"I could run them." The line on Davey's mouth tightened. "And safer than Conal, I've been thinking. Some of the cows have father's brand on them. Most of the calves ought to have the D.C. by rights, I suppose. They've got the cut of our Ayrshires, though Conal's done the double M's pretty neatly on them.
"What's the old man's will be mine some day, and so they're in a sort of way my cattle too. I can say, I don't think Ayrmuir had any right—not much anyway—to them, if we couldn't get them. The old man wouldn't risk a couple of horses on the off-chance. Rosses and Morrisons lost three horses when they had a go for 'em, besides there isn't a man on our place could have yarded them. Conal got them. We were with him. You can hold his share for this batch when I bring it to you. But I'm going to drive, saying they are Donald Cameron's cattle. So they are, most of them. I'll be driving my own cattle as a matter of fact, though it may be realising on the estate, a forced loan from the old man, you may say. My name will carry me through and when the deal's over I can make it right with father. I'm going home."
"Can't think what Conal means, leavin' 'em so long," Steve muttered irritably.
"We can't have them on our hands any longer!"
Davey's voice was short and irritable too.
"You're right, Davey." The Schoolmaster spoke slowly, thoughtfully. "What you say makes the getting rid of them sound easy, but I hardly like the idea of—"
"Taking your share, after the way I've put it?" Davey interrupted. "But as far as I'm concerned they're Conal's beasts, and your's—and mine—because we got them. Nobody else could, and they weren't any good to anybody eating their heads off in the hills. But for all the world it's as if I had contracted with you to do it on behalf of the estate. Ayrmuir gets a third of the profits. I'll hand it over to the old man—and as likely as not he'll be glad enough to see it, for a couple of dozen breakaways and scrubbers he never expected to make a penny out of again."
The Schoolmaster's gesture of impatience was one of resignation also.
"It's a specious argument, Davey," he said, "but I wish to heaven you'd kept clear of the whole business."
That evening Davey called Deirdre and they wandered down the hillside, watching the sun set on the distant edge of the plains that stretched, northwards and inland, from the rise beyond Steve's.