“I expect I am in for some exciting times,” Rock murmured to himself. “Yes, sir, I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Ten minutes later he was sound asleep.
CHAPTER X—THIRTY ANGRY MEN
He had been given forty-eight hours! When twenty-four of them had elapsed, Rock lay in his bunk at the TL, staring at roof beams dim above his head. The small noises of the night, insect voices, and the river’s eternal whisper drifted through an open window. In an opposite corner the two hired men snored. Perhaps to-morrow something would happen. Perhaps not. Yet Rock could not take easy refuge behind the idea that Buck Walters’ talk had been a bluff. Fire burned under that smoke. To-morrow would tell the tale.
Sunrise came and breakfast. Rock set the men at work in a meadow. The whir of the mower blades droned in the quiet valley. There were odds and ends of work that kept him busy until ten o’clock. While he attended to these jobs, he debated with himself whether to tell Nona Parke about his encounter with Buck. He concluded to keep it to himself. He wished that he had taken advantage of Dave Wells’ presence to establish his own identity. Yet who the devil, he asked himself fretfully, would have expected Buck Walters to declare open war?
At the next opportunity, he decided, he would be himself and be done with a dead man’s troubles. It had been altogether too easy to let people go on thinking he was Doc Martin. But there was no use worrying Nona Parke with that just now. She wasn’t concerned. If anything happened to him, she could get other riders. And she was quite helpless to prevent anything happening. Rock didn’t intend that anything should happen to him. He would be wary, watchful, his weapons always handy.
Something took him to the house.
Nona sat on the porch, darning stockings for Betty. She stopped Rock to mention the need of getting in more work horses, and while they talked, her eyes, looking past Rock, began to twinkle.
“Well,” she said, “we are about to have a distinguished visitor. There’s Alice Snell, and she’s certainly burning the earth.”
Rock turned. That range phrase for speed was apt. Alice came across the flat on a high gallop, her skirt flapping, bareheaded, and the gold of her hair like a halo in the sun. Her bay horse, when she jerked him to a stop, was lathered with sweat, his breast spotted with foam flecks. The girl’s face struck Rock as being stricken with a terrible fear. She swung down. To Nona Parke she gave no greeting whatever. Her eyes never left Rock, except for one furtive, backward glance. And she cried with a hysterical tremble in her voice: