She darted into the house and changed the red silk for a percale house dress. Tom was on the mare. She put one foot in the stirrup left free for her, and he pulled her up behind him. Old Milford rode ahead. His buttocks shook back and forth like a vast bowl of clabber. Doney tightened her arms around Tom’s thin waist and leaned one cheek against his back. It was almost as good as being close beside him in the bed, to ride so with him.

He said, “Pa wants to see that stranger bad as ary one. Whatever he looks like, he’ll go right on despisin’ him.”

She accepted the comfort of their closeness, and gave her thoughts to the newcomer in the cattle section. His name was Dixon. He had appeared from nowhere and had bought four thousand acres of land for taxes. The land lay along the river, and over it the cattle belonging to Milford, the Wilsons, the Dibbles, and others, had for years ranged free. Dixon had sent in a big crew, who built a fine log lodge. Then, in the space of a few days, it seemed, before any one quite understood what was happening, the crew had fenced in the whole four thousand acres, and now the local cattle must feed over the poorer land to the west. Doney agreed with her father-in-law that it was not right for a rich man to snap up, for next to nothing, land that poor men had been unable to hold. Dixon was bringing in his own herd of cattle, hundreds of them, it was said. The unloading was due this morning on the branch railroad.

The mare had long since caught up to Milford’s horse. She walked close to his heels, anxious for a swifter pace. Tom rode herd with her on the Milford stock, and she liked to have his spurs touch her lightly, to be allowed to break into a long, smooth gallop across open wire grass. She jerked her head impatiently to the ground and snorted. Tom touched her mane.

“No use to run when you’re headin’ toward the enemy,” he said to her.

Doney was suddenly depressed. Old Milford hated everybody, and his curses no longer disturbed her. But if Tom felt danger, nothing was secure.

She said, “Will this here sure enough harm us?”

He hesitated. “There’s so much harm to it, honey,” he said, “I just don’t know where it’s like to stop. Pa just ain’t of a mind to let no stranger block his pastures.”

“But ’twa’n’t his land.”

“No, but seems like what folks have always used belongs to them.”

“What can he do?”

“I reckon he’ll try to make trouble for this here Dixon.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Can’t never tell, with pa.”