“Why do you carry it?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “it’s not a pretty gun—and it’s heavy.” She caught the inference. The gun was not an ornament. His keen, steady, dark gaze caused her vague alarm. What had once seemed cool and audacious about this cowboy was now cold and powerful and mystical. Both her instinct and her intelligence realized the steel fiber of the man’s nature. As she was his employer, she had the right to demand that he should not do what was so chillingly manifest that he might do. But Madeline could not demand. She felt curiously young and weak, and the five months of Western life were as if they had never been. She now had to do with a question involving human life. And the value she placed upon human life and its spiritual significance was a matter far from her cowboy’s thoughts. A strange idea flashed up. Did she place too much value upon all human life? She checked that, wondering, almost horrified at herself. And then her intuition told her that she possessed a far stronger power to move these primitive men than any woman’s stern rule or order.
“Stewart, I do not fully understand what you hint that Nels and his comrades might do. Please be frank with me. Do you mean Nels would shoot upon little provocation?”
“Miss Hammond, as far as Nels is concerned, shooting is now just a matter of his meeting Don Carlos’s vaqueros. It’s wonderful what Nels has stood from them, considering the Mexicans he’s already killed.”
“Already killed! Stewart, you are not in earnest?” cried Madeline, shocked.
“I am. Nels has seen hard life along the Arizona border. He likes peace as well as any man. But a few years of that doesn’t change what the early days made of him. As for Nick Steele and Monty, they’re just bad men, and looking for trouble.”
“How about yourself, Stewart? Stillwell’s remark was not lost upon me,” said Madeline, prompted by curiosity.
Stewart did not reply. He looked at her in respectful silence. In her keen earnestness Madeline saw beneath his cool exterior and was all the more baffled. Was there a slight, inscrutable, mocking light in his eyes, or was it only her imagination? However, the cowboy’s face was as hard as flint.
“Stewart, I have come to love my ranch,” said Madeline, slowly, “and I care a great deal for my—my cowboys. It would be dreadful if they were to kill anybody, or especially if one of them should be killed.”
“Miss Hammond, you’ve changed things considerable out here, but you can’t change these men. All that’s needed to start them is a little trouble. And this Mexican revolution is bound to make rough times along some of the wilder passes across the border. We’re in line, that’s all. And the boys are getting stirred up.”