Molly nodded.
“You’re good to me, Lightning,” she said warmly. “I guess I’ll be all wrong, and you’ll be right, as you mostly are. Still, I don’t see you need be worried about that boy Andy McFardell, though. I sort of feel good about him. I’d say any boy who takes up land is a swell tryer. Can you wonder he gets into Hartspool to buck a game? Why, think. He’s right on his lonesome there. Not a soul to pass a hand to him. He’s mighty little money, and he’s got to fix it all up himself. I’d go crazy that way—if there wasn’t some sort of game around to buck. Then to get fired from the Police. My, that’s awful. I haven’t heard why, and he never talks, but I often see a deal of worry in his swell eyes. We shouldn’t think hardly of him.”
“No. You’ve a hunch fer that boy.”
Lightning’s smile had passed. Molly looked squarely into the eyes behind the smoke of his pipe. Hers were unsmiling, too.
“When disaster hits a man, and he’s the courage to start up in decency, it gets a hunch from me all the time,” she said coldly. “Life’s tough in these foothills, Lightning. I’ve been bred to it. The man who can jump into it, and face it right, seems to me my best notion of a—man.”
“Sure. If he’s on the straight.”
Molly drew a deep breath. A quick sparkle lit her eyes. “Andy McFardell’s on the straight,” she said quietly, as she rose to clear the supper-table.
Lightning passed out of the house to the blankets awaiting him at his bunk-house.
As he passed along to his quarters audible expressions of disgust and anger broke from him. The cows were forgotten. Dan Quinlan was forgotten. All his bitterness was turned against the man the mention of whose name had stirred Molly to a rebuke that had hurt him in a fashion of which she was wholly unaware.