Mackenzie put his hand to his face where the flames had licked it, and to the back of his head where his scorched hair broke crisply under his palm. Joan looked at him, the aging stamp of waking and worry in her face, exclaiming pityingly when she saw his hurts.
“It served me right; I stumbled into their hands like a blind kitten!” he said, not sparing himself of scorn.
“It’s a cattleman’s trick; many an older hand than you has gone that way,” she said.
“But if I’d have waked and watched like you, Joan, they wouldn’t have got me. I started to watch, but I didn’t keep it up like you. When I should have been awake, I was sleeping like a sluggard.”
“The cowards!” said Joan.
“I let one of them sneak up behind me, after they’d clubbed two of the dogs to death, and grab me and get my gun! Great God! I deserve to be burned!”
“Hush!” she chided, fearfully. “Hush!”
“One of them was Hector Hall––he came after his guns. If I’d been a man, the shadow of a man, I’d made him swallow them the day I took––the time he left them here.”
“Matt was with him,” said Joan. “You couldn’t do anything; no man could do anything, against Matt Hall.”