Vida made her way in the face of the freshening wind to where her father stood guard over the empty sheep wagon and waited impatiently her return. Behind her tagged Walt Smith, puffing and pasty-white from the scare he had gotten.
"Poppy, either you or Walt will have to go and stay with the sheep," she announced firmly, when she came near and the lightning split the darkness and revealed him to her. "Burney killed one of the dogs—but you needn't be scared, either one of you. I put him on the run, shooting at him. He won't bother again to-night—he never has, after he has been shot at."
"He oughta be killed!" snarled her father ineffectively. "A man that'll murder"
"You can suit yourself which one goes back to the sheep. It's going to storm pretty quick—and storm hard, too. I've got to git me something to eat, and rest up. I'm about done up, as it is." She started to climb up into the wagon, but stopped in the doorway and turned toward the two. "Where's the sheriff at?" she asked. "And what's he going to do about Burney?"
"I ain't runnin' the sheriff," her father retorted, with the petulance of the weak-souled. "How sh'd I know where he's at? Went back to town with the cor'ner, I guess, after we buried Jake, He couldn't do nothing about Burney—not after the cor'ner's jury let him off. Sheriff can't run a man in without a warrant," he explained, in the tone of weary tolerance for a woman's ignorance which some men love to assume. "He didn't have no warrant. Yuh got to git something on Burney 'fore he c'n be 'rested."
"Yes, and he'd run loose a good long while before you ever done anything about it—but talk!" she accused bitterly. "'N it was your own brother, too. And your sheep. Walt Smith, you git back there and look after 'em! What you gitting paid for? You needn't be scared-a Burney. All you gotta do is shoot if he shows up, and he'll run. You seen how quick he headed the other way when I shot? He won't show up, though. He's halfways home by this time."
She waited until she saw Walt turn reluctantly and go off toward the sheep. She upbraided her father again for his weak passivity that spent precious minutes in useless clamor, and told him to keep watch while she slept. In the morning, she declared, she meant to get out after Burney herself, seeing no one else had the nerve to do it.
When she had made her feelings and her intentions perfectly clear to him—and thereby and clarified her own mind—she ate hungrily of cold, fried bacon and some very good bread which she herself had baked, and finished with a dish of stewed, dried apples and a cup of cold tea.
After that she lay down upon her hard bed, with her six-shooter cuddled under her pillow and her fingers touching the cool butt of it, and listened to the grumbling mutter of the storm and watched the searing lightning flash intermittent glares of light upon her bowed, canvas roof.
She fell asleep so. For she was young and healthy and sturdy of spirit, and she had seen Burney, the giant, turn and run from her and her gun—and she had lost her fear of him.
The rain came suddenly, and pelted the sageland with great globes of cold water hurled earthward. Sheets of it, like a gray wall, with the gashing sword-thrusts of the lightning and the splitting crash of thunder—and still she slept. All her life she had known those terrific thunderstorms of the plains country, and the shelter of that twelve-ounce canvas over her head spelled security to her nerves.
Her father pottered peevishly about, piling harness and saddles under the wagon and lifting his blankets up under the canvas top. He muttered querulously to himself at the vileness of fate and the passionate fury of the storm, while he spread his bed upon the floor between the stove and the hinged table, and, with a grunt, laid himself down at last for his belated rest. And Vida slept quietly, heavily, utterly worn out and gathering strength for what was to come.
In the morning came Shelton and Spider to see how she had fared, and to learn whether they had seen or heard anything of the murderer of her uncle. That, at least, was their professed errand; probably they merely made that an excuse for riding over.
Spider had been made a deputy before the sheriff left, so that he might feel behind him the authority of the law in case an emergency rose. The sheriff, he explained to Vida apologetically, would have stayed and hunted the hills over—if he had known who, or what, he was to search for.