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 Barrett, Alma questioning him briefly, breathlessly, in the same tongue from time to time. They did not hear Barrett's approach, although the weary horse started' at his step. He paused near them, outside the beam of light that reached out into the shrubbery through the open door.

Teresa stood just in the edge of this diffused beam, her figure sharp in contrast with the other two, holding her hands clasped before her bosom in pose of supplication. Now and again she moaned and shook her: head, whether in sympathy for the man who had fallen, or for his own peril, Barrett had no way of knowing.

Whatever the old man was saying, Barrett knew that he could make him out only a pale sort of heroin that plot. He did not know, even, whether there was much sympathy or consideration for him in any bosom there, for he had reduced himself to an infinitesimal point in his own contempt for the way he had conducted himself at Eagle Rock camp that day.

A man would have slung his gun and cleaned them up before Fred Grubb ever appeared at the door; a man would have come out of it with a feeling of sufficiency in himself, and not as a boy led out of trouble by the hand.

A lame figure of a hero, indeed, standing there in the dark like a spy. He had the thought of sneaking back to Fred and sharing with him the salmon and crackers. He remembered in time to stop this retreat that he was there under orders; he advanced into the beam of light, and approached the door.

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 ing as if to draw and defend. The girl's face was pale, her eyes were great with the horror of the thing she had heard.

"Oh, Mr. Barrett!" she said, a shocked note of lamentation in her tone. "You must not think—I can't bear to have you think—that anybody here—that it was with the knowledge of anybody here"

"Not at all," said Barrett, lying only with his lips, his heart cold in its charity toward another member of that house.

"You would be almost justified, it was so diabolically conceived. If that's Dale Findlay's notion of a joke, I think it's time he practiced his pleasantries on another range!"

"Joke?" Barrett repeated, feeling his heart sink to his heels.

He knew something of the lengths to which men of that calling would go to have their jokes. Could this carefully worked out scheme, carried to a head with so much hard riding and planning in distant parts, have been nothing more in the beginning than a cowpuncher jest? He recalled Manuel's warning, and turned to him sharply.

"Was it a joke—did you know it was a joke?" he demanded.

"No-o-o, señor!" said Manuel, forcefully, solemnly, shaking his head slowly. "It was not a joke!"

"Dale told Manuel it was nothing but a joke—that's what he told you, Manuel?"

"He told me, Mees Alma."

"They didn't expect it to end that way, they only

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 thought they'd throw a scare into you. They didn't count Alvino in, the wicked old devil!"

"No, they didn't count Alvino in," said Barrett, slowly, seeing again the knife-point protruding through the half-breed's breast. "Nor Fred Grubb—they didn't count him in, either."

"Poor old Fred! He's been the victim of so many of their pleasantries he couldn't tell a joke the length of his arm away in broad daylight," said Alma.

"It cost a man his life," Barrett reminded her. "However unworthy, he was a man, You knew—" to Manuel, facing him sharply—"that man came to camp to make trouble?"

"To keel you, señor."

"Did he tell you that, Manuel?" Alma challenged him, almost craftily, it seemed to Barrett, in her sudden desire to establish the whole affair as a pleasantly designed thing with an unfortunate ending in tragedy. She had recovered quickly from her shocked, horrified concern. She was of the blood of the cattle barons, in whom she could see no wrong.

"Did he tell you that?" she demanded again, in growing severity.

"He did not tell me," Manuel replied.

"Well, don't you know it's dangerous to go around guessing such things?"

"He did not tell me, but I knew. Before I—señorita, I knew."

"How did you know? Who told you?" she insisted, with the bullying severity of one accustomed to break ing down obstacles to her will.


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 Manuel turned away without a word, with that same silent dignity over him that Barrett had marked when—Fred Grubb addressed him on terms of inequality at the 'corral gate. It appeared to lift the silent old man now far above the impatient, overbearing young woman who sought to make a case for those whom she defended out—of her inborn disposition to oppose all who stood against the institutions of the barons' range.

"Señor Nearing will get it out of you!" she threatened.

Manuel was not shaken by the threat. He led his horse away, and Teresa, his wife, returned to the kitchen with the speed of panic, as if she recalled that moment she had left some dish on the fire.

"I ask you to withhold judgment on them, Mr. Barrett, till Uncle Hal gets the straight of it," Alma said. "I was all rattled myself when Manuel told me about it, but I can see now where he could overdraw things in his imaginative Mexican way. Dale Findlay isn't the man, not counting the other two, whom I don't know, to let a poor old chump like Fred Grubb get the drop on him if he's playing a serious game. Don't you see that, Mr. Barrett?"

"I hadn't thought of it in that light," Barrett confessed, but still unshaken in his profound belief that Findlay had meant that noonday hour to be his last.

"He'd have taken the gun away from poor old Fred and bent it around his gourd if he'd been in earnest," she declared. "I'm sorry for the poor mestizo—he must have insulted Alvino terribly to drive him to that deed."


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 "We'll call it a joke, then, and let it drop," said Barrett.

He was uncomfortable in this discussion with her, hot-headed and biased as she was in her defense of the very men she had arraigned with so much bitterness a few days before. Still it wasn't the cowboys, it was not Dale Findlay, that she labored to prove blameless of any sinister attempt on his life, Barrett very well understood. She was standing in defense of the institution she had been bred to consider vested with overriding and incontestable right on the range.

Teresa was setting his supper out on the kitchen table, the mistress of the house evidently having given direct orders. Alma, seeing this, excused herself on the plea that she must see to the needs of her ailing aunt.

"When you're through supper, go out to the gate," she directed, rather than asked. "I'll come out in a little while—I want to have a talk with you, Mr. Barrett."

Teresa waited on Barrett with assiduous hand, smiling fatly as she brooded close by to anticipate his slightest need. As she poured his second cup of coffee she said, her voice cautious and low:

"When you are boss of this house, Meester Barrett, remember Manuel and me, to keep us here and let us work for you."

Barrett looked up into her face to see if he could head off another of those jokes for which that vicinity was so notable. Her countenance was serene, all save a little eagerness of expression, an unquestionable sincerity in her eyes.


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 "Why, I haven't got anything to do with it! I'll never be boss here," he said, amazed to see her so set on what she evidently believed to be true.

"It will come," said Teresa, confidently, nodding her sleek black head." Manuel read it in the cards."

"He'd better shuffle them again," said Barrett, laughing.

But Teresa only shook her head, undisturbed in her faith in an event unerringly foretold.


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URING the ride down to the ranch, after the probability of pursuit had passed and given place to a feeling of security, the question of why Alma Nearing had summoned him rose constantly in Barrett's mind. The answer evaded him still as he walked a little beat outside the gate with his pipe, waiting for her to come.

