Macdonald caught the bridle and pushed her horse back to its haunches, and she, in her reckless anger, struck him across the hand in sharp quick blows. Her conduct was comparable to nothing but that of an ill-bred child striking one whose situation, he has been told, is the warrant of his inferiority.
The struggle was over in a few seconds, and Macdonald stood free of the little fury, a red welt across his cheek, the back of his hand cut until the blood oozed through the skin in heavy black drops. Chadron had not moved a hand to interfere on either side. Only now that the foolish display of Nola’s temper was done he rocked in his saddle and shook the empty landscape with his loud, coarse laugh.
He patted his daughter on the shoulder, like a hunter rewarding a dog. Macdonald walked away from them, the only humiliation that he felt for the incident being that which he suffered for her sake.
It was not so much that a woman had debased herself to the level of a savage, although that hurt him, too, but that her blows had been the expression of the contempt in which the lords of that country held him and his kind. Bullets did not matter so much, for a man could give them back as hot as they 101 came. But there was no answer, as he could see it in that depressing hour, for such a feudal assertion of superiority as this.
It was to the work of breaking the hold of this hard-handed aristocracy which had risen from the grass roots in the day of its arrogant prosperity—a prosperity founded on usurpation of the rights of the weak, and upheld by murder—that he had set his soul. The need of hastening the reformation never had seemed greater to him than on that day, or more hopeless, he admitted in his heart.
For hour by hour the work ahead of him appeared to grow greater. Little could be expected, judging by the experiences of the past few days, from those who suffered most. The day of extremest pressure in their poor affairs was being hastened by the cattlemen, as Chadron’s threat had foretold. Would they when the time came to fight do so, or harness their lean teams and drive on into the west? That was the big question upon which the success or the failure of his work depended.
As he had come down from the hillside out of the sunshine and peace to meet shadow and violence, so his high spirits, hopes, and intentions seemed this bitter hour steeped in sudden gloom. In more ways than one that evening on the white river road, Alan Macdonald felt that he was afoot and alone.