His meaning was plain, though he did not finish. She looked at him straight in the eyes though her face was crimson and her lips trembled a little.
"You are a brute!" she said. Turning swiftly she began to descend the slope toward the ranchhouse.
Calumet stood looking after her for a moment, his face working with various emotions that struggled for expression. Then, ignoring Dade, who stood near him, plainly puzzled over this enigma, he walked over to the edge of the wood where Taggart's rifle lay, picked it up and made his way to the ranchhouse.
CHAPTER XVII
MORE PROGRESS
A strange thing was happening to Calumet. His character was in the process of remaking. Slowly and surely Betty's good influence was making itself felt. This in spite of his knowledge of her secret meeting with Neal Taggart. To be sure, so far as his actions were concerned, he was the Calumet of old, a man of violent temper and vicious impulses, but there were growing governors that were continually slowing his passions, strange, new thoughts that were thrusting themselves insistently before him. He was strangely uncertain of his attitude toward Betty, disturbed over his feelings toward her. Despite his knowledge of her secret meeting with Taggart, with a full consciousness of all the rage against her which that knowledge aroused in him, he liked her. At the same time, he despised her. She was not honest. He had no respect for any woman who would sneak as she had sneaked. She was two-faced; she was trying to cheat him out of his heritage. She had deceived his father, she was trying to deceive him. She was unworthy of any admiration whatever, but whenever he looked at her, whenever she was near him, he was conscious of a longing that he could not fight down.
And there was Dade. He often watched Dade while they were working together on the bunkhouse in the days following the incident of the ambush by Taggart. The feeling that came over him at these times was indescribable and disquieting, as was his emotion whenever Dade smiled at him. He had never experienced the deep, stirring spirit of comradeship, the unselfish affection which sometimes unites the hearts of men; he had had no "chum" during his youth. But this feeling that came over him whenever he looked at Dade was strangely like that which he had for his horse, Blackleg. It was deeper, perhaps, and disturbed him more, yet it was the same. At the same time, it was different. But he could not tell why. He liked to have Dade around him, and one day when the latter went to Lazette on some errand for Betty he felt queerly depressed and lonesome. That same night when Dade drove into the ranchhouse yard Calumet had smiled at him, and a little later when Dade had told Betty about it he had added:
"When I seen him grin at me that cordial, I come near fallin' off my horse. I was that flustered! Why, Betty, he's comin' around! The durn cuss likes me!"
"Do you like him?" inquired Betty.