Something had happened to jangle woefully the serenity of that household between the day of his departure for Eagle Rock camp and the day of his return, Barrett could feel, rather than see. Mrs. Nearing was not herself; the fact that he was a horse wrangler in her husband's employ could not alone justify her strange behavior toward him when she knew he stood at her door. She was as one distracted by a great grief, a racking calamity. Her anxious inquiry for news of Nearing seemed to give an insight into the cause of her troubled state.

Had the thieves fallen out? Had Nearing gone on some expedition not countenanced by his partners in those dark transactions, for which his life might be forfeit? Or was it that his wife had become cognizant of his dishonesty at last? Even so, what could Alma

Alma, coming softly to keep her rendezvous, was almost beside him when he turned, wrapped in his brooding thoughts as though he walked in a fog. The long


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 dark cloak that shrouded her dress made her as part of the moonless night; she must be wearing moccasins to approach so noiselessly, he thought. She came upon him so unexpectedly, although waited for, confronting him so close when he turned at the end of his beat, head down in troubled concentration, that he felt hot blood rush into his face as if she had surprised him of his meditations.

"Aunt Hope is asleep," she said, "but I'm afraid it will not be for long. We'd just as well sit on the porch, where I can hear her when she wakes."

"She must have suffered a great deal to change her so in this short time," said he. "She didn't appear to recognize me."

"She's always worried so about Uncle Hal when he's away," Alma excused, leading the way to the house. "Can you expect her, or any of us, to feel the same toward you, Mr. Barrett, when you come here under false pretenses to humiliate and trouble us, and drive us out of house and home if you can!"

"My intention has been greatly abused by somebody," Barrett quietly returned. "Under the indictment I'd better not go any nearer the house; I'd feel better a little distance away. We can talk here?"

"Anywhere. Maybe you're right about going any nearer."

She remained silent a little while, arms on the gate as he had been fond of recalling her in memory during the days of his short apprenticeship on the range. She was looking away, he knew, with that far-seeing gaze into the mysteries of a land he had not yet come to


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 understand. He could not see her eyes, but he could feel the struggle that lay in them, as he had felt it that calm morning when they first stood together at the gate.

"Look what you've done!" she said, facing him again in her sudden, unexpected way, hand thrown out as if discovering the material damage laid to his charge.

"Done?" he repeated, amazed by her vehemence.

"Come here whining for your money back, like a tin-horn that's got into a game too big for him. You've got to have your precious money, no matter if it wrecks the company, breaks my uncle and drives us out on the prairie. Before you came here you were writing around to certain stockholders to get their proxies, boping to throw Uncle Hal out!"

"Yes, that's true," Barrett admitted, neither shaken nor ashamed. "I'd do it tomorrow if I could."

"Why didn't you come here like a man, then, and fight for controf in the open, if you think you're the appointed savior of this company?"

"There wasn't anything secret in my attempt to get enough proxies to put in another president at the next election, Miss Nearing. I knew some of the stockholders would make inquiry about it here. Senator Nearing knew what I came here to find out, he told me so the first night; why didn't he send me away?"

"I didn't mean to get out of patience with you, Mr. Barrett," she said, not attempting to answer him, seemingly oblivious to his question, indeed, her mind running back on her hot, ungenerous speech of a moment before. "I've seen them suffer so, Uncle Hal


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 and Aunt Hope, worrying over the thought of disgrace the son of an old friend might bring, was trying to bring, on them in their old days. For the failure of this company, the ousting of Uncle Hal, would be a disgrace to them that they could never bear."

"There's no disgrace in honest failure, Miss Nearing. The business world, heartless as it is said to be, never looks on it in that light."

"Uncle Hal only wants time, time to catch up on his losses, to pay every stockholder his original investment, if not a profit," she urged, knowing her lesson very well, Barrett thought. "I sent for you to come while Uncle Hal was away to ask you, as a gentleman and a friend of the family, to leave here, Mr. Barrett, drop this silly little attempt of yours to investigate something that's away too much of a big man's problem for a boy of your experience to handle, or even understand."

"He could have refused to put me to work; that would have been the better way," said Barrett, seeming to answer his own question of a little while before, the question she had passed over and ignored. "But I have not done anything, Miss Nearing, nor found out anything, to give an honest man one moment's uneasiness."

"He was more afraid of what you'd tell around when you went back home than what you'd find out, I'm sure, if he sent you away without giving you a chance to try, your hand at this despicable, sneaking detective business," she told him, scornfully.

"But it would have been wiser," he persisted, thinking of the three guns that had leaped to work the


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 vengeance of cowards and thieves, "wiser and better than the other way."

"What other way?" she asked, in sharp severity. "What do you mean?"

"I was thinking of the jokes of certain merry gentlemen," said he, grimly.

"You're even more of a green boy than I thought you were!" she declared.

"I am very green," he owned with a kindly toleration of her scornful abuse, "and I hope I'm still something of a boy. Maybe I'll outgrow both faults in time."

"You've seen how Aunt Hope has broken already under the worry and anxiety," she said, passing over him in her manner of noting only what it suited the baronial fashion of her argument to note. "I've heard them talking nearly all night time and again since you came. What do you suspect, Mr. Barrett? What da you want to know?"

"Maybe it was just a tin-horn's uneasiness for his little stake," said he.

"You knew before you came here, as all the stockholders know, why this business hasn't paid, but you don't know how the rustlers work, you folks back East; you can't realize how they can get away with so many cattle and not get caught or killed. I only wish you could run into a bunch of them, just to give you a taste of what it means!"

Evidently she had not heard of his fight with Wells and his companion his first day on the range, as she had not heard of many things which Nearing locked in


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 his secret places. Barrett knew that it was not his place to inform her. He hoped, in truth, that she might never know.

"The manly thing, the kind and friendly thing, would be to go away from here," she said, her manner softer, her voice gentle and pleading. "Give Uncle Hal the chance you'd ask for yourself in his place; believe me when I tell you he hasn't deceived anybody, doesn't want a cent of anybody's money; that he would rather put a bullet through his own heart than wrong the most unworthy person that ever trusted him."

"I hope it will all clear up for him, then, and come out right," he said.

"It will all come out right, Mr. Barrett, if you'll go away and stop worrying him by your suspicions of crookedness, or whatever it was induced you to come. Your money's safe; Uncle Hal's got the rustlers on the run, and things are going to take a turn for the good from now on. Will you take my word for it, Mr. Barrett, if you're not willing to take his?"

"I've cut all my connections with the Diamond Tail, as far as they relate to employer and employed," he told her, his voice slow and grave. "My foolish, small, sneaking investigations have come to an end."

