“What kind of a lookin’ guy was he?” spoke up a dark young man known as Bob Farnum.
“A big man, señor, and looked a ruffian.”
“They’re always that way until you run ’em down,” grinned Ellis. “Never knew a hold-up wasn’t eight foot high and then some—to the fellow at the wrong end of the gun.”
“If you mean to say, Dave Ellis, that I lay down to a bluff——” Alan was beginning hotly when the old frontiersman interrupted.
“Keep your shirt on, McKinstra. I don’t mean to say it. Nobody but a darn fool makes a gun-play when the cards are stacked that-a-way. Yore bad play was in reaching for the gun at all.”
“Well, Jack Flatray will git him. I’ll bet a stack of blues on that,” contributed a fat ranchman wheezily. 96
“Unless you mussed up the trail coming back,” said Ellis to the stage-driver.
“We didn’t. I thought of that, and I had José drive clear round the place. Jack will find it all right unless there’s too much travel before he gets here,” said Alan.
Farnum laughed malevolently. “Mebbe he’ll get him and mebbe he won’t. Jack’s human, like the rest of us, if he is the best sheriff in Arizona. Here’s hoping he don’t get him. Any man that waltzes out of the cactus and appropriates twenty thousand dollars belonging to Mr. Morse is welcome to it for all of me. I don’t care if he is one of MacQueen’s bad men. I wish it had been forty thousand.”
Farnum did not need to explain the reasons for his sentiments. Everybody present knew that he was the leader of that bunch of cattlemen who had bunched themselves together to resist the encroachments of sheep upon the range. Among these the feeling against Morse was explosively dangerous. It had found expression in more than one raid upon his sheep. Many of them had been destroyed by one means or another, but Morse, with the obstinacy characteristic of him, had replaced them with others and continually increased his herds. There had been threats against his life, and one of his herders had been wounded. But the mine-owner went his way with quiet fearlessness and paid no attention to the animosity he had stirred up. The general feeling was that the trouble must soon come to a head. 97 Nobody expected the rough and ready vaqueros, reckless and impulsive as they were, to submit to the loss of the range, which meant too the wiping out of their means of livelihood, without a bitter struggle that would be both lawless and bloody.