Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/64

 "Me!" she challenged a hundred-mile sweep of the Big Country, and there was no histrionic stilting in her voice, just a cold matter-of-factness. "Me, I 'm going to fight you—fight everybody. No love, no wedding veil and hand on some man's shoulder for me. Just fight."

Speech cleared the atmosphere of introspection like a thunderstorm. Immediately she dismissed the photograph from her mind—nor did it occur to her that this hidden treasure might have been a shrine of a withered little man's devotions—and came back to hard dollars and cents. Rather the search for them, for in the box on her knees was not so much as a Mexican dollar.

The bank book showed her father had something over two thousand dollars to his credit in the Grangers' Bank at Two Moons, but the box yielded a note for fifteen hundred dollars held against Ring, once renewed and due again in five months; interest was eight per cent. The government paper was title to the homestead here on Teapot—one hundred and sixty fenced acres with the house and water rights appertaining thereto. For the rest, sheep books.