“Even your father——” Jim began.
“Don’t!” Sudden tears came to the girl’s eyes.
“She allus bogs down—about her father,” explained Nabours.
“I’ll not bog down! I’ll get over this some day. Why, the reason I want to go north is to find the man that did it! He’s somewhere up there.”
McMasters, captain in the Rangers, looked at her with a sudden kindling of his own cool eyes; but he said nothing. The mistress of Del Sol stamped her foot in its cross-banded slipper.
“Always you treat me like a girl. I’m not!”
“Yes, you are, Miss Taisie,” rejoined Jim Nabours. “You’re a girl, and I’m your mother and your father both, till you get a new segundo.”
“Listen at him!” Taisie turned to the young stranger. “The whole state of Texas is dying on its feet, and the men of Texas scared to drive, with maybe five dollars a head waiting for them at the railroad! That’s riches!
“How long would it take?” she demanded of her informant.
“All season, practically,” replied McMasters. “I rode about forty miles a day, coming south, and I was eleven hundred miles away at one time. Cows could go ten miles a day, maybe, if you could keep the herd going; say two-three hundred miles a month. Say three-four months—that would cover a heap of trail.”