"Horse or cow?"
"Probably both; and we'll be sort of neighbors, won't we?"
She shrugged her thin young shoulders. "Geographically speaking, yes; but otherwise we're not very neighborly down in Fire Weed, particularly with a man who's going to graze 'probably both.'"
Bernice was turning to leave the office, admitting defeat, but with no quiver of lip.
"Just a moment, Miss Gallegher," he begged, something inside him commanding that he not let her depart in entire despair. After all, he'd only require that section a few months if luck was with him. Evidently she had been sent on the long ride to town to corral the range on some sudden tip that it still was open to purchase. No telling what sort of a father awaited her at the home ranch—perhaps a cross-patch, maybe a tyrant. She needn't go back without some hope, so far as he was concerned. He could promise her something without jeopardizing his mission. For the first time in his bashful life he really wanted to promise a woman something.
For a moment he thought she did not intend to turn back. Although she paused at his suggestion, she kept her eyes fixed upon the stairway. The sigh with which she at last returned to him might have been from despair, from resignation—what not.
"I just wanted to say," Childress snapped into it before the impulse evaded him, "that I may not like ranching in the Fire Weed. If I find that I don't, or if, for any other reason, I decide to give up my little ranch—the first I've ever owned, by the way—I promise to give you ample advance notice, so that you can, if you like, step into my shoes."
Strangely enough, there was almost venom in the look with which she now studied him. Suddenly a small gasp of intensity quivered through her slender, strong body. Gone was her dreaminess, her resignation or despair.
"I'll promise you, stranger, that you won't like ranching in Fire Weed," she snapped, "but I'll be damned if I'll step into any man's shoes." And with that she was gone.
Childress realized that he had spoken his well-meant offer sadly, yet that scarcely accounted the ill-will of her response. She seemed as sure that he would not enjoy life in the wonderful hills of her home country as if she knew a dozen reasons why. A sudden suspicion caught him. Was it possible that "Pop" Gallegher, her father, was implicated in the stock stealing which had continued so successfully for more than a year? Was that why he wanted the gap between his own range and the Rafter A—wanted it so badly that he sent his daughter loping to claim it the moment he found it was open to purchase? Never had he seen the parent, but he had heard of him as "hard." No more could he answer the questions he had put to himself. But they would be answered, these questions, even though he dreaded further contact with the sharp-tongued range nymph who had promised him in turn. Or did he dread this prospect? Thank Heaven she did not connect him with that uniformed knight at the border. Declining to answer even his innermost self, he accepted from the land clerk his documents of title and took himself off to locate, as soon as possible, the "Mountie" constable, assigned to act as his aide in the rôle of ranch hand and instructed to meet him here in Strathconna.