“I’m sorry,” said Price Selwood earnestly, “but you know you run against my fist yourself. I’d never mess up with a friend if I didn’t have to. You’d ought to know me well enough to know that.”
“I guess I do—but that damned sneering threat of yours, Price—it just set me to seeing red. You don’t seem to know a woman from a man, somehow.”
There was a petulant complaint in his voice.
“Not when the woman’s Kate Cathrew,” said the sheriff grimly, “I don’t.”
“You’re a good sheriff, Price, and a good man, but you’re stupid as hell sometimes. To hold Miss Cathrew under your two-bit magnifying glass of suspicion as you do is drivelling twiddle—silly child’s play. True, she lives an out-of-the-ordinary life——”
“I’ll say she does,” interrupted Selwood, “by what power does she hold together the worst set of off-scourings this country ever saw? Why do they obey her lightest word, step lively when she speaks in that high-and-mighty tone of hers? Tell me that. It ain’t natural—not by a long shot. And here’s another thing—a good two-thirds of them ain’t cattlemen. Never were. I know that every new one, as he has come in from time to time during these past three or four years, has had to be taught the cattle business. Caldwell, her foreman, is a cowhand—he came from Texas—and so is that long black devil they call Sud Provine, and one or two others, but the rest are city products, or I’m a liar—and why does she want that kind? And she keeps a heavy force for the amount of cattle she runs.”
McKane spread his hands in eloquent resignation. “You two-bit officers!” he said. “You make me sick.”
“Make you sick because you’re already sick for Kate Cathrew—who wouldn’t wipe her boots on you, and you know it.”
“Sure, I know it. But that don’t prevent me taking up for a woman, anywhere, any time.”
Uncertain of morals and dealings as the trader was, there was a simple dignity in his words which demanded respect, and they struck Selwood so.