“What’s happened?” demanded Bud, as Buck appeared. “Tex put me to work oiling harness, but I sneaked off as soon as he was out of sight. I heard Slim say yuh were fired.”
Flinging his belongings together as he talked, Stratton briefly retailed the essentials of the situation.
“I’m going to saddle up and start for town right away,” he concluded. “If I hang around here much longer I don’t know as I can keep my hands off that double-faced crook.”
He added some more man-sized adjectives, to which Bud listened with complete approval.
“Yuh ain’t said half enough,” he growled, from where he stood to the left of the closed door. “I wish yuh would stay an’ give him one almighty 173 good beating up. He thinks there ain’t a man on the range can stand up against him.”
Buck’s eyes narrowed. “I’d sure like to try,” he said regretfully. “I don’t say I could knock him out, but I’d guarantee to give him something to think about. Trouble is, there’s nothing gained by starting a mess like that except letting off steam, and there might be a whole lot—”
He broke off abruptly as the door swung open to admit Lynch and McCabe. The foreman, pausing just inside the room, eyed Stratton’s preparations for departure with curling lips. As a matter of fact, what he had overheard of the interview between Buck and Mary Thorne had given him the impression that Stratton was an easy mark, whose courage and ability had been greatly overestimated. A more sagacious person would have been content to let well enough alone. But Tex had a disposition which impelled him to rub things in.
“There’s yore dough,” he said sneeringly, flinging the little handful of money on the table with such force that several coins fell to the floor and rolled into remote corners. “Yuh better put it away safe, ’cause after this there ain’t nobody around these parts’ll hire yuh, I’ll tell a man!”
His tone was indescribably taunting, and of a sudden Buck saw red. Dominated by the single-minded 174 impulse of primeval man to use the weapons nature gave him, he forgot momentarily that he carried a gun. When the two men entered, he had been bending over, rolling his blankets. Since then, save to raise his head, he had scarcely altered his position, and yet, as he poised there motionless, fists clenched, muscles tense, eyes narrowed to mere slits, Lynch suddenly realized that he had blundered, and reached swiftly for his Colt.
But another hand was ahead of his. Standing just behind him, Bud Jessup had sized up the situation a fraction of a second before Tex, and like a flash he bent forward and snatched the foreman’s weapon from its holster.