“You can bring up cattle from below as fast as you need more stock. Marry and settle down, son, and go into the sheriff business up here. I’ll give you my recommendation that you’re the best pistol shot I ever saw, unless it’s myself, and I’m not any too damn sure of that last.
“I’d bring Agnes out here if I was in a little different line of work myself,” he added. “That’s my wife.”
No man ever heard him speak in other but terms of gentleness of the woman who had married him, knowing what he was.
“I have got to finish my work first before I can settle down,” said Dan McMasters, almost as sad and moody as his companion here—indeed, singularly like to him.
Suddenly he touched the arm of Wild Bill, spoke in a low voice.
“Look!” said he, “Don’t move! There’s our man! That’s Rudabaugh down there by the last car! So that’s the way he took to get here!”
“Yes,” smiled Hickok, only amusement on his face. “He’s got here too late to stop that herd from making Abilene.”
“Yes; but he got here at just the right time, for all that!”
McMasters’ face was cold. The mask of expressionlessness again was covering it. His eyes, narrow, the skin of the upper eyelids drawn triangularly down, never left the man for whom so long and patiently he had been waiting.