"Oh!" cried the girl softly in fascinated horror.
"Such things had to be in those days. Any man that was a man had sometimes to fight or else go to the wall."
"I can see that. I wasn't blaming your father. Only ... it must have been horrible to have to do."
"The fellow thieves of the man swore vengeance. One night they caught the chief—that's what I used to call my father—caught him alone in a gambling hell in the cow town where the stockmen came to buy provisions. My father had gone there by appointment to meet a man—lured to his death by a forged note. He knew he had probably come to the end of the passage as soon as he had stepped into the place. His one chance was to turn and run. He wouldn't do that."
"I love him for it," the girl cried impetuously.
"The story goes that he looked them over contemptuously, the whole half dozen of them, and laughed in a slow irritating way that must have got under their hides."
Moya, looking at the son, could believe easily this story of the father. "Go on," she nodded tensely.
"The quarrel came, as of course it would. Just before the guns flashed a stranger rose from a corner and told the rustlers they would have to count him in the scrap, that he wouldn't stand for a six to one row."
"Wasn't that fine? I suppose he was a friend of your father he had helped some time."
"No. He had never seen him before. But he happened to be a man."