"Howdy, Ellen. Shore you ain't goin' to say good mawnin' to this heah bad lot?" drawled Daggs, with good-natured sarcasm.
"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.