Mr. Poole reddened and scowled. "I had a blame sight better ranch than this, but I sold it," he said.
"By your looks I think the sheriff helped you," Angus said. "You look to me like a man that is too lazy to turn over in bed, like a man that would sleep in winter and never hear his stock bawling for feed. You will never have this ranch. If you try to come on it—"
"Angus," Mr. Braden broke in with dignified severity, "you are forgetting yourself. You must not talk in that way to your elders."
But by this time young Mackay's temper, which had been gradually rising, was beyond being damped off by a stern voice and dignified manner.
"I will say what I think," he declared, "to this man Poole, or to you, or to anybody else, and I will back up what I say the best way I can. You come here and talk about renting the ranch and selling stock as if I had nothing to say about it. I tell you, now, it doesn't go. I am staying here, and so are Jean and Turkey. If you try to put us off, or put this Poole or anybody else on, there will be trouble you can scoop up in a bucket."
Garland chose that moment to laugh. Angus turned on him with a scowl. He was like a young dog cornered by older ones, nervous, snarling, but quite ready to fight for his bone. He looked Garland in the eye.
"And that goes for you too," he said. "You will buy nothing with the MK brand from anybody but me. You try to take a single head of my stock off the range, and you'll do it in the smoke, do you savvy that?"
Garland laughed again, but there was a note of uneasiness in it, for next to the real "bad man," cold, experienced and deadly, comes the boy, who, bred in the traditions of the old West, has the recklessness and hot passions of extreme youth. The history of the West teems with examples.
"You're making a fool of yourself, kid," he said.
Here Dave Rennie broke the silence which had enwrapped him.