"She has 'em," she muttered to herself. "Friends ... an' respect ... an' everything I want.... "I wonder what makes me hate folks so...." CHAPTER VII THE CATAMOUNT Three weeks after her arrival Jane made her first trip to town and Beck drove the pair of strong bays which swirled their buckboard over the road at a spanking trot. Events had arisen to prevent their being together in the days immediately following the frank discussion of their attitudes toward one another and Jane thought that she detected a feeling of curiosity in him, as though he wondered just how she would go about forcing him to like her. Shrewdly, she avoided personalities and talked much of the ranch. When they broke over the divide and began the long drop into town, he said: "Since you asked advice from me, I keep thinkin' up more, ma'am." "That's nice. I need it. What now?" "I s'pose Dad mentioned that water in Devil's Hole?" "Why, I don't recall it. We've talked so much and about so many things that perhaps it's slipped my mind." "Maybe. He said he had." She questioned him further but he said it might be well for her to mention it to Hepburn. "He's foreman, you know." They swung into the one street of Ute Crossing and stopped before the bank. As Beck stepped down to tie the team a girl came out of a store across the way and vaulted into the saddle on a big brown horse with graceful ease. It was the nester's daughter. Two men came from the saloon just as she reined her horse about. They eyed her insolently with that stare of a type of loafer which is eloquent of all that is despicable and one of them, a short, stodgy man, smiled brazenly. The girl gave them one stare, hostility in her brown eyes, and then looked away, her lips moving in an unheard word, surely of contempt. Then the man spoke. It is not well to repeat. His words were few, but they were ugly. The girl had touched her horse with a spur and he leaped forward. Just that one bound. As he made it the man spoke and with a wrench she set the brown back on his haunches and whirled him about. Her face was suddenly white, her lips in a tight, red line, and her eyes blazed. She rode back to the men, who had continued on their way, holding her horse to a mincing trot, for he seemed to have caught the tensity of her mood. "Did I hear you right?" she said to the man who had spoken. He stood still and looked up with the rude leer. "That depends on your ears, likely. All I said was that you--" She did not give him time to repeat. Her right arm flashed up and the quirt, slung to its wrist, hissed angrily as it cut back and with a stinging crack wound its thong about the man's face. "Take that!" she cried. "And that ... and that!"