Madeline’s faculties nerved to keen, thrilling divination. She grasped the relation between Monty’s terrible cry and the strange hunched posture he had assumed. Stillwell’s haste and silence, too, were pregnant of catastrophe.
“Nels, git in this!” yelled Monty; and all the time he never shifted his intent gaze as much as a hair’s-breadth from Hawe and his deputy. “Nels, chase away them two fellers hangin’ back there. Chase ’em, quick!”
These men, the two deputies who had remained in the background with the pack-horses, did not wait for Nels. They spurred their mounts, wheeled, and galloped away.
“Now, Nels, cut the gurl loose,” ordered Monty.
Nels ran forward, jerked the halter out of Sneed’s hand, and pulled Bonita’s horse in close to the porch. As he slit the rope which bound her she fell into his arms.
“Hawe, git down!” went on Monty. “Face front an’ stiff!”
The sheriff swung his leg, and, never moving his hands, with his face now a deathly, sickening white, he slid to the ground.
“Line up there beside your guerrilla pard. There! You two make a damn fine pictoor, a damn fine team of pizened coyote an’ a cross between a wild mule an’ a Greaser. Now listen!”
Monty made a long pause, in which his breathing was plainly audible.
Madeline’s eyes were riveted upon Monty. Her mind, swift as lightning, had gathered the subtleties in action and word succeeding his domination of the men. Violence, terrible violence, the thing she had felt, the thing she had feared, the thing she had sought to eliminate from among her cowboys, was, after many months, about to be enacted before her eyes. It had come at last. She had softened Stillwell, she had influenced Nels, she had changed Stewart; but this little black-faced, terrible Monty Price now rose, as it were, out of his past wild years, and no power on earth or in heaven could stay his hand. It was the hard life of wild men in a wild country that was about to strike this blow at her. She did not shudder; she did not wish to blot out from sight this little man, terrible in his mood of wild justice. She suffered a flash of horror that Monty, blind and dead to her authority, cold as steel toward her presence, understood the deeps of a woman’s soul. For in this moment of strife, of insult to her, of torture to the man she had uplifted and then broken, the passion of her reached deep toward primitive hate. With eyes slowly hazing red, she watched Monty Price; she listened with thrumming ears; she waited, slowly sagging against Stillwell.