In the trapped heat of the yard the sun’s white glare was like the breath from a furnace and drought had turned the thin fringe of grass along the south fence into the same dead color as the hoof-tracked dust that stretched unbroken between the dead gray walls of the outfit’s buildings. In the breathless quiet there was no slightest movement. The few scattered leaves still clinging precariously to the cottonwoods’ scabrous branches hung limp and yellow; even the horses, drowsing hip-shot in the plank corral, looked more like samples of the taxidermist’s art than they did replacements for a cow spread’s remuda. Yet in this motionless hush there was a curiously alien feel of watchful waiting, of cross currents stirring underneath the slumbering surface. The girl alone in her room at the back of the ranch house sensed it; the man seated across the desk from Lewis Cor dray in his office felt it and moved broad shoulders restively. ‘Bennie’ this one was called for reasons he had never fetched into the open.
