Henry wheeled and stared at her in blank amazement. He looked all around her, then advanced the theory that she was sitting on the ground.
“Wrong, Henry,” said Mary gloomily. “I’m sitting on your new rain gauge. But don’t be alarmed. I’m keeping my weight off it. I won’t sit down hard, Henry, unless you persist in refusing to accompany me to Tanburt’s Ranch to get on the trail of Doctor Shonto. What do you say, Henry?”
Henry had nothing to say, so he looked worried and cackled his silly “Heh-heh-heh!” At half-past one he was stalking into the night in a southwesterly direction, with Mary Temple riding behind him, tortured by the rolling motion of her walking horse, but enduring silently. The rain gauge was strapped at the front jockey of her saddle, its thin brass ready to be squeezed to uselessness if Shirttail Henry became obstinate.
CHAPTER XXV
THE DEADLY BULL AND THE SILVER FOX
IT was nearly noon the following day when a lone horsewoman rode into the grove of cottonwoods that stood before the ranch house of Gustav Tanburt. No one came out to meet her. A few chickens moseyed about, commanded by a black rooster with a red muffler about his neck and a redder comb, deeply notched. He gave Mary Temple a wall-eyed stare. A young calf, tied to a tree on thirty feet of rope, took the occasion to celebrate Mary’s advent by racing round in a circle, carrying its tail as if it were broken in the middle, and ending the performance by encircling several trees with the rope and coming to an enforced, bawling standstill.
Mary dismounted in a spasm of suffering, watered her horse at a dripping trough adjacent to a flow of artesian water from a rusty pipe, lowered the reins over the horse’s head, and walked to the painfully small and circumspect veranda. She knocked smartly on a weather-stained door, in which a brown-china knob hung like a loose tooth. Gus Tanburt, for all the riches that had been forced upon him, clave to the familiar relics of his days of haphazard struggling.
Mary knocked twice. A large black-green blow fly buzzed about before her peaked nose, seeming to anticipate the opening of the door. Mary struck at it viciously, not with the flat of her hand but with her bony fist. Mary was in no humour to administer punishment with the flat of her hand. She was in the mood to deliver a haymaker and put her scant weight behind it.
Shuffling footsteps preceded the opening of the door, and Gus Tanburt bleared at her from between wind-stung eyelids.
The eyelids had no lashes, and the skin of the rancher’s face was slick and shiny as an ancient scar. His teeth were few and far between—yellow fangs in his yielding gums. The breath of his brown clay pipe nearly asphyxiated his gentle caller.
He glowered at Mary as if she were the tax assessor.