"Have you found out anything?" she challenged, in the defiance of perfect confidence.

"Nothing to give an honest man one moment of uneasiness, as I said before, Miss Nearing."

"Then you're going away?"

"Not very far. I like this country, I'm going to settle here."


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 "Going into the cattle business?"

"I hardly think so. I don't see my way to anything very clearly yet, but when Senator Nearing comes home I'll give him my resignation—I've already quit. Does that assurance quiet your mind any?"

"If I've been hasty and harsh, and maybe I have, forgive me, Mr. Barrett," she appealed, more like herself, not overriding in the egotism of a cattle baron's sacred rights, he thought. She offered her hand, whitegleaming in the dark. Barrett took it, encased it a moment between both his own, and thus gave her absolution without words.

Barrett made allowance for her breeding, readily forgiving much, but his pride was hurt, as the pride of youth must suffer before it bends down in meekness, or strikes to the by-ways in craft. It hurt him to have her give him such a low rating among men. Without undue egotism he felt this to be untrue.

Barrett believed, he knew, in fact, that he could stand up in a man's place and give and take with the roughest of them on equal terms. It was in this coward's game of gun slinging that he lacked the speed and recklessness of consequences to class as a fighting man. He visualized the men she meant when she spoke of the big ones. Dale Findlay rose in the foreground of the picture; other figures grew distinct in the campfire, pressing behind him. And cattle barons rode into the picture, broad men of lordly bearing, insolent to look upon the weak, ready with fire and shot to drive onward all who trespassed upon their undeeded estates.

Such as these this girl knew, such as these were to


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 her the nobility of the earth. Whatever she had seen of life in her schooling and travels beyond the range, her heart had been molded there in that land; its ideals were her own, its free interpretations of right composed her own moral code.

"So you think you'll stay here on the range," she said, curious to the core to learn what he meant to do for a livelihood there. "If you don't go into the cattle business there's nothing for you but sheep, unless you turn nester."

The last choice she added with an outflung word, as one names a thing outlawed by common contempt, impossible by reason of its very baseness. Barrett did not reply at once. There was so much of forecast of the standing he would assume in her opinion if he should proceed in the hay-making venture with Fred Grubb, that his mind veered from that business.

"There's somebody coming," said he, catching the sound of an approaching horse.

"You've got a good ear if you hear anybody," she said, discounting the news in that superior way of one who resents being beaten at his own trade by an outsider.

"Yes," he admitted, "a man's ears sharpen at sea."

"You're right, I beg your pardon; there is somebody coming. But it doesn't ride like Uncle Hal."

Barrett thought it must be Findlay, or a man sent from Eagle Rock camp by him, arriving with the news of the half-breed's death, and other particulars of the failure of their plot, for Nearing's ear. For he could not get it out of his thought that the mestizo had been


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 Nearing's agent, sent there to work the rustlers' vengeance and his own.

"One of the boys," said Alma, indifferent now, as the rider halted at the high gate opening into the stable yard.

Barrett could see him, plainly outlined against the sky, reach up to pull the lever which opened the gate to riders without dismounting. There seemed to be something familiar in the carriage of the man, but he was certain it was not Findlay.

Barrett thought of going to join Fred Grubb, feeling that nothing remained to be said between this lady of the cattle lands and himself that would advance either of them toward the desired end. For he intended to go ahead with his demands on Nearing, and his investigation of him. The charge of being a man too small to play that game of the cattle country, which she had laid with so much contempt against him, would be refuted in her eyes very soon.

"I'm rather glad you're going to stay, after all, Mr. Barrett," she said, returning unexpectedly to that theme. "I've been considering it; maybe it's better that way. Stand off and take an outsider's view, even if it can't be a friendly and unprejudiced one. You'll see then how things are run in this country, and what the cattlemen have to face. Stay one winter, just one winter, and I'll promise you that you'll never question & cowman's word again when he tells you of losing thousands of his cattle in one blizzard, and thousands more when the snow covers up the grass for weeks at a time."

"Strange as it may seem to you, Miss Nearing, that's one part of it I never have questioned," Barrett told


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 her. "I've seen a few things in the way of storms"

He broke off suddenly, the flame of conscious shame coming again hotly into his face. It began to sound like a boast, a bolstering up of the manhood in him that she had sneered upon and found without weight in the rude balance of that land.

But what could a cowman know of storm or hardship, who never had clung his watch to the ice-sheathed deck of a struggling ship! Incredible as it might seem to them, to her, other parts of the world than the cattle lands contained men. But deeds, not words, must prove him in her eyes.

"Yes, but there's a shelter on a ship," she said, unimpressed by his halted speech.

"What are the men doing while the cattle are dying of cold and starvation?" he inquired.

"What can they do?" she countered, resentful of the implied criticism. "There's nothing to be done but wait till it blows over."

"And then go out and count the dead," said he, keeping to himself the thought that it was all very noble and humane.

"They skin 'em if the wolves haven't torn the hides,—but it hardly ever pays," she said, no compassion in her for that great suffering, that slow death in unvoiced misery upon those bitter wilds. "But you wait here through one winter—that will be the best medicine for you, after all, You'll understand the hazards of this business then."

When Barrett parted with her she made apology for not offering the hospitality of the house. She seemed


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 herself again, for the first time since the moment of his arrival, when she had given him her hand in welcome that could not have been feigned. Barrett believed the news brought by Manuel from Eagle Rock camp must have worked something in her mind to his prejudice, deepening her resentment against him for coming there to guard his family's interests.

He went his way through the dark to the bunkhouse to find a bed, there to meet Dan Gustin, who proved to be the rider who had arrived a little while before. It was their first sight of each other since the evening of Barrett's arrival at the ranch, Dan having been on duty many miles from the scene of Barrett's humble start as wrangler.

Dan reported that he was out of a job. It had come to the point where he either had to kill a man or quit, he said.

"I'm too poor to kill a man," he said soberly, "so I had to quit my job. I was talkin' to old Charley Thomson about it the day I met you in Saunders, Ed. He said a cowpuncher couldn't afford to kill nobody these days, it come too high; so I just let the feller live on."

"I was tellin' him about me and you goin' to start grangerin', Ed," Fred Grubb disclosed.

"What do you think of it, Dan?" Barrett asked, anxious to have the clean young fellow's opinion on the bold departure.

"I was just tellin' this old hidebound wrangler if you fellers'd let me, I'd take up a claim by the side of yours and settle down to stretch my hands and face and rest," said Dan.


