'I'll ride heeled for a few days, anyhow,' he decided. 'I guess I can shoot with Jim Courtot yet.'
'Did you ever find out for sure that it was Jim the other time?'
'Sure enough to suit me,' returned Howard. 'He was in town that night. And it was his style of work to take a pot shot at a man out of the dark.'
'He's not exactly a coward,' warned Carr.
'No, not a coward. But that's his kind of work, just the same. He would go after a man just as he plays poker--simply to win the surest, quickest, easiest way. Saw Sanchia Murray in town the same day he was there. Are they working together again?'
'I haven't seen either one of them. But I guess so. Barbee, poor kid, is trailing after her all the time, and he comes back hating Courtot worse and worse every day. Seen the Longstreets lately?'
Howard admitted that he had. It was only a little way over, he reminded Carr, an hour and a half ride or such a matter, and the old boy was such a helplessly innocent old stranger, that it didn't seem quite right to turn them adrift altogether.
'The girl is a pretty thing.' said Carr.
'Yes,' agreed Howard. 'Kind of pretty.'
Carr looked at him steadily. And for absolutely no slightest, vaguest reason in the wide world that he could think of, Alan Howard felt his face going red. Carr's look probed deeper. Then, with common consent, they turned to other subjects until bedtime. Nothing of business matters passed between them, although both remembered that a considerable payment was to fall due within ten days.
In particular Howard had cause to remember. He had recently balanced his books and had found that he had cut into his last five thousand dollars. Therefore, meaning to pay on the nail, he had arranged a sale of beef cattle. The range was heavily stocked, he had a herd in prime condition, the market was fair, and his system called for a sale soon and the purchase of some calves. Therefore the next morning, before Carr was astir, Howard and several of his men were riding toward the more remote fields where his beef herds were. Behind them came the camp wagon and the cook.
All day long he worked among his herds, gathering them, sorting them, cutting out and heading back towards the home corrals those under weight or in any way not in the pink of condition for the sale. His men rode away into the distances, going east and south, disappearing over the ridges seeking cattle that had strayed far. Howard changed the horse under him four times that day, and the beast he freed long after the stars were out was jaded and wet. In the end he threw himself down upon the hot earth in the shade of the wagon and turned his eyes toward the uplands of the Last Ridge. He had had no moment of his own to-day, no opportunity to ride for a call on his new friends, and now, after he rested a little and ate, he would go back to work with his men, night-herding. For the rounded-up cattle were now a great milling herd that grew greater as the night went on and other lesser bands were brought in, a stamping, churning mass whose deep-lunged bellowing surged out continuously across the valley stretches and through the passes of the hills.