Taisie Lockhart, alone in her encampment except for her serving women, threw herself face down on her blankets. A black and ominous world surrounded her. She knew that yonder man, riding away into the twilight, never would come back to her.
“Get your night horses staked, men,” ordered Nabours gruffly, after the return to the encampment.
Against a wagon wheel old Sanchez dreamily thrummed a guitar. Sitting on his bed roll, a little apart in the dusk, Cinquo Centavos, for the time off remuda watch, engaged in song. His face was turned toward a certain star, above a certain remote camp fire, a quarter of a mile away. He thought his voice might carry so far. He was fourteen, and very, very much in love. His voice quavered and roared and broke.
“Neeter, Wah-hah-ha-neeter, ast thy s-o-oul ef we-e-e mus’ pa-a-art!”
“Damn you, kid, shut up!” called the voice of the foreman. “We got troubles enough.”
CHAPTER XII
THE COW HUNTERS
AT midnight the tired herd, after the strange fashion of cattle, rose almost as with one impulse and began slightly to straggle before lying down on the other side. The four men then on the watch, slowly riding two in each direction of the round of the massed cattle, did not redouble their monotonous crooning—time out of mind a range custom in handling cows—but kept their spaces, knowing the herd would soon again resume its rest. No unusual sight or sound alarmed them. As Len Hersey said to Del Williams, they handled sweet so far. The last watch saw the herd rise for the morning, not yet beginning to feed, standing, stretching. The cook began duties of the day, grumbling to himself.
By now, without a word, the wrinkled Anita was gathering bits of fuel, starting a tiny practicable blaze, and groans could be heard from black Milly, still in her cart, complaining of her misery. Frugal, but better than the fare of these others who now moved here and there between the tent and the massed brown blur of the herd, was the breakfast for the owner of Del Sol.
The sun still was young when Nabours, moody, morose, finished his snatched breakfast, got into saddle and resumed his lead. Len Hersey was moved up to the left point now. He and Del Williams dribbled the thin forward edge of the loosely grazing cattle into line. Without crowding, stopping, grazing, advancing, the cattle again began to trail.
No man mentioned the incidents of the night before.