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HE three friends' conference at the bunkhouse door, where they worked out the details of their proposed defiance of the cattle barons by turning granger in the forbidden bounds, was interrupted by the arrival of Nearing. Manuel was in bed by then, the house was dark, for the three conspirators against the dignity of the cattle barons had prolonged their talk far into the night. Nearing rode into the barnyard, pulling up short when he smelled their smoke.

"Who's there?" he hailed.

The three men answered, each for himself. Nearing did not speak again, and Fred Grubb, out of his long habit of caring for the horses of other men, went to take off the saddle.

"I've got to strike him for my time," Dan said, "but I believe I'll let it go till morning. I don't know, though; he may go off before daylight, he's roamin' the range like a wolf these days. I saw him away over on the other side of Eagle Rock canyon this morning."

"I've got some business with him tonight," Barrett said, getting to his feet.

Nearing had started toward the house, but walked slowly, for he was saddle-stiff and weary. He turned quickly when he heard Barrett hurrying after him.

"I'm surprised to find you here, Ed," he said.


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 "I know you are," Barrett returned with significant stress.

"What's wrong up at Eagle Rock camp that both of you fellows come down here? Who's looking after the horses?"

"Senator Nearing, I left Eagle Rock camp at noon with Fred Grubb, after he'd saved my life in that trap you and Findlay laid for me."

"What's the matter with you?" Nearing demanded, as if half way between vexation and anger. "I don't like that kind of a joke."

"After you left Findlay over west of Eagle Rock canyon this morning, Senator Nearing, he came to camp with two men, hot-foot on the arrival of a Mexican half-breed with one thumb—the fellow you delegated to come there and put out my humble light. He's over there at camp with a butcher knife through his heart, and the has come between you and me."

"I don't know what you mean—damned if I know what you mean!"

"Fred Grubb can substantiate what I've said. The Mexican is dead, Alvimo killed him as he was slinging his gun to shoot me. That part of it wasn't on the books, Alvino's part; I thought you'd like to know."

Nearing stood as if trying to read in the dark in Barrett's face whether he might be demented. He made a poor pretense of it, as his unsteady voice betrayed.

"Come over here—let me get down to the bottom of this thing you're telling me. There's some mistake, Ed. I don't know anything about a Mexican with one


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 thumb."

Nearing led the way to the front gate, plainly anxious that neither the men at the bunkhouse nor those inside his own dwelling should hear any part of what was to pass. There, in the shadow of the cedars where Alma and Barrett had stood three hours before, the cattleman put his hand on the young man's shoulder and peered again into his face.

"For God's sake, Ed, you don't mean to tell me you suspect me of a plot to murder you!"

"The Mexican was the man who got away that evening in the canyon," Barrett said, stern as judgment, backing out from under Nearing's hand. "You were more interested that day in seeing the thieves get away than stopped. Now this one comes openly into camp today with the avowed intention of killing me. What kind of a compact have you got with these rustlers, Senator Nearing? What hold has that fellow Findlay got over you that makes you step up and lick your bran out of his hand?"

"This is foolish talk from a man of your experience, Barrett—talk that I'd answer in just one way from any other man! Now, let me get at the bottom of your delirium. You say a Mexican was killed by Alvino, just as he was pulling his gun to shoot you. What had you done to provoke the man?"

Patiently, coolly as he was able to command his words, Barrett recounted the morning's experience, not forgetting the warning Manuel had given, nor Fred 'Grubb's positive identification of the slain man as the second thief.


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 "This is an ugly sort of charge to bring against a man, Barrett," said Nearing, almost convincingly grave and severe. "What motive can you supply out of your insane imagination; why should I want you taken off in this plotted, melodramatic way?"

"There's an old piratical axiom that covers the case," Barrett replied, unmoved by Nearing's sarcasm.

"If you mean that dead men tell no tales, why, in the name of God, should I want to stop your little tongue? Consider that I've dealt openly with you from the start, offered to show you the books, go into the business with you in every detail, which you refused. I sent you to the range knowing very well your purpose was to spy on me. If I'd been afraid of you getting anything on me, Barrett, wouldn't I have refused to put you to work?"

"You didn't expect me to find out anything. When we ran into those two thieves, and I broke the code by removing one of them from his profitable activities, I found out too much. Findlay wanted to pay me off for that from the very first minute. Neither of you expected a greenhorn to stumble into your secrets as headlong as I was pitched."

"Your imagination would be worth a fortune to you in fiction, Barrett, but it's a dangerous gift to let have free rein on the range. What advantage would there be to me in this compact of thieves you've framed? Why should any man rob himself?"

"I don't know, Senator Nearing. But I do know Findlay is the directing hand in the rustling that's making such wholesale raids on the herds of this com-


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 pany. Maybe you got involved with him in some way and can't pull out. He's got a lead on you some way that you don't seem to be able to break. I saw that the night he made you leave your gun off before he'd talk with you in the cabin up at Eagle Rock camp."

"Barrett"

Nearing stopped, stood silent a while. Barrett heard the latch of his throat click drily as he swallowed at the anxiety the darkness hid in his face. And again:

"Barrett"

"Senator Nearing, if you're involved with that crook and can't cut loose—if there's anything in this world I can do to help you, talk to me like a man!"

"There's nothing to all this nonsense, Barrett," Nearing gathered himself in the admirable strength that was his in hiding his emotions, holding his voice steady. "What can I do to satisfy you that everything's straight on the inside of this ranch?"

"Fire Dale Findlay, clean out his gang."

"That's an unreasonable demand, Barrett."

"From your side of it, Senator Nearing. You're in the boat with him; you're afraid, you can't fire him!"

"By God! Barrett!"

"It's a nasty dose, but you'll have to swallow it. You can either come clear with me, sir, fire that scoundrel and his men, or I'll report the facts as I know them to every stockholder in this company!"

"You'll never leave here to spread your damned slanders!"

Nearing spoke in choked, smothered voice; Barrett heard his pistol scrape the leather as he jerked it from


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 the sheath.

Barrett had read the cattleman's desperate intention in his first word; it was as plainly revealed to him as if daylight had discovered the movement of his hand to his weapon. Barrett bent low, sprang forward, caught Nearing's arm as he threw the pistol down to fire.

They struggled breast to breast for a moment, Nearing making no sound save a low one in his throat like a strangled sob. In that brief struggle the pistol was discharged; its report broke fearfully upon the quiet of the night. The flash revealed Nearing's face close to Barrett's own, white, frightful in its passion and fear. By a wrench of Nearing's arm Barrett sent the weapon flying among the cedars near the gate.

Gustin and Grubb came running, the sound of their feet heavy in the stillness which fell again as suddenly as night closed after the momentary flash of Nearing's gun. In the house a woman's voice was raised in the clamor of alarm. Nearing and Barrett stood submerged in the deeper darkness of the cedars; near the corral gate the running men had stopped, listening, cautious of rushing into something they could not see. Before they started forward again the front door opened, and Alma came speeding to the spot where the actors in the averted tragedy stood.

