"You'll listen to the likes of me, Bill Crowdy!" she cried passionately, a small fist clinched. "You get those calves out into some fresh air just as quick as the Lord will let you! Into a pen by themselves. Doc Tripp will attend to them in the morning."
"Tripp's gone."
"He's on his way back, right now. And you're on your way off the ranch. Understand? You can come to the office for your pay to-night."
Crowdy shrugged his shoulders and turned away.
"If I'm fired," he growled in that ugly voice which was so fitting a companion to that ugly mouth of his, "I quit right now. Get some of your other Willies to turn your calves out."
For a moment, in the heat of her anger, Judith's quirt was lifted as though she would strike him. Then she turned instead and ran to do her own bidding. A moment later Miller was with her. The two of them got the calves—there were seven of them—out of the sulphur-laden air and into the corral. The poor brutes, coughing softly in paroxysms, some of them frothing at the mouth, two of them falling repeatedly and rising slowly upon trembling legs, filed by in a pitiful string. One of the youngest lay still in the hospital, dead.
"He would have killed them all," said Judith, her teeth set as she looked at the living calves in the corral where, with necks thrust far out, they fought for each breath. "And Bayne Trevors ordered a treatment that he knows has gone into the discard! Charlie, that man has gone further than I thought he had the nerve to go."
"Crowdy did something else that don't look just right," said Miller, gazing with eyes of longing after the burly, departing figure. "I saw him do it just after Masters carried him your message. He drove three of the sick calves—there's a dozen or more got the worms, you know—out into the pasture with the well calves."
Judith didn't answer. She looked at Miller a moment as though she thought this must be some wretched jest of his. And when she read in his eyes the earnestness in his heart, there rose within her the question: "How far has Bayne Trevors gone?"
"Charlie," she said finally, "I want you to close store for the rest of the day. Get some one to help you and cut the sick calves out from the bunch. Haze them back here into the detention corral. Tripp will attend to them all in the morning. Now, tell me—what's wrong down at the milk corrals? What are all of those men up to?"