"If you come fooling round the ranch again there'll be hell!" It seemed strange that a man who had lived west of the Pecos for ten years could not see in Steele something which forbade that kind of talk.
It certainly was not nerve Wright showed; men of courage were seldom intolerant; and with the matchless nerve that characterized Steele or the great gunmen of the day there went a cool, unobtrusive manner, a speech brief, almost gentle, certainly courteous.

Wright was a hot-headed Louisianian of French extraction; a man evidently who had never been crossed in anything, and who was strong, brutal, passionate, which qualities, in the face of a situation like this, made him simply a fool! The way Steele looked at Wright was joy to me.

I hated this smooth, dark-skinned Southerner.

But, of course, an ordinary affront like Wright's only earned silence from Steele.
"I'm thinking you used your Ranger bluff just to get near Diane Sampson," Wright sneered.

"Mind you, if you come up there again there'll be hell!" "You're damn right there'll be hell!" retorted Steele, a kind of high ring in his voice.