"Uncle Hal! I heard Uncle Hal's voice!" she said, pausing a little way from the gate, a fearful tremor in her tone.

"I'm here," Nearing answered, shaken, hoarse, the dying flash of his passion and his fear that drove him to attempt Barrett's life, leaving him weak.


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 Alma was beside him in a bound, clinging to him, pleading to know what had happened. Barrett could see her face, dim and nebulous as a mist-hidden star, lifted to him in wild appeal.

"It was only—it was just—" Nearing groped, lost for a word to cover his cowardly attempt.

"I fired at something I imagined," Barrett said. "I was nervous after what happened today. I ought to have had more sense."

Grubb and Gustin came up, stumbling in the dark. They heard Barrett's explanation, and spoke to each other in low words. A white-clad figure stood in the door, the dim light of a lamp in an inner room reaching faintly into the hall.

"It's all right, Aunt Hope—it was Mr. Barrett, shooting at nothing," Alma explained, a tilt of contempt in her words.

"Nothing, nothing at all," said Nearing, catching quickly at the absolution offered, a comforting lightness in his relieved tone.

Manuel came around the house with a lantern, holding it high to peer under it. He stood so a moment, flooding the group with sudden light. Alma had thrown a cloak over her nightdress; her hair was in confusion. She stood clinging to her uncle's arm, the arm so lately lifted in murderous intent. A moment her great eyes swept Barrett, who stood a little distance farther along toward the gate; quick, searching, questioning eyes. From Barrett back to Nearing, and to the cattleman's empty holster. A wild light of revelation leaped into her face; she searched the ground in a fearful, sweep


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 ing glance. Manuel lowered the light and came forward.

"Go to your aunt, child," Nearing directed the girl.

Alma turned obediently back to the porch, where Mrs. Nearing stood exclaiming and moaning. Nearing spoke in Spanish to Manuel, who retreated with his light.

"I'll see you two in the morning," Nearing said to Gustin and Grubb, by way of dismissal for them. "Yes, yes—I'll come in a minute"—to his wife, who stood at the porch railing calling his name.

Alma took her aunt into the house, closing the door as if to say that she knew very well that something remained unfinished between the two principals in the mysterious midnight conference that had been broken by such a dramatic interference. When Nearing and Barrett again stood alone, the cattleman unbuckled his belt and holster, and threw them on the ground near Barrett's feet.

"If you can find that fool gun of mine, Barrett, hang it on the porch," he said. "You ought to throw it in the river—I'm not to be trusted with it any more!"

Barrett did not speak. Trouble had multiplied upon him in these few minutes until he felt its sombre weight. Nearing turned toward the house; stopped, came back.

"Barrett, you're right about it. Findlay's got me where he could ruin me with a word. I can't discharge him, I can't discharge the lowest of his gang."

"Is there anything I can do to help you?" Barrett asked, moved with pity by the hopelessness of the man's word and bearing.


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 "Help!" Nearing repeated, infinitely bitter. "There is no help when a man like me can't help himself!"

He came a step nearer, leaned forward in his earnestness, speaking almost in Barrett's face.

"Can you think it a trivial matter, a compact between thieves, when I'd lift my hand against you to keep it locked a little longer with its damned consuming fire in my heart? Help! By God, Barrett! I tell you I've been riding the range like a madman for two days, hoping to rid myself of that wolf. But he's never alone; they're always with him, close to him as his shadow."

"But how long is this thing going to keep on?"

"Till one of us is dead!"

"He doesn't appear to be after you very hard," said Barrett, unable yet, for all the cattleman's dramatic earnestness, his half confession, to absolve him of some scoundrelly partnership in a criminal business that had grown out of his control.

"No; he wants to suck the last drop of my living blood!"

"But your friends, Senator Nearing"

"They can only destroy me if they interfere. I've suffered alone, I've burned, to avoid the disgrace and pain this scoundrel could bring to those who love me."

"I don't suppose it matters who—who—clears the atmosphere of that scoundrel, as long as it's done," Barrett said.

"Who can reach him if I fail? Barrett, you can't bring down a shadow with your gun. I've tried for two days to head off what they'd set to spring on you,


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 but the wind is as vulnerable as that cat. He leads me on to my just vengeance only to laugh at me. But my hour will come!"

Barrett could feel the spirit of baffled vengeance, of hollow weariness, that bore on Nearing, making him old far beyond his years. The days since he had seen Nearing at Eagle Rock camp must have been filled with extraordinary cares and troubles to wear away his spirit so.

"Fire him, you say, turn him out. It's been my problem to get rid of him for, I don't know how long—years, years! How in the hell to do it, how in the hell to do it! There's only one way, by God! one way."

"Things must go on then, the way they've been going, till the clock strikes? We must keep on contributing our gain, and more, to this thief to keep his mouth shut and save you from the fire of your own kindling. Senator Nearing, it isn't square, it isn't right. It's got to stop, you've got to cut loose from that man, and do it at once. If you can't, deputize the power to me, some way, any way. I'll tell him he's fired, I'll rid the range of him!"

"Don't you understand, don't you understand?" Nearing repeated it slowly, dully, hopelessly, as one might appeal to the dead. "It can't be done, Barrett; I'm a ruined man the day he speaks, no matter who's in power for the company. To save myself, my name, my honor, my dearer than life, I've got to hold my place as president of this company till he's out of the way. After that—anybody—I don't care who."

Again he turned to the house; again he came back.


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 "I've told you more than any living soul besides myself and Findlay knows, Barrett. I've done this to square myself a little with you, to show you the provocation for my flare-up a little while ago. Consider my worried mind, consider—everything, and let it pass, will you, Ed?"

"I ought to have more sense than to go shooting at shadows," said Barrett, with regret as simply expressed as if it had been that way.

Nearing's gait was that of an old man as he mounted the steps and entered the house. Barrett groped about beneath the cedars until he found the pistol. He loaded the empty chamber, hung the weapon in its holster on the gate, and stood there revolving in his mind the confession he had heard from this man, in whom there seemed to be neither contrition nor remorse; only fear for the consequences of exposure. It seemed a strange moral bias for a man to adjust himself to, yet quite in keeping with the baronial ethics of the range.

Whatever it might be that Findlay held over him, it was not so grave that the president of the Elk Mountain Cattle Company could be justified in his treason to those who had trusted him, in one instance, at least, with their all, A man must be a coward in his soul who would go on living the life of a felon against his will, to shield himself from some rash, hot-headed deed.

