She had permitted the first day to pass without going to see Haydon. But when it had gone and another day dawned without Haydon coming to see her, she felt that he was deliberately absenting himself. For certainly he must have heard what had happened, and if he thought as much of her as he had led her to believe he would have come to her instantly.
Had Haydon seen the defiant gleam of her eyes when she gazed westward—in the direction of the Star—he might have realized that each day he stayed away from the Rancho Seco would make it that much more difficult for him to explain.
Barbara stayed indoors much of the time during the first days of Harlan’s control of the ranch, but from the windows she saw him—noted that the men obeyed him promptly and without question.
A sense of loss, of emptiness, still afflicted the girl, and yet through it all there ran a thrill of satisfaction, of assurance that the steady-eyed man who had saved her from Deveny, and who had treated her like a courtier of old on the night she had killed Lawson, seemed to have her welfare in mind, seemed—despite the reputation the people of the country had given him—to have constituted himself her guardian, without expectation of reward of the kind she had feared he sought.
Harlan’s method of assuming control of the Rancho Seco had been direct and simple. When the twenty-seven men of the outfit had straggled into the yard surrounding the big corral—the chuck-wagon, bearing the cook and his assistant, trailing a little behind, and followed by the horses of the remuda with the wrangler hurling vitriolic language in the rear—Harlan was standing beside Purgatory near the corral fence in front of one of the bunkhouses.
He had paid—apparently—no attention to the men as they dismounted, unsaddled, and turned their horses into the corral, and he did not even look at the belligerent-eyed cook whose sardonic glance roved over him.
But the men of the outfit watched him out of the corners of their eyes; as they passed him to go to the bunkhouses, they shot inquiring, speculating glances at one another, full of curiosity, not unmixed with astonishment over his continued silence.
It was when, drawn by the wonder that consumed them, they gathered in a group near the door of one of the bunkhouses, that Harlan moved toward them.
For he had noted that they had become grouped, and that into the atmosphere had come a tension.
Harlan’s actions had been governed by design. His continued silence had been strategy of a subtle order. It had attracted the attention of the men, it had intrigued their interest.