Frances felt a shudder run through the girl’s body as her arm clasped the pliant waist.
“Why, Frances! You can’t mean that! They’re terrible—just think what they’ve done—oh, the underhanded thieves! By the law of the range it’s my fight now, instead of my work to help them!”
“The law of the range isn’t the law any longer here, Nola, and it never will be again. Alan Macdonald has done the work that he put his lone hand to. You have no quarrel with anybody, child, no feud to carry on to a bloody end. Put it out of your mind. If you are sincere in your heart, and truly penitent, you can prove it best by beginning to do good in the place where your house has done a terrible, sad wrong.”
“They started it!” said Nola, vindictively, the lifelong hatred for those who encroached upon the range so deep in her breast, it seemed, that the soil of her life must come away on its roots.
“There’s no use talking to you about it, then,” said Frances, coldly.
Nola seemed hurt by her tone. She began to cry again, and plead her cause in moaning, broken words. “It’s our country, we were here first—father always said that!”
“I know.”
“But I don’t blame Mr. Macdonald, they deceived him, the rustlers deceived him and told him lies. He didn’t belong to this country, he couldn’t know at first, or understand. Frances”—she put her hand 310 on her friend’s shoulder, and lifted her head as if trying to pierce the dark and look into her eyes—“don’t you know how it was with him? He was too much of a man to turn his back on them, even when he found he was on the wrong side. A man like him must have understood it our way.”
“What he has done in this country calls for no excuse,” returned Frances, loftily.