“Now, see here, Miss Taisie,” he went on, breaking a bit of bark between his fingers, “when we started out we thought we had stripped the Del Sol range. We taken all ages. Only a act of God could of kept us from having a plumb thousand calfs riding in yore carts. But now looky here! We’re going to cut back all that stuff and throw in fours instead. The cut is going back to Del Sol. But who’s going to take care of Del Sol while we go north?”
“Well, who could?”
“You could. Yes, Miss Taisie, you! We can git along damn well without you, and Del Sol can’t get along alone. Don’t you think you’d be safer back home that way than what you will be going north up to the sixth princerpul meridjun with sixteen pirates and God knows what kind of weather?
“You’re only a girl, Miss Taisie—the damnedest finest girl ever borned in Texas; but girls is girls. I can handle cows, Miss Taisie. I can’t handle girls. You go on back home, please ma’am. We’ll pull in afore Thanksgiving with a wagonload of Yankee money.”
The girl straightened up.
“I’ll not go back! I closed the doors when I started up the trail. How could I live there alone?”
“I ain’t ast you to live there alone. What I say is, we’ll be inside of ten miles of Austin when we cross the Colorado. I want you and Del to ride in to Austin and get married. Then I want you both to take charge of this cut and ride on back to Del Sol.”
The old man turned his gray grim eye to her.
“Can’t you leave me be yore maw, Taisie, child?”
“No—no—no, Jim!” Both her hands were on his. “Don’t ask me! I’ve nothing to live for outside of what’s here on the ground. Everything I own I’ve got with me, and all my friends. No, Jim, I’m going through. No use to argue—no use to argue, Jim!”