Besides how could he be expected to know that the cattle had been driven away down here, and scattered, and that the Happy Family would not have overtaken them long before?
Did they think he was a mind-reader?
Pink, with biting sarcasm, retorted that they did not.

That it took a mind to read a mind.

He added that, from the looks of Irish, he must have started home drunk, anyway, and his horse had wandered this far of his own accord.

Then three or four cows started up a gulch to the right of them and Pink, hurling insults over his shoulder, rode off to turn them back.

So they did not actually come to blows, those two, though they were near it.
Big Medicine lingered to bawl unforgivable things at; Irish, and Irish shouted back recklessly that they had all acted like a bunch of sheepherders, or the cattle would never have been driven off the bench at all.