It circled Big Basford’s head from the back, the bitter end snapping across his face with indescribable force.
It curled him away from his victim, tumbling back on his heels with his murderous hands covering his cheeks.
For a moment he hung on the veranda’s edge, balanced, then slipped off, lurching on his lame foot. He held his hands over his face for a tense moment. Then he looked up through his fingers, where the blood was beginning to ooze, straight at the woman.
The red-rimmed eyes were savage with rage and hurt, but behind both was a flaming passion which seemed to swell and burgeon with a perverted admiration.
“I’ve told you before, Basford,” said Kate Cathrew, “that I will deal with my men myself. I don’t need your overly zealous aid. Get out of my sight—and stay out till you can heed what I say. Minnie, take this fool away—pump some wind into him. Give him some whiskey.”
She touched the boy contemptuously with the toe of her buckled slipper. He was weakly trying to get up and the Pomo girl unceremoniously finished the effort, lifting him almost bodily in her arms and supporting him through the door into the kitchen. The look she turned over her shoulder at Big Basford was venomous.
The owner of Sky Line walked down the veranda to her living-room door. At its lintel she stopped and stood, drawing the heavy quirt through her fingers, looking back at Big Basford. He had watched her progress and now the hard, bright, sparkling gaze of her dark eyes seemed to force him to movement, so that he picked up his hat, set it on his head and turned away toward the corrals at Rainbow’s foot, swinging with a rolling gait that further made one think of jungle folk.
But the lips in the flaring beard were twitching.
Kate Cathrew went in and hung the quirt on its smooth pegs, then sat down and took up her interrupted work just where she had left it.
“Three hundred head,” she said, “prime on hoof—at thirteen-fifty——” and her pen began to travel evenly across the page before her.