“No, you all seemed brave enough then, when you had him eight to one.”
“I wasn’t there,” hastily put in McWilliams. “I don’t go gunning for my man without giving him a show.”
“I do,” retorted Morgan cruelly. “I’d go if we was fifty to one. We’d ’a’ got him, too, if it hadn’t been for Miss Messiter. ’Twas a chance we ain’t likely to get again for a year.”
“It wasn’t your fault you didn’t kill him, Mr. Morgan,” she said, looking hard at him. “You may be interested to know that your last shot missed him only about six inches, and me about four.”
“I didn’t know who you were,” he sullenly defended.
“I see. You only shoot at women when you don’t know who they are.” She turned her back on him pointedly and addressed herself to McWilliams. “You can tell the men working on this ranch that I won’t have any more such attacks on this man Bannister. I don’t care what or who he is. I don’t propose to have him murdered by my employés. Let the law take him and hang him. Do you hear?”
“I ce’tainly do, and the boys will get the word straight,” he replied.
“I take it since yuh are giving your orders through Mac, yuh don’t need me any longer for your foreman,” bullied Morgan.
“You take it right, sir,” came her crisp reply. “McWilliams will be my foreman from to-day.”
The man’s face, malignant and wolfish, suddenly lost its mask. That she would so promptly call his bluff was the last thing he had expected. “That’s all right. I reckon yuh think yuh know your own business, but I’ll put it to yuh straight. Long as yuh live you’ll be sorry for this.”