The lamb had backed off for another run when the stranger jumped for it. Bowers called sharply: "Don't tech that little sheep, pardner!"
The answer was snarled through white teeth: "I'm goin' to kick its slats in! I'm goin' to break every bone in its body."
"I wouldn't advise nothin' like that. Come here, Mary!" Bowers endeavored to speak calmly, but he was seized with a tremulous excitement when he saw that the stranger intended to carry out his threat.
"I'll pay you fer it," he panted as he tried to catch the lamb, "but I'm aimin' to kill that knot-head!"
Bowers dried his hands on his overalls and stepped inside the wagon. He returned with his shotgun.
"And I aim to blow the top of your head off ef you try it," Bowers said, breathing heavily. "That little innercent sheep don't mean no harm to nobody. Sence we're speakin' plain, I don't like you nohow. I don't like the way you act; I don't like the way you talk; I don't like the way your face grows on you; I don't like nothin' about you, and ef I never see you agin it'll be soon enough. You'd better go while I'm ca'm, for when I gits mad I breaks in two in the middle and flies both ways!"
Panting from his chase, the stranger stopped and stood looking at Bowers in baffled fury. Then he turned sharply on his heel, caught his horse and swung into the saddle. He hesitated for the part of a second before spurring his horse a little closer.
"You kin take a message to your boss--you locoed sheepherder. Tell her it's from an old friend that knew her when she was kickin' in her cradle. Show her that photygraph of the feller with the runnin' horse and tell her I said it was the picture of her father, and that he's scoured the country for her, spendin' more money to locate her than she'll make if she wrangles woolies till she's a hundred. Tell her a telegram would bring him in twenty-four hours--on a special, probably. Give her that message, along with the love of an old, old friend what was well acquainted with her at the Sand Coulee!" He laughed mockingly, and with a malevolent look at Bowers, plunged into the quaking asp and vanished.
Bowers stared after him open-mouthed and round-eyed. He had placed his visitor. "The feller that smelled like a Injun tepee in the drug store the night Mormon Joe was murdered!"
The discovery that his visitor was the malodorous stranger of the drug store impressed Bowers far more than his mocking message to Kate concerning her father. That might or might not be true, but he was entirely sure about the other.