw coat and woolen cap. The trapper was tall and lank, with a pair of curious, unforgettable eyes looking out from a swarthy face that told of Indian blood.
He looked for a moment as though he were going to faint, then he clutched the edge of the table cloth in a convulsive grip, and shouted with an attempt at his old braggadocio: "It's a lie!" "It's the truth!" Teeters thundered, opposite. "Mullendore confessed. Anyhow, I've got other proof the original owner of the gun who left it at your house when he was a kid. Feller come out." "Disston!"
But there was one thing about Kate that puzzled Prentiss, and troubled him a bit: he had observed that while she talked freely of her mother and the Sand Coulee Roadhouse, of Mullendore and the crisis which had sent her to Mormon Joe, of the tragedy of his death, of her subsequent life on the ranch, of her ups-and-downs with the sheep, of anything that she thought would be of interest to him, of her inner self she had nothing to say of friends, of love affairs and he could not believe but that that a woman of her unmistakable charm must have had a few.
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