“Push on up, Miss Taisie,” called Nabours. “Yore place is at the head. We’ll see nothing hurts ye.”
“I don’t want to ride front,” replied the girl. “You’ve got men enough there. Who’s riding point besides Del?”
“Mr. Dan McMasters is on left point, Miss Lockhart,” said Jim Nabours quietly.
“Well, he’s been over the road north, anyways—the onliest one of us has. He’s a cowman. So fur, I taken him fer a square man. Not that I care a damn fer a hand’s morerls. He may be a horse thief, but jest so he don’t steal from us I don’t care.”
“Sanchez found it in the—well, the McMasters wagon that went back to Gonzales this morning. We’ve got it in our cart now.”
Nabours looked far out over the gray and green of the landscape a long time before he ventured speech. His face then was sad.
“I’ve knowed men shot for less,” said he at length. “But are you sure? Do you know who done it?”
“I haven’t seen anything. I only know what Sanchez says. None of my men stole the trunk. It meant nothing to them. The land scrip in it might some day mean a fortune to a man who did know about such things; and he did know it was there; and he did say that there’d be a boom in land and cows in Texas in less than ten years, maybe five.
“Well, we Lockharts always did open our doors. We thought the world was honest!—It’s hard for me to doubt—to doubt—him.”
Downcast, she rode on. It was long before Nabours made comment.
“Miss Taisie,” said he at last, “there can’t no man rob you and get away with it. Us men won’t have it. After supper I’ll be back at yore camp. I’ll have with me my left-point man. I’ll have besides my segundo and Sanchez and six of the best hands of Del Sol.”
“Mean to do? You ast that, and you a cowman, and daughter of one? I mean to hold a court, that’s what I mean to do. What us fellows decides is right is what’ll happen. It’ll happen soon.”
“But, Jim”—the girl was suddenly pale—“we’d have to take any—any suspected man to Austin. And he’s a sheriff himself!”
“Austin be damned, ma’am! Likewise, sher’f be damned! Del Sol runs her own laws. That man’s father and yores was friends—until the war. Then they wasn’t so much, maybe. Calvin McMasters was a Yankee sympathizer. We don’t know it wasn’t him that killed yore father. But there can’t no man rob Burleson Lockhart’s girl and get by with it!