Perhaps Nearing had pulled his gun on some other man as he had slung it on Barrett there at the gate. Murder might be the hold that Findlay held over him. But one man's word against another man's would not convict, especially when men held the relative positions


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 in society of Nearing and the superintendent of the Diamond Tail.

Outside the crime of murder there were few in the code of the range to give a man concern, cattle stealing alone excepted. In the cattle barons' law that offense transcended all others. That was a crime which called for no trial. Condemnation went with the very discovery; sentence was outstanding against every member of that accursed and driven tribe.

So it came down at last in Barrett's conclusion that Nearing had been a rustler in his day, involved with Findlay, perhaps. Should Findlay betray him, Nearing might swing as the most despicable of outlaws on some bleak-limbed cottonwood at the river side. It must be that. There was not room for any other fear so great in the heart of a man who had faced so long the perils and hardships of the range.

Findlay alone must share this secret with Nearing, or it would not be a weapon of such force in his hands. Divide it between three men, or five, and it would grow correspondingly weaker. Nearing had not said'the secret was Findlay's alone, but his manner had justified that conclusion. He was ready, anxious, to do murder to free himself of the driving hand; he plotted against Findlay's life with the craft of a man seeking to destroy a cattle-killing beast, notorious for a hundred miles.

Barrett could picture that grim chase, that stalking, that tireless riding, that wait and watch for an unguarded moment. He could see the dark sneer of the hunted man's face, who rode in confidence, defiant, without fear, hedged around by watchful eyes. Nearing


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 must be preserved, he must be kept alive to wear away his heart in vengeful, fatuous gnawing. Dead, the shadow under which Findlay pursued his wholesale robbery would be lifted; other hands would take up the direction of the company's business, Findlay would be forced to flee for his life. While Nearing lived this shameful robbery must go on. Unless, unless

There would be no such ending, though, to Nearing's disgraceful bondage. Findlay would not lay himself open to the peril of the cattleman's long-burning vengeance. It seemed logical that Findlay had confined his stealing to the Diamond Tail ranch for the past several years, at least. It would have been folly to extend his operations, Barrett reasoned, and run risks, when he could work his deviltry in safety there. And to put an end to the loss that was ruining the company, eating up the little patrimony that was so much to the Barretts; to end this tragic, shameful, disastrous conspiracy, Dale Findlay must die. There seemed to be no other way.

Barrett forgot his companions who waited for him anxiously at the bunkhouse door; forgot the lapse of time, for a little while the place. He stood in the black shadow of the cedars, his thoughts projected over the range like a sweeping searchlight beam, seeking to compass the fall of this dark robber, who held the soul of a man, no matter how weak and guilty a man, in his hand and crushed it, little by little, day by day.

A soft sound in the path behind him drew him back from this thought-winging search, Alma. She had struck a match to look under the cedars for her uncle's


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 gun, missed from his holster when she stood beside him there a little while ago, the truth half guessed.

She bent low, holding the branches aside, the light of her match strong on her face. Barrett was not more than twenty feet from her, but unseen. She applied another match to the flickering spark of the first, pushing her search with little rustlings among the branches. Barrett hoped she would pass without discovering him.

A little while in that spot, and she gave over the search, turning to the cedars on the other side of the gate, close against which Barrett stood. When her next match flashed, held in the cup of her hand against the low breath of wind, she discovered him, and the weapon she sought hanging beside him on the fastenings of the gate.

Alma started, exclaiming softly in surprise. Her little flame, caught for a moment unshielded, was whipped out by the wind.

"I didn't know anybody was here," she said, in the senseless speech of confusion.

"I should not have been," Barrett returned, in confusion scarcely less than her own. "I guess I was moonstruck—on a cloudy night."

"You know what I came to look for."

"It's here," he said, "Senator Nearing asked me to hang it on the porch. He was tired carrying the weight of it."

She touched his arm when she reached to take the heavy belt and pistol; she ran her fingers along it, as one blind, until she found his hand. Firm and warm, friendly and assuring, was the pressure of her fingers


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 for the moment before she relieved him of his charge.

"I slandered you tonight, Mr. Barrett," she owned in contrition. "You are a man among men!"

She sped away to the house again as silently as she had come. Perhaps Barrett might be forgiven if, at that moment, he felt himself very nearly a hero, after all.


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EARING surprised the three adventurers next morning by a full endorsement of their plan for taking up homesteads in the valley above the ranch. The country was coming to it, he said; all around the Diamond Tail farmers were beginning to cut up the land. There was no wisdom in the cattlemen's further contention with them, for the farmers would win in the end, the day of vast herds on the public domain was fast coming to a close.

Further than that, he offered them the use of his teams and hay-making machinery, the latter already stored in a shed on the fenced land from which the Iowa grangers had been driven. Give him a few tons of hay if they felt like it in return for the use of the machinery; that was as much as he asked. He advised them to get at their hay-making at once, as the time between then and frost was short.

Speechless in amazement as they were over this generous offer, Gustin and Grubb still had suspicion of something behind it that would not be so comfortable. They had expected to fight for the land. They believed now that Nearing had some scheme of his own of which they were designed to be the victims.

Barrett did not share this distrust. To him there appeared to be in the cattleman's concession the thought and deed of a man who felt his consequence


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 departing from him, the uselessness of further struggle against inevitable defeat. For, light as he tried to make his spirits appear that morning, Nearing was a changed man. His doom seemed over him, the shadow of it at his feet.

Grubb was not to be cheated out of his security by the unstable assurance of a cowman's word. He insisted on going to Saunders to consult his shrewd friend, Charley Thomson, interview the government land agent, and make entry in due and legal form for himself, at least. The others could go down when the hay-cutting was over and get their papers.

So it was agreed. Barrett and Dan were to go that morning and take possession of the fenced lands, tinker up the machinery and start cutting hay.

Dan Gustin was gay as he made ready for the start after Fred had swallowed his breakfast like a snake and gone his way to Saunders. Barrett enjoyed no such lightness of heart. The threat of tragedy that hung over that peaceful-seeming home reached out to him as one numbered in the climax of accumulated secrets, troubles and deceits, soon to fall as a thunderbolt among them.

Nearing had not been called upon before to play his part in the eyes of one to whom his duplicity was known. Bravely as he had carried concealed under his mantle, the fox that had gnawed away his vitals, he was breaking under fear of discovery at last. This morning he was haggard and gray, thin of cheek, restless of eye; a man baffled in his wild desire to rid himself of the thing that stood between him and his peace. He


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 did not refer to the preceding night's scene between him and Barrett as he drew the young man aside while Dan was hitching the team.

