His keen eye sought that of Dalhart, whose own met it as fearlessly.
“It’s a trade!” said he. “I’ll keep my word on that.”
“Well, that’s settled. Now, let’s set off the branding gangs. We got to get at least four hunderd of these fours in the Fishhook before night day after to-morrow. That’ll keep us all from making love, I reckon. Blest be the tie that binds! But you’re a T.L. hand now, and not no more’n that. You got a naturalized citizen’s right to love the boss, but you ain’t reached no years of majority ner discretion this side of Aberlene.”
Jim Nabours rode back in the twilight and flung off from a foam-streaked horse at Taisie’s fire. The tall girl came and seated herself beside him on a bed roll, a hand laid on his knee.
His quick eye noted her paleness. He knew she had been weeping. A large gnarled brown hand of his own stroked gently the slender brown hand on his knee.
“Why, Miss Taisie, ain’t nothing wrong, I’d say. Fact is, everything is too damned right, that’s all.”
He went on to tell her of the developments of the day; how more than richly their exchange of discards for beeves was working out; how well the herd was developing. Then he came to what was on his mind.
“Now, see here, Miss Taisie,” he went on, breaking a bit of bark between his fingers, “when we started out we thought we had stripped the Del Sol range. We taken all ages. Only a act of God could of kept us from having a plumb thousand calfs riding in yore carts. But now looky here! We’re going to cut back all that stuff and throw in fours instead. The cut is going back to Del Sol. But who’s going to take care of Del Sol while we go north?”
“You could. Yes, Miss Taisie, you! We can git along damn well without you, and Del Sol can’t get along alone. Don’t you think you’d be safer back home that way than what you will be going north up to the sixth princerpul meridjun with sixteen pirates and God knows what kind of weather?
“You’re only a girl, Miss Taisie—the damnedest finest girl ever borned in Texas; but girls is girls. I can handle cows, Miss Taisie. I can’t handle girls. You go on back home, please ma’am. We’ll pull in afore Thanksgiving with a wagonload of Yankee money.”
“I’ll not go back! I closed the doors when I started up the trail. How could I live there alone?”