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They were first to find the trail, and with all the ferocity of their blood-eating nature followed it with quick exciting leaps. A fox caught the scent of it a quarter of a mile to windward, and came nearer. From out of a deep windfall a beady-eyed, thin-bellied fisher-cat came forth, and stopped with his feet in the crimson ribbon.
A sharp little sound from him. Miss Kate looked up, quickly. Chet Ball was staring at the beady-eyed yellow chicken in his hand. "What's this thing?" he demanded in a strange voice. Miss Kate answered him very quietly, trying to keep her own voice easy and natural. "That's a toy chicken, cut out of wood." "What'm I doin' with it?" "You've just finished painting it."
This was his second season on the Devil's Tooth ranch, and he knew that Belle Lorrigan was merely harnessing her pinto team in the stable, and that nothing out of the ordinary was taking place. Being a wise bird as well as an inquisitive one, he fluttered up to the ridge-pole of the roof and from that sanctuary listened beady-eyed to the customary tumult.
Rough and ready, witty, profane, and obscene, he bubbled over with tales of reef and sea, of women and men he had met, of lawless tricks on natives, of storm and starvation, and of his claimed illicit loves. Loud-mouthed, bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped by a hundred sordid deeds, he must get the center of attention by any hazard.
Jack Stillwell solved the problem. He was chewing tobacco. "Sh! I'll fix him," he whispered. He slightly raised at the movement the snake coiled, rattle sticking up in the center, head poised, tongue licking wickedly. And aiming his best, Jack spat. The stream spurted truly. It drenched the beady-eyed, flat-iron head, flooded the swaying neck and spattered the thick scaly coils.
From there, with twenty-seven horses and one mule, with the happy Bird-woman and the beady-eyed Toussaint, the two captains and their men took the trail for the Great Salt Water, one thousand miles toward the setting sun.
At her very best he would never have tacked the word beauty on to her; a buxom, rotund, beady-eyed young female would have made the word beauty spring to his lips Cléo de Bromsart, never. But she was getting more pleasant looking and her eyes were getting over their "stiffness" which was something, and he felt pleased.
She was recalled to the present by a plate, on which was a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese, being thrust beneath her nose. She was hungry when she came downstairs; now, appetite had left her. Her gorge rose at the pasty-faced girls, the brick-walled cellar, the unwholesome air, and the beady-eyed little woman seated at the head of the table.
Later on, that winter, the mice had seven young ones seven such skinny, thread-limbed, beady-eyed little beasts that no one noticed their arrival. "Very soon after, almost before any hen had time to look round or think, behold! mice were squeaking in every corner, and there were holes behind every wainscot, plank, and rafter.
Alfred leaped off his horse, helped Florence and Madeline down, and, bidding them rest and wait on the porch, he followed Stillwell. "I hate these Greaser places," said Florence, with a grimace. "They're so mysterious and creepy. Just watch now! They'll be dark-skinned, beady-eyed, soft-footed Greasers slip right up out of the ground! There'll be an ugly face in every door and window and crack."
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