“Having just been before the august court, I ain’t homesick to return,” Pape said, easing, but not foregoing his shoulder hold. “So if you’ll just postpone that illustration until a more suitable time and place for me to illustrate back what I think of your dam’ impudence, I won’t get hauled in again and you hauled out of a reg’lar back-home bashing up.”
By way of agreement, Harford threw off his hold and moved across the seat. That he made no further effort to leave the car did not deceive Pape as to his courage or capacity. His coloring bespoke a temper of fierce impulses and physically he looked fit, a few pounds heavy, but strong-framed and plastered with muscles.
Pape dismissed the present opportunity by stepping back to the pavement. “Let's hope our trails will cross soon in a get-together place. I’m mighty interested in oil stock and I’ve got to get exercise somehow.”
“Where did the others go from here?” Harford enquired, with an abrupt resumption of his accustomed savoir-faire.
“Heard the judge say ‘Home, James’ to his chauffeur”—Pape, adaptably. “I wouldn’t have been here to answer your questions if he hadn’t plumb forgot to ask me to climb aboard.”
The forward movement of the sport car made safe Harford’s back-thrown jibe:
“He didn’t forget, Pape. He remembered not to ask you to ride. It’s been a generation since Judge Allen has appeared in police court. He’s through with you, as are the rest of us.”
“Oh, no, he ain’t,” the ranchman called after the car, with what outward cheer he could exact from his inner confidence. “He’s only begun with me—he and the rest of you.”
In retrospect the maliciousness of the rich real-estater’s snub gained upon him. So he was not and never could be of their sort—was a social ineligible!
He didn’t feel that way. In blood, brain and brawn he always had considered himself anybody’s equal. And what else mattered in the make-up of he-man? He owed it to the expanses from which he had come—limitless space, freedom of winds, resource to feed the world—to show Harfy, the Sturgises and even the Lauderdales just what, from what and toward what he was headed. He owed it to the graduate school of the Great West to prove the manliness of its alumni. He owed it to all the past Peter Stansburys and Papes who had done and dared to demonstrate that the last of the two lines had inherited some degree of their courage, good-faith and initiative. Before to-day he had been asked as to his family tree. He must show these Back Easters some symbol of the myriad horsepower of the roof of the continent, a share in which had strengthened him to defy difficulty and command success. Why should he? For certain he wouldn’t be Why-Not Pape if he let them twit him twice! He’d show them—by some sign, he’d show them that he, too, was born to an escutcheon rampant!