Pete shook his head and said nothing. But his eyes burned. Kamloops Charlie urged him to come with them, and talked fast in the Jargon.
"You come, Pete, no one at the house now, Pete. By-by she want you. She often talk of you with me, want to see you."
Charlie had worked for Cultus since Pete went away.
"I come by-by," said Pete. They left him standing in the road. When some of them turned to look at him before they came where they would see him no more, he was still standing there.
"Tell you Pete's dangerous," said Simpson. He was a long, thin melancholy man from Missouri, with a beard like grey moss on a decayed stump.
"He'll hev' a long account with the Quin brothers," replied Joe Batt.
"Many has," said Bill Baker. Cultus owed him money. Baker chewed tobacco and the cud. He muttered to himself, and the only audible word was "dangerous." Above his shoulder the hurt woman moaned.
And even when they had disappeared Pete stood staring after them. They had time to go more than a mile before he stirred. Then he walked a little distance from the road and cached his bundle behind a big bull-pine. He started the way his sister had come, and went quick. He had seen some of his sister's blood on the road.
In two hours he was at the ranche, and found it as the others had found it, when Kamloops Charlie had come to tell them that Cultus had killed Mary. The door was open, the table was overturned, there was broken crockery on the floor. There was a drying pool of blood by the open fire which burnt logs of pine. Scattered gouts of blood were all about the room: some were dried in ashes. The dreadful shovel stood in the corner by the fire. Pete took it up and looked at it. Many times he had heard old Cultus say he would give Mary the edge. Now he had given her the edge. Pete's blood boiled in him: he smashed the window with the shovel. Then he heard a bellow from the corral in which some of the best of Cultus' small herd were kept up, some of them to fatten for the railroad.
"I do that," said Pete. In the stable he found Mary's horse, a good old grey, but past quick work save in the hands of a brute, or a Mexican or an Indian. Pete put the saddle on him and cinched up the girths. He found a short stock whip which he had often used. He led the horse out, and going to the corrals, threw down the rails. Going inside he drove thirty cows and steers out. On the hills at the back of the ranche about fifty more were grazing. Pete got on the horse and cracked his whip. He drove them all together up the hills and into a narrow valley. It led towards a deep cañon. There was little water in the creek at the bottom, but there were many rocks. From one place it was a drop of more than two hundred feet to the rocks, and a straight drop too. The mountain path led to it and then turned almost at right angles. The valley in which the cattle ran grew narrow and narrower and Pete urged them on.