"You'd better wait," suggested Meshackatee, "you're supposed to be a prisoner, and maybe he'll have other plans."
"I'm not working for him!" declared McIvor, obstinately, "I'm doing this work for you."
"Fair enough," agreed Meshackatee, "but I'm working for him. So try to stand in on the play. Come on, we'll go down to the house."
They arrived just as Elmo, the youngest of the Scarboroughs, stepped out from where he had been sulking. He was short and sandy, with a slouchy wool hat and two guns hung low on his hips. Each was tied at the bottom with a buckskin string which held the muzzles close to his legs, so that the carved ivory handles stuck out at such an angle that they practically touched his hands. Both holsters were cut away until they barely held their pistols, and the whole was arranged so that he could draw and shoot in the shortest possible time. But the boy himself—for he was hardly a man—had on his face such a look of both weakness and reckless deviltry that McIvor looked him over again. He was sullen now, after his defeat by the sheepmen and the tongue-lashing that Zoolah had given him, but he stepped out to meet his brothers with such a purposeful swagger that Mrs. Scarborough allowed him to pass.
"Well, they've come, boys," he announced, "Dave Grimes and twenty Mexicans, and nigh onto ten thousand sheep. They got in behind us—come across the Reservation—and now they're headed for the Basin!"
"Let 'em come!" challenged Isham, dropping down off his horse, "that suits me to a hickey—let 'em come! But the first damned Mexican that puts a sheep across Turkey Crick is going to git killed, that's all! That's my dead-line—Turkey Crick—and the minute they step across it the fireworks is going to begin!"
"We thought we'd better wait," explained Elmo hastily, "until you and Red got home——"
"That's right, kid," praised Isham, "you've got the right idee—leave it to me, and they won't nobody git hurt. But if you go riding in on 'em when they're down on their knees and shooting——"
Elmo glanced at Miz Zoolah and spit a thin jet of tobacco-juice, while the Texas gunmen smirked. But Zoolah was not the woman to let this pass unchallenged and she stepped out and confronted her husband.