five minutes for this thing or that."

The glow of a certain hard pride burned through the careworn languor of
her brown cheek. What she had said was strangely true. This raw-boned
woman before him, although scarcely middle-aged, had for years occupied
a self-imposed maternal and protecting relation, not only to her husband
and brothers, but to the three or four men, who as partners, or hired
hands, lived at the ranch. An inherited and trained sympathy with what
she called her "boys's" and her "men folk," and their needs had
partly unsexed her. She was a fair type of a class not uncommon on the
Southwestern frontier; women who were ruder helpmeets of their rude
husbands and brothers, who had shared their privations and sufferings
with surly, masculine endurance, rather than feminine patience; women
who had sent their loved ones to hopeless adventure or terrible vendetta
as a matter of course, or with partisan fury; who had devotedly nursed
the wounded to keep alive the feud, or had received back their dead
dry-eyed and revengeful. Small wonder that Cressy McKinstry had
developed strangely under this sexless relationship. Looking at the
mother, albeit not without a certain respect, Mr. Ford found himself
contrasting her with the daughter's graceful femininity, and wondering
where in Cressy's youthful contour the possibility of the grim figure
before him was even now hidden.

"Hiram allowed to go over to the schoolhouse and see you this mornin',"
said Mrs. McKinstry, after a pause; "but I reckon ez how he had to
look up stock on the river. The cattle are that wild this time o'
year, huntin' water, and hangin' round the tules, that my men are nigh
worrited out o' their butes with 'em. Hank and Jim ain't been off
their mustangs since sun up, and Hiram, what with partrollen' the West
Boundary all night, watchin' stakes whar them low down Harrisons hev