"To all appearances you men will be working for me," Nearing said. "Nobody's likely to bother you this fall under that arrangement, but I can't answer for what may happen to you next spring when you begin to plow, if you stick to it that long. You're pretty close to the edge of our range up there, somebody from the outside may come along and take a shot at you, even the Diamond Tail boys may cut loose when they find you're not hired by me. They resent the coming of the grangers more than the cattlemen themselves. It means cutting them loose from the only trade they know."

Barrett said that, for himself, he did not know that the experiment would extend beyond the hay-making. From what he had heard of the winters in that country, the prospect was not alluring.

So they parted, Barrett taking along his saddlehorse at Nearing's generous urging. Not a word was said between them of the past; not a hint of the future which that gray, half-defeated, baffled man must face and fight in his own way alone.

Dan found himself out of tobacco that evening, and Barrett was little better stocked. On Dan's suggestion that they ride to Bonita and replenish supplies for the busy days ahead of them, they saddled and set out.

Not much had been accomplished that day, for neither of them ever had been introduced to a mowing machine before. Barrett was the one who finally solved


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 the question of getting the sickle bar down to engage the grass, and getting it up again to pass over an obstruction.

Dan had turnea the machine over to him with that, as a tribute to his mechanical genius, saying that the simple, skeleton construction of a rake was nearer his understanding. They had haggled off a few acres of grass by sunset, but such labor as that was little more than play to them, tough as both of them were.

"I want to introduce you to a friend of mine," Dan proposed. "You've heard me speak of her—Cattle Kate."

Barrett expressed more delight over the prospect than he felt, although he had a well defined curiosity to see this queen of the range, whose name was familiar in every cowpuncher's mouth for a hundred miles or more, he had been told. Thus, with the anticipation of delight on one hand, of a rather commonplace adventure on the other, the two friends rode into Bonita, the place that Fred Grubb had described as a louse clinging to the border of the military reservation.

Bonita was a place of few houses ranged along the road that divided the military reservation from the unrestricted part of that country. It had drawn as close to the source of its sustenance as it was geographically possible for it to do, and there it lay waiting with its doors open like gaping mouths, to swallow such victims as came its way.

It was a place proscribed, a pitfall of iniquities, where enlisted men from the post came to revel away their pay; to which cowpunchers and wranglers rode incred-


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 ible distances to break the lonely monotony of their lives. The place was no better and no worse than scores of its kind that have flourished and passed away. A small tributary of the river ran down behind it, the highroad before its door, and there Cattle Kate Medford kept the hotel, her father the saloon that was an important part of it.

Barrett and Dan arrived in Bonita long after nightfall, when the limited round of its entertainment was well under way. Several horses were ranged along the hitching rack before the hotel, many saddles lay on the porch to show that guests had come to stay the night out, and other nights out, until their money was done.

In spite of Dan's enlargement upon the attractions of Cattle Kate, Barrett was not thinking of her as he swung to the ground before her door. He was wondering, with a heaviness in his heart and gloom depressing him, whether Nearing had caught Dale Findlay off his guard that day, and balanced his shameful account.

Cattle Kate kept a small general store in the reception room, or office, of the hotel. There one might buy candy, kerchiefs for the neck; ammunition, clothing, peanuts, spurs; all the gauds and necessities in demand among the buckos of the range. In this little store, with the hotel counter on one side, chairs for loungers all around, Cattle Kate met Dan Gustin and his friend.

Cattle Kate, as Barrett had been given to understand by Dan as they journeyed to meet her, had gained her name and fame as a range rider in the days when her father was in the cattle business. His business, it


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 appeared, had been chiefly with the cattle of other men, to such extent that he had been mewed up a certain number of years in the state's corral to break him of the habit.

This had left a bitterness and vengeful spirit in his daughter, Cattle Kate, who was now the avowed encmy of every cattle baron between the Elk Mountains and the Black Hills. So much Dan thought necessary to tell his friend, to post him against any eccentricities of the young lady which were pretty sure to spring from her hot and handy tongue.

For all cowpunchers and grangers Cattle Kate had the hand of hospitality always extended. There was nothing in her stock a cowpuncher couldn't have, money or no money; his word was as good as a baron's bond. But if a crook tried to beat her, Cattle Kate was better than a lawyer at collecting. She had a little brassbound code of her own. Dan declared with all solemnity that she could clip a man's ear at forty feet and never muss his hair.

From this picturesque preparation Barrett expected to meet something more she-devilish than appeared in a little white apron at the partition door behind which the tables of the dining-room were to be seen. Cattle Kate was a stocky young woman of perhaps twenty-eight, with a buffalo-like look about her head and shoulders. Her face was broad and masculine, her skin fair and freckled; her heavy black hair, ringletted like shavings from a carpenter's plane, was cut to fall to the nape of her neck. It was held back from her forehead by a long, curved comb, called a roach-comb in


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 that time.

Her formidable bill-collector was not in sight, nothing more repellent than the broad, starched strings of her little apron was about her ample waist. She smiled as she shook hands with Dan, greeting him with quick, glad word; and smiled, a different smile altogether, when she gave Barrett her hand.

One would not expect to find phases in this woman, Barrett thought, but there was as much difference between smile and smile as wind and calm. His was a tentative smile, an acceptance on condition, an arms'-length-off smile. Dan Gustin's went to him warm out of the middle of her partial heart.

Here was a girl known to hundreds of wild devils, honest man and thief, soldier and civilian, addressed familiarly by all of them, yet a good girl, as Barrett knew by that unfathomable something that stands in an honest woman's eyes. He felt an unaccountable gratification over this discovery; it seemed to him that he had found something precious in an unexpected place.

And she knew, as well as he knew, that he was not of the kind that commonly came to her door. Fred Grubb had said she knew the secrets of the range, that she could tell a man many things. Barrett wondered if she could tell him what it was Dale Findlay knew. If she did know this, she would have to think tenderly of a man before he could get the key of the secret from her hand.

"You boys had supper?" she asked. Finding they had not, she at once disappeared to provide it.

There was one other belated guest eating supper


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 when Cattle Kate summoned the two waiting customers into the dining-room. This man sat across the room from the table to which the hostess escorted Barrett and Dan, the light of the swinging lamp strong over him. As they took their places Dan leaned over the table and whispered:

"That's Charley Thomson, the big lawyer."

Not much outward indication of greatness about the man, Barrett thought, viewing him with renewed interest. Thomson was arrayed as usual, his rusty black coat over an untidy woolen shirt, but his gray-streaked black hair was combed to a smoothness that scarcely would have given a fly a footing. He seemed to carry his attitude of sarcastic contempt to the table with him, eating as though he scorned the operation, and bent to it only as one of the contemptible conventions of the world which custom bound him to serve.

