This enthusiasm, however, he cloaked with a becoming nonchalance. He wasn’t in any hurry to tell all he knew. His few questions were to the point, and between them he maintained a decent reserve. Also he adapted himself quickly to new requirements. Sliver observed with satisfaction that, after one telling, his pupil abandoned the Eastern, high-trotting, park fashion in riding and settled down to a cowman’s lope. In fact, so quiet and biddable was he, Sliver began to feel secret qualms at the course he had marked out for himself; had to steel his resolution with thoughts of Lee.
“’Twon’t do to have no pretty boys pussy-footing around her,” he told himself. “He’s gotter show me, an’ if he don’t—out he goes.”
Opportunity soon presented itself in the shape of a momentary relapse, on Gordon’s part, into the old habit of riding. Sliver seized it with brutal roughness.
“Hey! that milk-shake business may go with missies in pants that ride the parks back East, but if you-all expect to work this range you’ll have to try an’ look like a man.”
Gordon stared. It wasn’t so much the words as the accent that established the insult. Just as Bull had seen in El Paso, his hazel eyes were suddenly transmuted into hard blue steel flecked with hot brown specks. Sliver felt sure he was going to strike; experienced sudden disappointment when he rode on.
“Santa Maria Marrissima Me!” He swore to himself in sudden alarm. “Is he a-going to swallow it?” But the next moment brought relief. Gordon was rising in his stirrups with the regularity of a machine.
With the quick instinct of sturdy manhood, Sliver sensed the motive, the wise hesitancy of a new-comer in starting trouble. “Calculated it would get him in wrong with Lady-girl. He’s putting it up to me!”
Even more loath, now, to push than he had been to begin the quarrel, there was nothing left but to go on. So, riding alongside Gordon, he began to deliver himself of a forcible opinion concerning his mode of riding. “Why, you blankety, blank, blank of a blank—”
The rest of it was cut off by a crack between the eyes that toppled him out of the saddle. He was up again, hard eyes flashing, as Gordon leaped down, and as he rushed, broad round body swaying above his short hairy chaps, Sliver looked for all the world like a charging bear.
A clever writer once described a terrific combat between two sailors in two words, “Poor McNab!” Sliver was almost as terse in describing his defeat to Bull and Jake that evening.