"I s'pose Dad mentioned that water in Devil's Hole?"
"Why, I don't recall it. We've talked so much and about so many things that perhaps it's slipped my mind."
"Maybe. He said he had."
She questioned him further but he said it might be well for her to mention it to Hepburn. "He's foreman, you know."
They swung into the one street of Ute Crossing and stopped before the bank. As Beck stepped down to tie the team a girl came out of a store across the way and vaulted into the saddle on a big brown horse with graceful ease. It was the nester's daughter.
Two men came from the saloon just as she reined her horse about. They eyed her insolently with that stare of a type of loafer which is eloquent of all that is despicable and one of them, a short, stodgy man, smiled brazenly.
The girl gave them one stare, hostility in her brown eyes, and then looked away, her lips moving in an unheard word, surely of contempt.
Then the man spoke. It is not well to repeat. His words were few, but they were ugly. The girl had touched her horse with a spur and he leaped forward. Just that one bound. As he made it the man spoke and with a wrench she set the brown back on his haunches and whirled him about. Her face was suddenly white, her lips in a tight, red line, and her eyes blazed.
She rode back to the men, who had continued on their way, holding her horse to a mincing trot, for he seemed to have caught the tensity of her mood.
"Did I hear you right?" she said to the man who had spoken.