Yuma nodded slowly. "That's what I figgered. I'll be there, though, if ever yuh need me."
Penny could never know how Yuma had steeled himself to make the extravagant suggestion. The cowboy knew there wasn't a one-in-a-thousand chance that Penny would agree, and when he saw the scornful look, he had no more to say, no argument to put forth. He had made his request and it had been turned down. His simple and straightforward way of thinking hadn't grasped the thing in the same way that Penny did. He knew the girl was in a dangerous place and wanted to take her from it, make her safe. She refused to go. That was all there was to it.
The door closed, and Penny was about to voice her indignation, but Gimlet spoke first.
The old man said, more soberly than he'd spoken before, "Miss Penny, yuh should o' gone."
"Why, the nerve of that crazy cowboy! I don't even know his name. He's been here only a short time; he's fought twice with Uncle Bryant, and told me what he thought of the only man in the world I ever cared for, my uncle. And now he expects me to leave home and go off to Red Oak teaching school! Leave here tonight! With him! It's the most ridiculous outlandish nonsense I—"
Penny stopped for breath.
Gimlet said again, "Yuh should o' gone."
"I should, huh!" retorted Penny. "I'd have to be gagged and hog-tied to go with that crazy wrangler, and even then I'd fight every inch of the way." She turned abruptly and pushed through the door into the living quarters of the house.
Gimlet blinked when the door slammed, almost in his face. He fingered his mustache reflectively and h'mmm'd through his knobby nose. "Gagged an' hawg-tied, eh," he muttered. "Keeee-ripes, but mebbe that's a good idee." He hurried across the kitchen in a busybody sort of stride and followed Yuma into the darkness.
Penny hoped to get upstairs and to her bedroom without having to talk any further. Her mental state was in the lowest depth of despondency she'd ever known. It seemed that the more she learned the more futile it became to look ahead to happiness in Bryant's Basin. Her nerves felt drawn to a tension that threatened to snap them like catgut drawn too tightly on a violin. It seemed as if nothing that could happen now made a great deal of difference. She turned a corner of the hall and stopped. At the foot of the stairs stood Vince Cavendish.