property, to be looted at will by her rapacious relatives.
She started to walk away, her head held high in the air, and as Adrian thought with the bearing of an angry empress. Her high and lofty manner must have struck some of the cowboys as ludicrous. She had rubbed it into them on numerous occasions, and naturally they glorified in her apparent downfall. One of them gave a low mocking laugh. Instantly the woman whirled around, and her eyes seemed to fairly blaze as she surveyed the group.
“Who laughed then?” she demanded; but no one answered, though several shrank back appalled; and Donald saw the man in hiding behind the bunk house, Mr. Thomas, draw his head in much after the manner of a tortoise when danger approaches.
“Cowards, all of you!” she went on to say, in a harsh tone; “you can insult a woman behind her back, but not one of you is man enough to acknowledge a little thing like that. Never mind, it won’t be long before I’ll be in a position to hold the whip hand, and then we’ll see who stays and who goes. As for you, Fred Comstock, just wait, that’s all!”
This time when she walked toward the ranch house not a sound broke out. Uncle Fred turned a troubled face toward his nephew.
“I wouldn’t dare be left alone with her again after this for a king’s ransom, and that’s the truth, Adrian,” he said, slowly. “Perhaps, since I’m
discharged from my position here, I ought to clear out right away before night. It looks cowardly, but there’s no other safety for me, I candidly admit.”
“No, don’t hurry about going, Uncle,” remonstrated Adrian, taking him aside so he could speak without others hearing, for he knew that some of the punchers had not been looking on him with friendly eyes; and these must be the men who were hand in glove with Hatch Walker and his sister, the wife of Uncle Fred.
“But my usefulness here has all departed, and why should I linger?” urged the despondent ex-manager.
“You don’t know what may happen yet, and if we have trouble with those Walkers you may get a chance to retrieve some of the blunders of the past year,” the boy went on to say, laying a hand affectionately on his uncle’s sleeve, for the other was shaking his head sadly in the negative as though he could not see a gleam of light in the overcast sky. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you that we met up with Frank Bowker, the puncher you sent to town on an errand; and I entrusted him with a note to the new sheriff, demanding that he gather a reliable posse at once and ride out to the Bar-S Ranch, because a fight was on with the rustler gang of Walkers, and we meant to settle this thing once and for all. That blot has been on this county far