McFardell turned and led the way across to his hut.
“Then we don’t need to waste time,” he said coldly.
Now they had settled down for their talk, with the drift of smoke from the fire doing its best to counter the onslaught of newly-hatched mosquitoes, and dispel the hordes of sticky cattle flies.
Lightning was talking expansively. He was talking with all the graphic elaboration he was capable of. He was striving to create an atmosphere of friendliness between them, which neither had the least genuine desire for. McFardell saw through the other’s manner instantly, and wondered. But he listened the more intently in consequence.
“You see, boy,” the old man grated, in his harsh way, “them cows is no more strayed than you an’ me. I’m dead wise to the things goin’ on around these hills, an’ you bein’ a police boy that was, I guessed I need to hand you the stuff I got in my head. Molly, gal, jest don’t know a thing. An’, anyway, she’d hate to think ther’ was cattle thieves around. But there is. By gee! Ther’ surely is. An’ they’re at work right here around us.”
McFardell removed his pipe from his heavy mouth.
“I see,” he observed. And his manner had swiftly fallen back to that acquired in his police days. “What’s lying behind this, Lightning?” he demanded sharply.
“Guess you haven’t ridden ten miles just to hand me—with my two cows—warning. Well?”
The suddenness of his challenge suited Lightning’s more direct methods, and, as a result, the questioner improved several places in his estimation.
“It’s easy,” he said at once, chewing vigorously. “Dan Quinlan, up there above us in the hills, has run a hundred an’ fifty yearlings last year into Hartspool an’ Calford. Well, you can’t grow a hundred an’ fifty yearlings out of ten mean cows that must have quit milking when you couldn’t raise a crop of chin-whisker. Not in the same year, anyway. Say, he runs a registered brand, too. ‘Lazy K.’”