Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/142

 Manuel turned away without a word, with that same silent dignity over him that Barrett had marked when—Fred Grubb addressed him on terms of inequality at the 'corral gate. It appeared to lift the silent old man now far above the impatient, overbearing young woman who sought to make a case for those whom she defended out—of her inborn disposition to oppose all who stood against the institutions of the barons' range.

"Señor Nearing will get it out of you!" she threatened.

Manuel was not shaken by the threat. He led his horse away, and Teresa, his wife, returned to the kitchen with the speed of panic, as if she recalled that moment she had left some dish on the fire.

"I ask you to withhold judgment on them, Mr. Barrett, till Uncle Hal gets the straight of it," Alma said. "I was all rattled myself when Manuel told me about it, but I can see now where he could overdraw things in his imaginative Mexican way. Dale Findlay isn't the man, not counting the other two, whom I don't know, to let a poor old chump like Fred Grubb get the drop on him if he's playing a serious game. Don't you see that, Mr. Barrett?"

"I hadn't thought of it in that light," Barrett confessed, but still unshaken in his profound belief that Findlay had meant that noonday hour to be his last.

"He'd have taken the gun away from poor old Fred and bent it around his gourd if he'd been in earnest," she declared. "I'm sorry for the poor mestizo—he must have insulted Alvino terribly to drive him to that deed."