"Meanin' that you'll let me hang around as long as I'm good," sneered Calumet in a dangerously soft voice. He was trying to work himself into a rage, but the effort was futile. Something in Dade's quiet, matter-of-fact voice had a dulling, cooling effect on him. Besides, he knew that an attack on Dade would be resented by Betty, and he felt a strange reluctance toward further antagonizing her. "You Texas folks are sure clever at workin' your jaws," he sneered, when Dade did not answer. "But I reckon that lets you out. When I'm lookin' for advice from women an' kids mebbe I'll call on you an' Betty, but if I don't you'll understand that I'm followin' my own trail. You've got away with one call because—well, because I was fool enough to let you. Mebbe another time I won't feel so foolish."
There were few words spoken between them during the following hours of the morning, though several times Dade caught Calumet watching him with a puzzled, amused smile in which there was a sort of slumbering ferocity. By the middle of the morning the front of the ranchhouse had been raised with the assistance of jacks, the old rotted sills taken out and new ones substituted. About an hour before noon, while Calumet, in woolen shirt and overalls, his face dirty, his hair tousled, and his temper none too good, was wedging the sill tight against the studding above it, he became aware of Betty standing near him. She nodded toward the sill.
"That makes an improvement already," she said.
"Ye-es?" he said, with an irritating drawl.
There was a silence; she stood, regarding his back, a faint smile on her face.
"I want to compliment you on your judgment of horses," she persisted, in an attempt to make him talk; "the ones you bought are fine."
Calumet drove a wedge home viciously. But he did not answer.
"I've been checking up your other purchases," she went on; "and I find that you followed the list I gave you faithfully."
He turned and looked up. "Look here," he said; "I got what you wanted, didn't I? There's no use of gettin' mush headed about it. I'd have blowed the money just as quick, if I'd wanted to."
"But you didn't."