"I don't know much about sheep," he admitted.
"Do you know--" to Kate, with all her social manner--"you are deliciously unique?"
Kate, who detected the sneer, but had no social manner to meet it, asked brusquely: "In what way?"
"You're so--" she hesitated for a word and seemed to search her vocabulary for the right one--"so strong-minded."
Kate's eyes were sparkling.
"If by that you mean intelligent, I thank you for the compliment, and I'm sorry that I can't--" She checked herself, but the inference was clear that she intended to add--"return it."
Miss Rathburn's fair skin became a deeper pink than even a pink-lined parasol warranted, while Kate addressed herself to Disston exclusively.
Disston had listened in dismay. Whatever was the matter? In truth, it must be, he told himself, that women were natural enemies. He never had seen this feline streak in Beth to recognize it, and he had felt instinctively that, on Kate's side, from the first glance she had not liked her visitor.
To Beth Rathburn, it was ridiculous that Disston should take seriously this girl who, at the moment, was considerably less presentable than any one of their own servants--that he should treat her with all the deference he showed to any woman of his acquaintance, as if she were of his own class exactly! And a worse offense was his obviously keen interest in her. It was a new sensation for the southern girl to be ignored, or at least omitted from the conversation, and each second her resentment grew, though the underlying cause was that she felt herself overshadowed by Kate's stronger personality.
To remind Disston of his remissness she walked over to a pen where Bowers, astride a powerful buck, saw in hand, was having his own troubles. She returned almost immediately, shuddering prettily: "He's sawing that sheep's horn off! Doesn't it hurt it?"
"Not nearly so much as letting it grow to put its eye out."
"I presume you do that, too?" The girl's eyes and tone were mocking.
"Oh, yes, I do everything that's necessary." There was something savage in Kate's composure as she turned directly and looked at her. "I have sheared sheep when I had no money to pay herders, slept out in the hills on the ground on a saddle blanket with my saddle for a pillow. I've made my underwear out of flour sacks and my skirts of denim. I've lived on corn meal and salt pork and dried apples and rabbits for months at a time. I eat and hobnob with sheepherders from one year's end to the other. I'm out with a drop bunch in the lambing season, and I brand the bucks myself--on the nose--burn them with a hot iron. I'll send you word when I'm going to do it again and you can come over--it's e-normously amusing. Just wait a minute--come over to the fence here--and I'll show you something. I'm even more deliciously unique than you imagine."