"Shall we ride together or spread?" she demanded again.
Childress had decided. "If you'll take the west side of the butte," he suggested, "I'll ride the east side. The distance there is greater, but Silver undoubtedly is swifter than your cayuse."
"I'm not so sure; if there was time I'd find out," she began, then laughed. This was no time, she seemed to realize, to show that seldom-give-in spirit that was hers. "We'll settle about our horse-flesh some other time. Just now, it's get that Sioux buck, and if you plant him in a bog and skin him alive—well, almost, that would serve him right. I don't mind the loss of the steer, or the hide, but the torture of the poor dumb thing. There's no telling just what you may be, Mister Jack, but I'm sure you never tortured, did you?"
They were getting on. He felt it and wondered that he was not alarmed. But this was neither time nor place. One promise he managed to exact from her. If she rode to the timber belt, which was the States side of the line, and found no suspect, she was to turn back and make for home without waiting for him or looking for him. In his turn, Childress promised that if he "made" the guilty buck, he'd bring him direct to the Gallegher ranch-house. With this exchange they were off, equally grim in spirit if not in looks and quite equally determined to avenge the suffering of the bogged-down steer.
It was after six when Flame Gallegher rode into the home ranch, flopped from the saddle and handed her tired cayuse to the mercies of one of their punchers. She asked no questions, for that was not according to "Hoyle," but she was unusually silent through dinner, which all of the outfit at the home-ranch ate together in the cook shack. So pronounced and so unusual was this rôle for the "light of the ranch," that her father took notice.
"What's the matter, Firecracker?" the ranchman asked as they sat on the porch after the meal. "Still worrying because that white-horse rider beat you out on buying the basin from the railroad?"
The one parent left to Flame Gallegher—in fact, the only one she really remembered, her mother having died when she was scarcely more than a babe—had contributed little to her charm of appearance, although much, probably, to the steel of her nerve and character. He was aquiline in appearance and, like the eagle, fearless. Nearly bald, he insisted on cutting the fringe of hair which was left to him with one of those patent contraptions which he had bought from a Winnipeg department store. The result was not always an artistic success, but the use of the instrument appealed to Gallegher's sense of independence. He was tall, lean and dark—as dark as his daughter was light. A hard man to work for, was the report among the punchers of the province, but one who'd never ask a "hand" to do what he dared not do himself. "Firecracker" was his nickname for the daughter who had been the love of his life since her mother's death.
Flame Gallegher was worrying about the man who had nosed her out of the basin purchase, but not because she had lost that property. No matter what he had encountered on the other side of the butte, he should have been in long since to report. Her eyes, in the twilight, held straight to the eastward, the direction from which he should come. She even ceased to worry about the reception he would receive from the eagle-father and the outfit once he came. But she wondered why he did not come. The parent's questions, however, always demanded answer.
"I've forgotten that muff," she said with a drawl that was, perhaps, her most effective subterfuge. "I did my best on that run up to town and we Galleghers don't pout over busted flushes. You could have given me a bit more time—would have, if you'd known."
"Then what—the silence?"