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!" 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.