"Howdy, Ellen. Shore you ain't goin' to say good mawnin' to this heah bad lot?" drawled Daggs, with good-natured sarca**.
"Why, shore! Good morning, y'u hard-working industrious MANANA sheep raisers," replied Ellen, coolly.
Daggs stared. The others appeared taken back by a greeting so foreign from any to which they were accustomed from her. Jackson Jorth let out a gruff haw-haw. Some of them doffed their sombreros, and Rock Wells managed a lazy, polite good morning. Ellen's father seemed most significantly struck by her greeting, and the least amused.
"Ellen, I'm not likin' your talk, " he said, with a frown.
"Dad, when y'u play cards don't y'u call a spade a spade?"
"Why, shore I do."
"Well, I'm calling spades spades."
"Ahuh!" grunted Jorth, furtively dropping his eyes. "Where you goin' with your gun? I'd rather you hung round heah now."
"Reckon I might as well get used to packing my gun all the time," replied Ellen. "Reckon I'll be treated more like a man."
Then the event Ellen had been expecting all morning took place.
Simm Bruce and Lorenzo rode around the slope of the Knoll and trotted toward the cabin. Interest in Ellen was relegated to the background.
"Shore they're bustin' with news," declared Daggs.
"They been ridin' some, you bet," remarked another.
"Huh!" exclaimed Jorth. "Bruce shore looks queer to me."
"Red liquor," said Tad Jorth, sententiously. "You-all know the brand Greaves hands out."
"Naw, Simm ain't drunk," said Jackson Jorth. "Look at his bloody shirt."
The cool, indolent interest of the crowd vanished at the red color pointed out by Jackson Jorth. Daggs rose in a single springy motion to his lofty height. The face Bruce turned to Jorth was swollen and bruised, with unhealed cuts. Where his right eye should have been showed a puffed dark purple bulge. His other eye, however, gleamed with hard and sullen light. He stretched a big shaking hand toward Jorth.
Thet Nez Perce Isbel beat me half to death," he bellowed.
Jorth stared hard at the tragic, almost grotesque figure, at the battered face. But speech failed him. It was Daggs who answered Bruce.
"Wal, Simm, I'll be damned if you don't look it."
"Beat you! What with?" burst out Jorth, explosively.
"I thought he was swingin' an ax, but Greaves swore it was his fists," bawled Bruce, in misery and fury.
"Where was your gun?" queried Jorth, sharply.
"Gun? Hell!" exclaimed Bruce, flinging wide his arms. "Ask Lorenzo.
He had a gun. An' he got a biff in the jaw before my turn come.
Ask him?"
Attention thus directed to the Mexican showed a heavy discolored swelling upon the side of his olive-skinned face. Lorenzo looked only serious.
"Hah! Speak up," shouted Jorth, impatiently.
"Senor Isbel heet me ver quick," replied Lorenzo, with expressive gesture. "I see thousand stars--then moocho black--all like night."
At that some of Daggs's men lolled back with dry crisp laughter.
Daggs's hard face rippled with a smile. But there was no humor in anything for Colonel Jorth.
"Tell us what come off. Quick!" he ordered. "Where did it happen?
Why? Who saw it? What did you do? "
Bruce lapsed into a sullen impressiveness. "Wal, I happened in Greaves's store an' run into Jean Isbel. Shore was lookin' fer him.
I had my mind made up what to do, but I got to shootin' off my gab instead of my gun. I called him Nez Perce--an' I throwed all thet talk in his face about old Gass Isbel sendin' fer him---an' I told him he'd git run out of the Tonto. Reckon I was jest warmin' up.
. . . But then it all happened. He slugged Lorenzo jest one. An'
Lorenzo slid peaceful-like to bed behind the counter. I hadn't time to think of throwin' a gun before he whaled into me. He knocked out two of my teeth. An' I swallered one of them."
Ellen stood in the background behind three of the men and in the shadow. She did not join in the laugh that followed Bruce's remarks.
She had known that he would lie. Uncertain yet of her reaction to this, but more bitter and furious as he revealed his utter baseness, she waited for more to be said.
"Wal, I'll be doggoned," drawled Daggs.
"What do you make of this kind of fightin'?" queried Jorth, "Darn if I know," replied Daggs in perplexity. "Shore an' sartin it's not the way of a Texan. Mebbe this young Isbel really is what old Gass swears he is. Shore Bruce ain't nothin' to give an edge to a real gun fighter. Looks to me like Isbel bluffed Greaves an' his gang an' licked your men without throwin' a gun."