She halted, her face flaming with fury. Hargus stopped beside her, his arm crooked to bring his hand up to his belt, sawing back and forth as if in indecision between drawing his gun and waiting for the wordy preliminaries to pass. Kerr stood embracing the pole in a pose of ridiculous supplication, the bright chain of the new handcuffs glistening in the sun.
"I want to talk to my father," said Grace, lashing Lambert with a look of scornful hate.
"Say it from there," Lambert returned, inflexible, cool; watching every movement of Sim Hargus' sawing arm.
"You've got no right to chain him up like a dog!" she said.
"You ain't got no authority, that anybody ever heard of, to arrest him in the first place," Hargus added, his swinging, indecisive arm for a moment still.
Lambert made no reply. He seemed to be looking over their heads, back along the road they had come, from the lift of his chin and the set of his close-gathered brows. He seemed carelessly indifferent to Hargus' legal opinion and presence, a little fresh plume of smoke going up from his cigarette as if he breathed into it gently.
Grace started forward with impatient exclamation, tossing her head in disdainful defiance of this fence-rider's authority.
"Go back!" Kerr commanded, his voice hoarse with the fear of something that she, in her unreasoning anger, had not seen behind the calm front of the man she faced.
She stopped, turning back again to where Hargus waited. Along the street men were drawing away from their doors, in cautious curiosity, silent suspense. Women put their heads out for a moment, plucked curtains aside for one swift survey, vanished behind the safety of walls. At the hitching-rack the two men—one of them Tom Hargus, the other unknown—stood beside their horses, as if in position according to a previous plan.
"We want that man," said Hargus, his hand hovering over his gun.