“So, of course, you’ll tell Don there’s nothin’ to what you said, that you was a li’l’ het up under the collar.”
“—but I ain’t duckin’ it either. I’m willing to eat what I said, but he can’t dictate about the kid. See?”
The cattleman’s light eyes stabbed bleakly at the man. “You ain’t playin’ a lone hand, Cig. Don’s right about it. We’re all in this. An’ another thing. Don’t you forget for a minute that you’ll do as I say, you an’ Don both.”
Black looked at his employer with a kind of fierce resentment. He had followed this man a good many years, not to his own good. There had been times when he had been close to a break with him, but Prowers held for him a sinister attraction. He never had liked him, yet could not escape his influence.
“What about the kid? I’m standin’ pat on that, Jake,” he said sullenly.
The old cattleman reflected. By nature he had in him a vein secretive and malignant. The thought of striking at Clint Reed through his little girl was not repellent to him. But he had lived fifty years in the West and knew its standards. The thing that Cig had done, unless it were promptly repudiated by him, would make Paradise Valley and the adjoining mountains buzz like a hornets’ nest. His allies would fall away from him instantly.
“You’ll take the kid back home to Clint, Don,” Prowers said. “You’ll tell him we sent her back soon as we found she had been taken. An’ that’s all you’ll tell him. No mention of Cig here. Understand?”
Black’s jaws began to move again regularly and evenly. “Suits me,” he agreed. “When do I go?”
“Why, the sooner the quicker.”
The instinct of a child as to grown-ups is not always sound, but Ruth knew which of these three was her friend. She had run to Black and caught him by the coat, screening herself behind him. His hand rested on the soft flaxen hair gently. Don was a bad hombre, a hard, tough citizen. But something tugged at his heart now. He knew that if it had been necessary bullets would have stabbed the air to save the little girl who had put herself under his protection.