"Wait!" he cried, leaping toward her, but with one spring the horse was out of reach and galloping away. Payne watched till she was out of sight, but she did not look back.
XVIII
Higgins and the first ox wagon of his train arrived soon afterward, and in the morning he led the six negro laborers he had brought in an attack with heavy machetes upon the elderberry jungle. The big knives, wielded by the powerful blacks, cut through the-soft wood at a single stroke. The brush was then piled and burned, and the land was ready for the tractor and breaking plow which were coming in pieces from Citrus Grove via ox team.
Payne watched the work for a while, then turned his attention to the fencing job out on the prairie. There was a mile of north-and-south fence to be built, and he set at once to work digging post holes well on the inside of his line.
He had worked two hours when he saw a horseman loping easily toward him from the west. The horseman was apparently a cow-puncher. He was tall, dark and hard-featured. He pulled up abruptly on the fence line and sat looking down, insolently refusing to acknowledge Payne's greeting. At last he said: "What you think you doing?"
"Well," replied Roger, "I'm sort of under the impression that I'm building a line fence."
"You can't fence here."
Roger paused in the act of driving his digger into the ground and looked carefully at his visitor, who, sitting his big buckskin with easy assurance, looked steadily back. For several seconds they appraised one another. Roger grew warm with the anger natural to a man who has been faced on his own land; the stranger was insolent with the bearing of a man who feels himself master in his own country and is face to face with a stranger. Still keeping his eyes on the man Roger drove the digger into the soil, twisted it round and pulled up a core of dirt. He continued doing this until the hole was dug, then pacing deliberately forward he came on a straight line to the stranger's horse. He touched the animal sharply with the digger.
"Up a step, boy."
"Who! Whoa —— you!" The rider checked his mount's startled leap by jerking back on the reins with a viciousness that threw the animal's open mouth straight up in the air.