Selwood smiled at him.
“Thanks, John,” he said, “I’ll not forget that. But I hate to have my friends think I’m laying down on the job. I haven’t said anything about what I’ve been doing, preferring to wait until I had something to show, but that time seems far off still. This is the smoothest work I ever saw, baffling——. I don’t stand to simple reason. We know beef cattle don’t fly—and yet that seems the only way they could have got out of the country. They go—and they leave no trail. I know, for I’ve ridden the hills, Jake, notwithstanding, in dragnet fashion. Ask my wife how many nights I’ve slept at home since the last raid. Take a look at my horse out there. He’s hard as iron and lean as a rail. And there’s another at home that looks just like him. If I haven’t found anything it’s not because I haven’t traveled.”
Several men stirred and one spoke.
“I don’t think many of us blame you, Price,” he said, “but it does gall a feller to lose stock an’ have to stand helpless.”
“And how do you think it galls me to fail to catch the lifters?” asked Selwood quietly. “It’s my job—my—my honor.”
He picked up his cards again and turned to the table.
“But no matter what is said, or thought, about me,” he finished, “every day of my further hold on office will be given over to the same hunt—until I find what I’m after, or give up as a failure.”
Hink Helsey, the bearded man who had sat on the store porch that day of the fight between Selwood and McKane, now dropped the forward legs of his chair to the floor and sat up, doubling his knife and putting it away in a pocket.
“Sheriff,” he said, “I’m stackin’ on you, along with Bossick. I think you’ll ketch yer game—an’ I think you’re already on th’ right trail.”
McKane looked at him as if he could kill him and his tongue itched to flail both men, the speaker and Selwood, for he knew that they meant the same thing.