"Cole Dalton, the sheriff. He is as anxious as I am to get his hands on Thornton. The whole country has been growing hotter in its criticisms of him every day for the last six months, blaming him for not rounding up the man who has committed one depredation on top of another, and gotten away with it."
"And you are sure," she hesitated a little in spite of herself, repeating, "you are sure … that Buck Thornton is that man?"
"Yes. I guessed it a long time ago. I know it now that he has robbed you. You will wait a few days, won't you?"
"Yes, I'll wait. But, oh," she cried out with sudden vehemence, swinging about when half way to the door, "I hate this sort of thing! Get it over with quick, Uncle Henry!"
She left him then and went upstairs to her own room where for a little she tried to concentrate her wandering thoughts upon a book. But in the end she flung the volume aside impatiently and went to her window, staring down into the neglected tangle of the front yard and the glimpse of the street through the straggling branches of the pear trees. She tried to see only that men like Kid Bedloe and Buck Thornton were not to be thought of as men, but rather as some rare species of clear-eyed, unscrupulous, conscienceless animals; that they were not human, that it would not be humane but foolish to regard them with any kind of sympathy; that the law should set its iron heel upon them as a man might set his heel upon a snake's flat, venomous head.
And she felt a hard contempt of self, she hated herself, when again and again there rose before her mind's eye the form and face of the man who surely was the worst of the lot, and yet who looked like a gentleman and who knew how to carry himself like a gentleman, who knew what courtesy to a woman was when he wanted to know, who had in a few hours made upon her an impression which she realized shamefacedly would stay with her always.
She had been in her room for an hour, driven by her loneliness had run downstairs to chat a few minutes with Mrs. Riddell in the kitchen and, unusually restless, had gone back upstairs. As she came again to her window, she saw two men leave their horses at the front gate and turn toward the house along the walk under the pear trees. Both were men whose very stature would have drawn one's thoughts away from even pleasant preoccupation, and Winifred Waverly's thoughts were sick of the channel in which they had been running.
One, the one who came on slightly in front of his companion, was very broad and heavy and thick. Thick of arm, of thigh, of neck. He was not short, standing close to six feet, and yet his bigness of girth made him seem of low, squat stature as she looked down upon him. She did not see his face under the wide, soft hat but guessed it to be heavy like the rest of him, square jawed and massive. She noted curiously that his tread was light, that his whole being spoke of energy and swift initiative, that the alertness of his carriage was an incongruity in a man so heavily built from the great, monster shoulders of him to the bulging calves.
The face of the other man she saw. His hat was far back upon his head and as he come on his dark features fascinated her. He was tall, as tall or nearly as tall as the Kid or Buck Thornton, she thought, slender, full of the grace of perfect physical manhood. There was a dash to him that, to the girl, was not without its charm. It spoke from the finely chiselled lips, curved to a still, contemptuous smile, from the eyes, long lashed, well set far apart, from the swinging careless stride. A handsome devil, as handsome in his own way as the Kid in his, as defiant an insolence in his smiling eyes, as cool an assurance and a vague added charm which was not so readily classified.
The two men came to the door. She heard Pollard greet them, calling them by name, and thus learned that one was Cole Dalton, the sheriff, one Broderick. Then there came up to her the hum of voices from her uncle's office, the heavy, rasping voice which she was certain belonged to the thicker-set man, the light, careless pleasant tones of the taller man. She found herself listening, not for the words which were lost in the indistinct hum, but to the qualities of tone, idly speculating as to which man was the sheriff, which Broderick. She wondered if now they were going to arrest Buck Thornton and if Broderick were a deputy? And again she hated herself with a quick spurt of contemptuous indignation that she allowed a feeling of sympathy for the tall cattleman to slip into her heart.