“I suppose he’ll fire me when he sees me.”
“No, I don’t reckon he will. Tim takes it as a kind of a joke, and he’s as proud as all git-out of the way Reid stacked up. If that boy hadn’t happened up when he did, Swan he’d ’a’ soaked you another one with that gun of yourn and put you out for good. They say that kid waltzed Swan around there and made him step like he was standin’ on a red-hot stove.”
“Did anybody see him doing it?”
“No, I don’t reckon anybody did. But he must ’a’ done it, all right, Swan didn’t git a head of sheep that didn’t belong to him.”
“It’s funny how Reid arrived on the second,” Mackenzie said, reflecting over it as a thing he had pondered before.
“Well, it’s natural you’d feel a little jealous of him, John––most any feller would. But I don’t think he had any hand in it with Swan to run him in on you, if that’s what you’re drivin’ at.”
“It never crossed my mind,” said Mackenzie, but not with his usual regard for the truth.
“I don’t like him, and I never did like him, but you’ve got to hand it to him for grit and nerve.”
“Has he got over the lonesomeness?”