The talk was not altogether a pleasant one; but both yielded something, and it was finally agreed that as soon as Whaley could pick up a man to fill Davie's place Davie should return home. Lorimer did not linger after this decision. Whaley's behavior had offended him and without the ceremony of a "good-bye," he turned his horse's head eastward again.
Picking up a man was not easy; they certainly had several offers from emigrants going west, and from Mexicans on the route, but Whaley seemed determined not to be pleased. He disliked Lorimer and was deeply offended at him interfering with his arrangements. Every day that he kept David was a kind of triumph to him. "He might as well have asked me how I'd like my drivers decoyed away. I like a man to be on the square," he grumbled. And he said these and similar things so often, that David began to feel it impossible to restrain his temper.
Anger, fed constantly by spiteful remarks and small injustices, grows rapidly; and as they approached the Apache mountains, the men began to notice a fixed tightening of the lips, and a stern blaze in the young Scot's eyes, which Whaley appeared to delight in intensifying.
"Thar'll be mischief atween them two afore long," remarked an old drover; "Lorimer is gittin' to hate the captain with such a vim that he's no appetite for his food left."
"It'll be a fair fight, and one or both'll get upped; that's about it."
At length they met a party of returning drovers, and half a dozen men among them were willing to take David's place. Whaley had no longer any pretence for detaining him. They were at the time between two long, low spurs of hills, enclosing a rich narrow valley, deep with ripened grass, gilded into flickering gold by the sun and the dewless summer days. All the lower ridges were savagely bald and hot--a glen, paved with gold and walled with iron. Oh, how the sun did beat and shiver, and shake down into the breathless valley!
The cattle were restless, and the men had had a hard day. David was weary; his heart was not in the work; he was glad it was his last watch. It began at ten o'clock, and would end at midnight. The weather was gloomy, and the few stars which shone between the rifts of driving clouds just served to outline the mass of sleeping cattle.