Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/290

 with him rose again, hot and indignant, with the thought. There was a queer moral bias in the man when he could refuse to take his cattle after they had been removed from the Kansas jurisdiction by a clever trick, but would pull his gun out and take them from Withers in a manner of open violence. Where the moral justification was stronger in one case than the other, she could not see.

Louise understood that Laylander believed, sincerely and honestly, that he had done the honorable thing in refusing to touch the cattle while the law's hand was upon them, and that he had moved only in accordance with his peculiar code in taking them from Withers. It was an audaciously admirable thing for one man to do, she admitted, not without pride in his partly successful stroke. Partly successful only on account of her meddling. She hoped Laylander did not know, and never would find out, who turned Cal Withers loose.

There was nothing she could do now to repair her misapplied kindness, nothing she could do to help Laylander out of the confusion she had made in his plan. She was as helpless as the night wind in holding back the force of destruction that was forming out there somewhere in the dark, vast, appalling, shudderful prairie.

She sat at the window while the night activities of McPacken subsided, until the cowboys quit their greedy swilling, took horse and rode away in noisy little bunches to their distant camps. She sat there until