“Big men like him think they can do anything,” Jowett replied, a little ironically, subtly trying to force a confession of her preference for Ingolby.
He succeeded. Her eye lighted with indignation. She herself might challenge him, but she would not allow another to do so.
“It is not the truth,” she rejoined sharply. “He does not measure himself against the world so. He is like—like a child,” she added.
“It seems to me all big men are like that,” Jowett rejoined; “and he’s the biggest man the West has seen. He knows about every man’s business as though it was his own. I can get a margin off most any man in the West on a horse-trade, but I’d look shy about doing a trade with him. You can’t dope a horse so he won’t know. He’s on to it, sees it-sees it like as if it was in glass. Sees anything and everything, and—” He stopped short. The Master Gorgio could no longer see, and his henchman flushed like a girl at his “break”; though, as a horse-dealer, he had in his time listened without shame to wilder, angrier reproaches than most men living.
She glanced at him, saw his confusion, forgave and understood him.
“It was not the horseshoe, it was not the Gipsy,” she returned. “They did not set it going. It would not have happened but for one man.”
“Yes, it’s Marchand, right enough,” answered Jowett, “but we’ll get him yet. We’ll get him with the branding-iron hot.”
“That will not put things right if—” she paused, then with a great effort she added: “Does the doctor think he will get it back and that—”
She stopped suddenly in an agitation he did not care to see and he turned away his head.
“Doctor doesn’t know,” he answered. “There’s got to be an expert. It’ll take time before he gets here, but—” he could not help but say it, seeing how great her distress was—“but it’s going to come back. I’ve seen cases—I saw one down on the Border”—how easily he lied!—“just like his. It was blasting that done it—the shock. But the sight come back all right, and quick too—like as I’ve seen a paralizite get up all at once and walk as though he’d never been locoed. Why, God Almighty don’t let men like Ingolby be done like that by reptiles same’s Marchand.”