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"Somebody you used to know?" face turned away, voice light in a careless, artificial note. "She was a sheepman's daughter," he said. "Did you know her down at Jasper?" "No, I never knew her at all, Rach Joan. That was a long, long time ago." Joan brightened at this news. She ceased denying him her face, even smiled a little, seeming to forget Hector Hall and his pending vengeance.
I've been quite safe, and it's all over now. Everything is all right." "Is it?" Sanderson laughed harshly. "The sheriff telephoned him to keep me, but you see he brought me home." "Brought you home?" The sheepman's black eyes lifted quickly and met those of his enemy. "So you're there, Buck Weaver. I reckon you and I will settle accounts."
The sheepman's gaze was becoming furtive as he watched them. He glanced sidewise, edging away from the door; then, pricking his mule with his spurs, he galloped madly away, ducking his head at every jump as if he feared a shot. "Look at the cowardly dastard!" sneered Creede bitterly. "D'ye know what he would do if that was me? He'd shoot me in the back.
He was the kind of man that always wanted what he could not get. He began to covet this girl mightily, even while he told himself that he was a fool for his pains. What was she but an untaught, country schoolgirl? It would be a strange irony of fate if Buck Weaver should fall in love with a sheepman's daughter. "Many people would go far to get my friendship," he told her.
"Sure," assented Hardy, "and so have our cattle. But I tell you what you can do you can go out through that pass yonder!" He pointed at the cañon down which the sheep had come in the Fall, the great middle fork which led up over the Four Peaks; but the sheepman's only reply was a snarl of refusal. "Not if I know myself," he muttered spitefully. "How'd do, Judge!"
Come to find out you had his hat in your possession all the time." "Does that prove I did it myself?" "Looks funny you happened to be right there while the robbery was taking place and that you had Luck's hat with you." The sleepy tiger look lay warily in the sheepman's eyes. "That's what the dictionaries call a coincidence, Bucky." "They may. I'm not sure I do." "Fact, just the same."
Hall spoke a low, mumbled, unintelligible word to the one who stood behind Mackenzie, and another gun pressed coldly against the back of the apprentice sheepman's neck. Hall went to the end of the wagon, found his pistols, struck a match to inspect them. In the light of the expiring match at his feet Mackenzie could see the ex-cattleman buckling on the guns.
This was true, as he long had realized, of a man who plants in the soil, risking the large part of his capital of labor year by year. But the sheepman's risks were greater, his courage immensely superior, to that of the tiller of the soil. One storm might take his flock down to the last head, leaving him nothing to start on again but his courage and his hope.
The busiest periods of the sheepman's year are the lambing- and shearing-seasons. The first begins early in March, when the little mesquite-trees are of a feathery greenness and the brown gramma and mesquite grass are beginning to freshen, and lasts about six weeks. It is an exacting time for the conscientious proprietor.
The sheepman's will melted before his insistence. He dared not face a showdown. "Oh, well, what's it matter? We can talk things over on the way. Me, I'm not lookin' for trouble none," he said, his small black eyes moving restlessly to watch the effect of this on his men. Bob helped his partner out of the house and into the surrey.
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