f more trouble was
coming, it would very likely come quickly. They were fighters, these
Rambouillets, she was thinking as she looked at them absently, and
recalled an instance where a herd of them had battered a full-grown
coyote to a jelly. They had surrounded him and by bunting him in the
ribs, back and forth between them like a football, had stopped only when
there was not a whole bone left in his carcass. However, she reflected,
the coyotes were mostly puppies yapping at the entrance of their den at
this time of year, and the last wolf had been cleaned out of the
mountains, so there really was not much danger from any source save
these human enemies.

But even a fighting Rambouillet was not proof against a 30-30.
Instinctively her eyes swept the surrounding country for some unfamiliar
moving object. Well, that was what she was there for--to protect them.
She did not expect any quarter because she was a woman--or intend to
give any. She meant to shoot to kill, if she had the opportunity.

It was in this survey that Kate saw Disston and recognized him
instantly. She had a notion that even if her eyesight had failed her,
her heart would have told her, for it jumped as if she had been badly
frightened. She felt dizzy for a moment after she verified her first
look--the world swam, as though she had been blinded. If she had
followed her impulse, she would have held out her arms and ran to meet
him crying, "Hughie! Hughie!" But her impulses, she remembered in time,
always came back like boomerangs to hurt her, if she followed them, so,
instead, she endeavored to pull herself together by recalling that he
had been six weeks at Teeters' without coming to see her but the one
time when he had brought that girl to laugh at her. Why had he come now,
she wondered.

Kate's pride had come to be her strongest ally and she summoned it all
in this emergency, so when Disston climbed to her, finally, leading his
limping horse, she was awaiting him calmly, her enigmatic smile upon her
face, which was but a shade paler than usual. Her composure chilled and
disappointed him; he could not know that she had clasped her hands
tightly about her knee to hide their trembling.

"I wanted to surprise you," he said regretfully.

"You have."

"You don't show it."

"Then I'm improving."

"I liked you as you were, Kate--warm-hearted, impulsive." He dropped the
bridle reins and sat down beside her.

"That got me nothing," she replied curtly