Picking up a man was not easy; they certainly had several offers from emigrants going west, and from Mexicans on the route, but Whaley seemed determined not to be pleased. He disliked Lorimer and was deeply offended at him interfering with his arrangements. Every day that he kept David was a kind of triumph to him. "He might as well have asked me how I'd like my drivers decoyed away. I like a man to be on the square," he grumbled. And he said these and similar things so often, that David began to feel it impossible to restrain his temper.
Anger, fed constantly by spiteful remarks and small injustices, grows rapidly; and as they approached the Apache mountains, the men began to notice a fixed tightening of the lips, and a stern blaze in the young Scot's eyes, which Whaley appeared to delight in intensifying.
"Thar'll be mischief atween them two afore long," remarked an old drover; "Lorimer is gittin' to hate the captain with such a vim that he's no appetite for his food left."
"It'll be a fair fight, and one or both'll get upped; that's about it."
At length they met a party of returning drovers, and half a dozen men among them were willing to take David's place. Whaley had no longer any pretence for detaining him. They were at the time between two long, low spurs of hills, enclosing a rich narrow valley, deep with ripened grass, gilded into flickering gold by the sun and the dewless summer days. All the lower ridges were savagely bald and hot—a glen, paved with gold and walled with iron. Oh, how the sun did beat and shiver, and shake down into the breathless valley!
The cattle were restless, and the men had had a hard day. David was weary; his heart was not in the work; he was glad it was his last watch. It began at ten o'clock, and would end at midnight. The weather was gloomy, and the few stars which shone between the rifts of driving clouds just served to outline the mass of sleeping cattle.
The air also was surcharged with electricity, though there had been no lightning.
"I wouldn't wonder ef we have a 'run' to-night," said one of the men. "I've seen a good many stampedes, and they allays happens on such nights as this one."
"Nonsense!" replied David. "If a cayote frightens one in a drove the panic Spreads to all. Any night would do for a 'run.'"
"'Taint so, Lorimer. Ef you've a drove of one thousand or of ten thousand it's all the same; the panic strikes every beast at the same moment. It's somethin' in the air; 'taint my business to know what. But you look like a 'run' yourself, restless and hot, and as ef somethin' was gitting 'the mad' up in you. I noticed Whaley is 'bout the same. I'd keep clear of him, ef I was you."