During the next week the girl inwardly accused the men of heartlessness. They jested as carelessly as if nothing unusual had occurred and she heard no mention of Bangs. It seemed that it took but a day for them to forget a former comrade who had come to an untimely end. Rile Foster had disappeared but on the fifth day he turned up at the Three Bar wagon and resumed his work without the least explanation of his absence.
The old man was gloomy and silent, his face set in sorrowful lines as he went about his work, and it was evident that he was continually brooding over the fate of the youth he had loved. It seemed to the girl that the men were even more cheerful and thoughtless than usual, that they concerned their minds with every conceivable topic except that which was uppermost in her own. The death of Bangs had affected them not at all.
She could not shake off the remembrance of the boy's adoring gaze as his eyes had followed every move she made and in some vague way she felt that she was responsible for the accident. She often rode near Rile Foster, knowing what was in his mind. He spoke but little and, in common with the rest, he never once mentioned Bangs.
At the end of a week Slade rode up to the wagon as the men were working the cows gathered in the second circle of the day. He jerked his head to draw her aside out of range of Waddles's ears.
"How's the Three Bar showing up this spring?" he asked abruptly.
"Better than ever," she retorted and he caught a note of defiance in her voice.
"You're lying, Billie," he asserted calmly. "The Three Bar will show another shrinkage this year."
"How do you know?" she flashed; and the distrust of him that Harris had roused in her, lately submerged beneath the troubling thoughts of Bangs, was suddenly quickened and thrown uppermost in her mind. In gauging him from this new angle she sensed a ruthlessness in him that was not confined solely to business efficiency; he would crush her interests without a qualm if it would gain his end.
"I know," he asserted. "It's my business to know everything that goes on anywhere near my range. There's not another outfit within a hundred miles that's on the increase. They're just hanging on, some of them making a little, some of them not. You say you want to run the Three Bar brand yourself. There's not a man in this country that would touch a Three Bar cow if you was hooked up with me."
"And then the Three Bar would be only one out of a dozen or more Slade brands," she said. She pointed to the men that worked with the milling cows in the flat. "That's what I want," she said. "To run an outfit of my own—not one of yours."