be damned!"

"Maybe I am. Them hard, snappy lookin' girls are the ones that smash.
They're brittle, that's why; but you take a soft lookin' girl like Kate,
maybe she ain't a diamond point to cut glass, but she's tempered steel
that'll bend, and bend, and bend, and then when you wait for it to break
it flips up and knocks you down. That's Kate."

Lee Haines rolled a cigarette in silence. He was too disgusted to
answer, until his first puff of smoke dissolved Buck in a cloud of thin
blue.

"You ought to sing to a congregation instead of to cows, Buck. You have
the tune, and you might get by in a church; but cows have sense."

"Kate will buckle and bend and fade for a while," went on Buck, wholly
unperturbed, "but just when you go out to pick daisies for her you'll
come back and find her singing to the stove. Her strength is down deep,
like some of these outlaw hosses that got a filmy, sleepy lookin' eye.
They save their hell till you sink the spurs in 'em. You think she loves
Dan, don't you?"

"I have a faint suspicion of it," sneered Haines. "I suppose I'm wrong?"

"You are."

"Buck, I may have slipped a nickel into you, but you're playing the
wrong tune. Knock off and talk sense, will you?"

"When you grow up, son, you'll understand some of the things I'm tryin'
to explain in words of one syllable.

"She don't love Dan. She thinks she does, but down deep they ain't a
damned thing in the world she gives a rap about exceptin' Joan. Men?
What are they to her? Marriage? That's simply an accident that's needed
so she can have a baby. Delicate, shrinkin' flower, is she? I tell you,
my boy, if it was necessary for Joan she'd tear out your heart and mine
and send Dan plumb to hell. You fasten on to them words, because they're
gospel."

It was late afternoon while they talked, and they were swinging slowly
down a gulch towards the home cabin. At that very time Kate, from the
door of the house where she sat, saw a dark form slink from rock to
rock at the rim of the little plateau, a motion so swift that it flicked
through the corner of her eye, a thing to be sensed rather than seen.
She set up very stiff, her lips white as chalk, but nothing more
stirred. A few minutes later, when her heart was beating almost at
normal she heard Joan scream from behind the house, not in terror,
or pain, as her keen mother-ear knew perfectly well, but with a wild
delight. She whipped about the corner of the house and there she saw
Joa