Under his breath Lance muttered something and went into the house, not looking at Belle or making her any reply.
“Lance,” said Belle to the pintos, “thinks we’re 270 rough and tough and just about half civilized. Lord, when you take a Lorrigan and educate him and polish him, you sure have got a combination that’s hard to go up against. Two years––and my heavens, I don’t know Lance any more! I never thought any Lorrigan could feaze me––but there’s something about Lance––”
In the house Lance was not showing any of the polish which Belle had mentioned rather regretfully. He was kneeling before a trunk, throwing books and pipes and socks and soft-toned silk shirts over his shoulder, looking for something which he seemed in a great haste to find. When his fingers, prying deep among his belongings, closed upon the thing he sought, he brought it up, frowning abstractedly.
A black leather case, small and curved, opened when he unbuckled the confining strap. A binocular, small but extremely efficient in its magnifying power he withdrew, dusting the lenses with the sleeve of his shirt. He had bought the glasses because some one had advised him to take a pair along when he went with a party of friends to the top of Mount Tamalpais one Sunday. And because he had an instinctive dislike for anything but the best obtainable, he had bought the highest-priced glasses he could find in San Francisco,––and perhaps the smallest. He buckled them back into their case, slapped them into his pocket and closed the trunk lid with a bang. From the mantel 271 in the living room he gleaned a box of cartridges for an extra six-shooter, which he cleaned and loaded carefully and tucked inside the waistband of his trousers, on the left side, following an instinct that brought him close to his grandfather, that old killer whom all men feared to anger.
“The horse and the hat; he thought it was dad he was trailing!” he said to himself, with his teeth clamped tight together. “Oh, well, when it comes to that kind of a game––”
He went out and down to the corral, watered Coaley and mounted again, taking the trail across pastures to Squaw Creek.