Me Smith

perfect condition; yet, save for the fact that she could stand up, she was as crippled as if the bones of every leg were shattered.
    It is doubtful if any but steel-colored eyes can take on the look which Ralston’s contained as they met Smith’s. His skin was gray as he straightened himself and drew a hand which shook noticeably the length of his cheek and across his mouth.
    In great anger, anger which precedes some quick and desperate act, almost every person has some gesture peculiar to himself, and this was Ralston’s.
    A less guilty man than Smith might have flinched at that moment. The half-grin on his face faded, and he waited for a torrent of accusations and oaths. But Ralston, in a voice so low that it barely reached him, a voice so ominous, so fraught with meaning, that the dullest could not have misunderstood, said:
    “I’ll borrow your horse, Smith.”
    Smith, like one hypnotized, heard himself saying:
    “Sure! Take him.”
    Ralston knew as well as though he had witnessed the act that Smith had hammered the frogs of Molly’s feet until they were bruised and sore as boils. Her lameness would not be permanent—she would recover in a week or two; but the abuse of, the cruelty to, the little mare he loved filled Ralston with a hatred for Smith as relentless and deep as Smith’s own.
    “A man who could do a thing like that,” said Ralston through his set teeth, “is no common cur! He’s wolf—all wolf! He isn’t staying here for love, alone. There’s something else. And I swear before the God that made me, I’ll find out what it is, and land him, before I quit!”
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    XIII
SUSIE’S INDIAN BLOOD
    Coming leisurely up the path from the corrals, Smith saw Susie sitting on the cottonwood log, wrapped in her mother’s blanket. She was huddled in a squaw’s attitude. He eyed her; he never had seen her like that before. But, knowing Indians better, possibly, than he knew his own race, Smith understood. He recognized the mood. Her Indian blood was uppermost. It rose in most half-breeds upon occasion. Sometimes under the influence of liquor it cropped out, sometimes anger brought it to the surface. He had seen it often—this heavy, smouldering sullenness.
    Smith stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at her. He felt more at ease with her than ever before.
    “What are you sullin’ about, Susie?”
    She did not answer. Her pertness, her Anglo-Saxon vivacity, were gone; her face was wooden, expressionless; her restless eyes slow-moving and dull; her cheek-bones, always noticeably high, looked higher, and her skin was murky and dark.
    “You look like a squaw with that sull on,” he ventured again, and there was satisfaction in his face.
    It was something to know that, after all, Susie was “Injun”—“pure Injun.” The scheme which had lain dormant in his brain now took active shape. He had wanted Susie’s help, but each time that he had tried to conciliate her, his overtures had ended in a fresh rupture. Now her stinging tongue was dumb, and there was no aggressiveness in her manner.
    Smith, laying his hand heavily upon her shoulder, sat down beside her, and a flash, a transitory gleam, shone for an instant in her dull eyes; but she did not move or change expression.
    He said in a low voice:
    “What you need is stirrin’ up, Susie.”
    He watched her narrowly, and continued:
    “You ought to get into a game that has some ginger in it. This here life is too tame for a girl like you.”
    Without looking at him she asked:
    “What kind of a game?” Her voice was lifeless, guttural.
    “It’s agin my principles to empty my sack to a woman; but you’re diff’rent—you’re game—you are, Susie.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and the weight of his hand made her shoulder sag. “Let’s you and me rustle a bunch of horses.”
    Susie did not betray surprise at the startling proposition by so much as the twitching of an eyelid.
    “What for?”
    Smith replied:
    “Just for the hell of it!”
    She grunted, but neither in assent nor dissent; so Smith went on in an eager, persuasive whisper:
    “There’s Injun enough in you, girl, to make horse-stealin’ all the same as breathin’. You jump in with me on this deal and see how easy you lose that sull. Don’t you ever have a feelin’ take holt of you that you want to do something onery—steal something, mix with somebody? I do. I’ve had that notorious feelin’ workin’ on me strong for days now, and I’ve got to get rid of