It was this knowledge which set the light burning in Cleve’s eyes.
He knew how Ellen loved Courtrey.
He knew also that Lola of the Golden Cloud had made the cattle king step lively for over a year. He saw the daily growing impatience with which Courtrey regarded his marriage.
He resented with every ounce of the repressed spirit there was in him the girl’s poor standing at the Stronghold.
Black Bart and Wylackie Bob treated her with no more consideration than any of the Indian serving women. They swore and drank before her with an abandon that made the young man’s nails cut deep in his palms at times, the blood mount high in his white cheeks.
And Ellen drooped like a lily on a broken stem, brooded over her husband’s absences, and hated 113 the name of Lola, used openly to her as a cruel joke.
The Stronghold was a huge place. The house was like the majority of the habitations of the region, built of adobe and able to stand siege against a regiment. It was shaded by cottonwoods and spruces, flanked by corrals and barns and sheds until the place resembled a small town.
Cleve Whitmore rode for Courtrey but his heart was not in Courtrey’s game. He was slim and sullen, dissatisfied, slow of speech, repressed.
He worked early and late and thought a lot.
Courtrey, who kept close count of the favours he did for others, considered Cleve deep in his debt and paid him a niggardly wage. So it was, that when the newly organized Vigilantes under Tharon Last came out in broad day and took back their own from Courtrey’s herds, there was one at the Stronghold who laughed quietly to himself in sympathy with the defy.