“Nor McWilliams. I'd admire to include him,” murmured Denver.
That sunburned, nonchalant youth laughed musically. “Sure thing. I'd hate to be left out. The only difference is—”
“Well?”
His roving eye circled blandly round. “I stand about one show in a million. Y'u roughnecks are dead ones already.”
With which cold comfort he sauntered away to join Miss Messiter and the foreman, who now appeared together at the door of the ranchhouse, prepared to make a tour of the buildings and the immediate corrals.
“Isn't there a woman on the place?” she was asking Morgan.
“No'm, there ain't. Henderson's daughter would come and stay with y'u a while I reckon.”
“Please send for her at once, then, and ask her to come to-day.”
“All right. I'll send one of the boys right away.”
“How did y'u leave 'Frisco, ma'am?” asked Mac, by way of including himself easily.
“He's resting quietly. Unless blood-poisoning sets in they ought all to do well.”
“It's right lucky for them y'u happened along. This is the hawss corral, ma'am,” explained the young man just as Morgan opened his thin lips to tell her.
Judd contrived to get rid of him promptly. “Slap on a saddle, Mac, and run up the remuda so Miss Messiter can see the hawsses for herself,” he ordered.
“Mebbe she'd rather ride down and look at the bunch,” suggested the capable McWilliams.
As it chanced, she did prefer to ride down the pasture and look over the place from on horseback. She was in love with her ranch already. Its spacious distances, the thousands of cattle and the horses, these picturesque retainers who served her even to the shedding of an enemy's blood; they all struck an answering echo in her gallant young heart that nothing in Kalamazoo had been able to stir. She bubbled over with enthusiasm, the while Morgan covertly sneered and McWilliams warmed to the untamed youth in her.
“What about this man Bannister?” she flung out suddenly, after they had cantered back to the house when the remuda had been inspected.
Her abrupt question brought again the short, tense silence she had become used to expect.
“He runs sheep about twenty or thirty miles southwest of here,” explained McWilliams, in a carefully casual tone.
“So everybody tells me, but it seems to me he spills a good deal of lead on my men,” she answered impatiently. “What's the trouble?”
“Last week he crossed the dead-line with a bunch of five thousand sheep.”
“Who draws this dead-line?”
“The cattlemen got together and drew it. Your uncle was one of those that marked it off, ma'am.”
“And Bannister crossed it?”
“Yes, ma'am. Yesterday 'Frisco come on him and one of his herders with a big bunch of them less than fifteen miles from here. He didn't know it was Bannister, and took a pot-shot at him. 'Course Bannister came back at him, and he got Frisco in the laig.”
“Didn't know it was Bannister? What difference WOULD that make?” she said impatiently.
Mac laughed. “What difference would it make, Judd?”
Morgan scowled, and the young man answered his own question. “We don't any of us go out of our way more'n a mile to cross Bannister's trail,” he drawled.
“Do you wear this for an ornament? Are you upholstered with hardware to catch the eyes of some girl?” she asked, touching with the end of her whip the revolver in the holster strapped to his chaps.
His serene, gay smile flashed at her. “Are y'u ordering me to go out and get Ned Bannister's scalp?”
“No, I am not,” she explained promptly. “What I am trying to discover is why you all seem to be afraid of one man. He is only a man, isn't he?”
A veil of ice seemed to fall over the boyish face and leave it chiseled marble. His unspeaking eyes rested on the swarthy foreman as he answered:
“I don't know what he is, ma'am. He may be one man, or he may be a hundred. What's more, I ain't particularly suffering to find out. Fact is, I haven't lost any Bannisters.”
The girl became aware that her foreman was looking at her with a wary silent vigilance sinister in its intensity.
“In short, you're like the rest of the people in this section. You're afraid.”
“Now y'u're shoutin', Miss Messiter. I sure am when it comes to shootin' off my mouth about Bannister.”
“And you, Mr. Morgan?”
It struck her that the young puncher waited with a curious interest for the answer of the foreman.
“Did it look like I was afraid this mawnin', ma'am?” he asked, with narrowed eyes.
“No, you all seemed brave enough then, when you had him eight to one.”
“I wasn't there,” hastily put in McWilliams. “I don't go gunning for my man without giving him a show.”
“I do,” retorted Morgan cruelly. “I'd go if we was fifty to one. We'd 'a' got him, too, if it hadn't been for Miss Messiter. 'Twas a chance we ain't likely to get again for a year.”
“It wasn't your fault you didn't kill him, Mr. Morgan,” she said, looking hard at him. “You may be interested to know that your last shot missed him only about six inches, and me about four.”
“I didn't know who you were,” he sullenly defended.
“I see. You only shoot at women when you don't know who they are.” She turned her back on him pointedly and addressed herself to McWilliams. “You can tell the men working on this ranch that I won't have any more such attacks on this man Bannister. I don't care what or who he is. I don't propose to have him murdered by my employees. Let the law take him and hang him. Do you hear?”
“I ce'tainly do, and the boys will get the word straight,” he replied.
“I take it since yuh are giving your orders through Mac, yuh don't need me any longer for your foreman,” bullied Morgan.
“You take it right, sir,” came her crisp reply. “McWilliams will be my foreman from to-day.”
The man's face, malignant and wolfish, suddenly lost its mask. That she would so promptly call his bluff was the last thing he had expected. “That's all right. I reckon yuh think yuh know your own business, but I'll put it to yuh straight. Long as yuh live you'll be sorry for this.”
And with that he wheeled away.
She turned to her new foreman and found him less radiant than she could have desired. “I'm right sorry y'u did that. I'm afraid y'u'll make trouble for yourself,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“I don't know myself just why.” He hesitated before adding: “They say him and Bannister is thicker than they'd ought to be. It's a cinch that he's in cahoots somehow with that Shoshone bunch of bad men.”
“But—why, that's ridiculous. Only this morning he was trying to kill Bannister himself.”
“That's what I don't just savvy. There's a whole lot about that business I don't get next to. I guess Bannister is at the head of them. Everybody seems agreed about that. But the whole thing is a tangle of contradiction to me. I've milled it over a heap in my mind, too.”
“What are some of the contradictions?”
“Well,