“I got it,” said Rance softly, glancing toward the stairs.
“Uh-huh.” Chuckwalla opened his mouth widely, blinked his eyes and backed toward the stove, where he turned and began shaking up the fire. Rance walked out to the front porch, and the old cook looked after him, a quizzical expression in his eyes.
“Rance,” he said to himself, “you’re addin’ lies to the rest of yore sins.”
Rance McCoy sat down on the steps of the old ranch-house which had been his home for eighteen years. There were a few stunted rosebushes in the yard. Near the corner of the house grew a gnarled cottonwood tree. The barbed-wire fence sagged badly in spots, and the weeds grew unmolested. To his left was the long, low stable, and beyond it was the series of pole-corrals. On the hill beyond the stable a bunch of cattle were stringing away from the ranch waterhole in the willows. Several miles away to the south he could see a streamer of black smoke from a train, heading toward Red Arrow, northwest of the ranch.
The Circle Spade had never been a big cattle outfit. Only two cowboys were employed by Rance McCoy. He had never been well liked in the Red Arrow country. Gun-men are usually respected, but rarely liked. They let old Rance alone when he came to town and got drunk, which he did at rare intervals; but never blind drunk.
He could hear Monty Adams and Steve Winchell, the two cowboys, noisily washing their faces at the old wash-bench near the kitchen door, and joking with Chuckwalla Ike. Came a step on the porch, and he turned to see Lila. She was a tall, slender girl, her shapely head piled high with a wealth of golden-blonde hair, and wearing a pale blue dress.
Her eyes were slightly red, as though she had been crying. She leaned against the left side of the doorway and looked at the man she had always believed to be her father.
“How didja sleep, Lila?” he asked.
She shook her head slowly.
“Not very well.”