"I bet the little paint-horse could make a man swing and rattle to set up in his middle, once he started to act up," he said.
"Calico wouldn't know how to start," Harris said. "A horse, inside his limitations, is what his breaker makes him. I never favored the idea of breaking a horse to fight you every time you climb him. My horses are gentle-broke."
"But you have to be able to top off just any kind of a horse," Bangs objected.
"That don't hinder a man from gentling his own string," Harris returned.
Bangs turned his surprised eyes on Harris and regarded him intently as if striving to fathom a viewpoint that was entirely new to him.
"Why, it don't, for a fact," he said at last. "Only I just never happened to think of it like that before."
Morrow laughed and the boy flushed at the disagreeable ring of it. The sound was not loud but flat and mirthless, the syllables distinct and evenly spaced. His white even teeth remained tight-closed and showed in flashing contrast to his swarthy face and black mustache. Morrow's face wore none of the active malignancy that stamps the features of those uncontrolled desperadoes who kill in a flare of passion; rather it seemed that the urge to kill was always with him, had been born with him, his face drawn and over-lengthened from the inner effort to render his homicidal tendencies submissive to his brain, not through desire for regeneration, for he had none, but as a mere matter of expediency. The set, bleak expression of countenance was but a reflection of his personality and his companions had sensed this strained quality without being able to define it in words.
"You listen to what the squatter man tells you," Morrow said to Bangs. "He'll put you right—give you a course in how everything ought to be done." He rose and went outside.
"That was a real unhumorous laugh," Evans said. "Right from the bottom of his heart."
A raucous bellow sounded from the cookhouse and every man within earshot rose and moved toward the summons to feed.