“Set down, Miss Taisie,” said the gray old foreman, awkwardly, gently, flushing at asking the owner of Del Sol to be seated in her own cook house. She had arisen, and, hands at her eyes, was about to leave the place. Now she dropped back and looked at him dumbly, suddenly no more than a weak girl at her wits’ end.
“Now listen to me, Miss Taisie,” began old Jim Nabours with sudden firmness. “You know I’ve worked for yore folks all my life, ever since I come down from the Brazos forty years ago. I come back here when the war stopped—Kirby Smith’s men on the Lower Red was the last to surrender. This is my place, that’s all.
“Now, I got a right to talk plain to you. I’m a-going to. When you say you’re going to turn off a bunch of the best cow hands in Texas, just because you can’t pay their wages no more, why, then you ain’t showing reason ner judgment I’m foreman for the T. L. brand. What I say goes. When you say we’re turned loose you’re talking foolish. We ain’t! What’s wages to us? I’d like for you to tell me. Did we get any in the Army? Does anybody pay wages now, in all Texas? How can they?
“Miss Taisie, I went with yore paw to Austin, when he was a member, and in the big Assembly Room was a man at a desk with a hammer, and says he, ever oncet in a while, ‘Motion done overruled!’ Then he soaks the table with the hammer. And now, ma’am, yore motion about firing sixteen good cow hands is done overruled!”
Jim Nabours’ great fist fell with the force of a gavel on the breakfast table, till the tin plates rattled under their two-tined forks and the nicked cups brought added antiphony. Frowning, he looked savagely at the young woman. He was no better than her peon for life, for her father had given her to his care. She was the very apple of his eye.
“But what are we going to do, Jim?” Taisie’s tears now were less open and unashamed.
“What makes you ask that of me, ma’am? I ain’t got that fur along yet. I don’t know what we’re going to do. But I do know, for first, we ain’t going to quit. Fire us? Why, good God!”
The grizzled beard of Jim Nabours to some extent concealed the Adam’s apple, now again on its travels. There was not a man in the embarrassed group who did not wish himself in the chaparral precisely then, but every man of them nodded in assent. Of them all only old Sanchez, thin, brown and wrinkled, spoke at first—an old, old Mexican, born on Del Sol under its second transfer from the crown of Spain.
“Si, señorita,” said he. “Es verdad!”
“Shore it’s the truth!” broke out a freckled youth of seventeen, the soft beard just showing on his cheeks. But then, as he later confessed, he plumb bogged down. And the youngest of them all—Cinquo Centavas, they called him, since he had but five copper pennies when he rode in, twelve years of age; he was now fourteen—stood with his blue eyes wet with tears, unashamed in his rags.