"Must have some big case he's up here lookin' after, gettin' witnesses or something," said Dan. "Fred'll miss him; he'll have to go to somebody else."

"It don't look to me like he'd missed much," Barrett said, offhand and unimpressed.

"They never hang a man that's got Charley Thomson for a lawyer," Dan whispered, cautious as if eulogy were a thing distasteful to the great lawyer's ears. Dan watched him with admiration as he forked large pieces of steak into his fish-like mouth. "What do you suppose he charges for gittin' a man off for a shootin', Ed?"

"Not much, I'd say."

"Three to five thousand!" said Dan, delivering it


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 triumphantly.

"You'd think he'd blow himself for a new shirt and collar, then," said Barrett.

"He wouldn't be the same man in a stiff collar, Ed. I don't believe he could pull the same in any other rig."

Dan himself was not the same with that impressive legal magnate so near at hand. His mind was so full of him, his eyes so fastened on him, that he had to seek the familiar road to his mouth with slow hand. Barrett looked to see him jab out his eye with his fork. A man had achieved fame, indeed, thought Barrett, when he could move by his mere presence such a vast feeling of respect and awe.

When Thomson finished his meal he took the greasy old flop-brimmed black hat from a corner of the table, put it on as if to announce that his service of convention was at an end, looked savagely about his immediate vicinity to make sure that no valuables were being left behind, and went out. He went with considerable haste, one hand in his trousers pocket, the skirt of his long coat pushed back from his rusty leg, as if pressed by the obligation of immediate payment for what he had consumed.

"He's headin' for the bar," Dan said. "Takes a drink before eatin' and after eatin', and every little while between. If you was to shut his whisky off he'd die in a day."

"If I had him against me I'd send him a barrel," Barrett said.

"Wouldn't make a bit of difference to Charley; he'd only drink so much in a day. You can't get him drunk,


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 Ed, no more than you can drownd a frog. I went to sce him about killin' a feller the day I met you in Saunders."

"The devil you did!" Looking up in astonishment at the confession so frankly and casually made.

"Charley wouldn't take the case. Said to kill him first and then come to see him. But he said it wasn't no game for a cowpuncher like me, and I tell you, Ed, I believed him when he told me what it cost. So that's why that man's a livin' now."

"Was it another man, or"

"Same one, Ed. Foreman of my bunch, little pock-marked, tow-headed devil with his front teeth slantin' out like a roof from pullin' on dried beef they used to feed him and bring him up on when he was a kid down in Texas. Wasn't worth it, Ed. I wouldn't give three to five thousand dollars to shoot that man if I had as much money as Hal Nearing."

"I don't believe you'd get that much fun out of it," Barrett returned, his own conscience still unquiet, still under the melancholy cloud of the deed necessity had set to his hand.

"I'd like to know what old Charley's up here in Bonita for," Dan ran on, unable to get away from the remarkable event. "Nobody ain't been killed up here lately that'd be worth his time to fool with."

The question of the lawyer's presence in Bonita appeared to be answered in part, at least, when the two friends left the dining-room. Dale Findlay and Thomson were lighting cigars from the box of the best brand Cattle Kate sold. Shoulder to shoulder, Thomson talk-


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 ing in his low droning voice, the pair left the hotel, walking away together in the dark.

Dan's mystification, astonishment, curiosity, combined in his face in a speechless stare. He turned from Kate to Barrett; from Barrett back again to Kate. She smiled, understanding him better than if he had expressed his thoughts with his lips.

"I wouldn't like to be the man that's got to pay the bill," said Dan, turning from the door, where he had stood a little while looking after the illustrious pair.

Barrett left his friend leaning over the cigar case, Cattle Kate with elbows on it across from him, their heads rather close together. It seemed to be Dan's night, there being no immediate competition. Barrett wondered if there could be a man for every horse, to say nothing of every saddle on Cattle Kate's porch, in town. He concluded presently that there was, basing the conclusion entirely on the burst of noise that issued from the little dance hall at the farther end of the one-sided street.

In this a band of three Italians supplied the music that was only incidental to the beating of, and loud calling of the figures of the quadrille. Barrett looked a moment through the open door upon a scene such as he had witnessed with variations, and no elaborate ones at that, in many quarters of the globe.

Long ago this sort of diversion had lost its novelty for him, seasoned veteran in spite of his years. He turned back toward the peace and quiet of the white-painted plank hotel, thinking of the two men who had walked from its door a little while before.


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 A pair to draw to, Dale Findlay and that man. What sort of an evil scheme might hatch under their joint brooding no man could tell, but it would be a heavy bill for somebody, as Dan had said. The harried, gaunt-growing face of Hal Nearing presented itself with the thought. Barrett began to feel a great pity for the man, a great desire to take hold of the tangle of his life with him and help clear away the encumbering wreckage.

Back to the hotel, to find Dan and Cattle Kate still in their close conference across the showcase glass. Barrett sat on the steps, the light from the door dimly on the heap of saddles close at hand, to wait for his friend to conclude this pleasant interlude in his too barren life.

As always, the question of what next in the affairs of the Diamond Tail presented itself to Barrett. Plainly, things could not be allowed to run on as they were going, Nearing seeking in his insane way to end by violence the evil charm of this secret in his life which no man could share; Findlay elusive as the wind before him, hedged about by guards at every turn, Even tonight the hound-faced man and his partner were in Bonita, dancing with the poor scarecrow drabs in the dive up the road.

Barrett chafed under the inactivity of a single hour. Nearing had refused his offer of co-operation, fearful of discovery; in the desperation of his fear he had drawn his weapon to slay him in his own dooryard. What next? Where to take hold of this repellent tangle of Nearing's life without bringing down the disgrace


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 which the cattleman bartered his soul to avert? For spare the man, small of soul, cowardly, treacherous and dishonest as Barrett knew him to be, this robbed stockholder desired now above all.

Not for Nearing's sake. For the memory of a swift hand fleeting softly down his arm to clasp his fingers; for the memory of wrong generously admitted, and made right in a quick word out of the heart.

Dan was obliged to yield his monopoly of Cattle Kate presently by the arrival of more customers to swell the tide of business in Bonita. These were cowboys from a ranch some fifty or sixty miles distant, some of them known to Dan. They greeted him hilariously, and carried him off to the saloon which was part of Cattle Kate's establishment run by her father. Barrett dodged them by sneaking off in the dark.

It appeared that Dan was in for a night of it now, for presently Barrett saw him making for the dance hall with the others. In that place of diversion another saloon was maintained, with games of chance to comb up whatever loose change might escape the rest. Barrett knew that Dan would come home like a roaming dog in his own time. He had no inclination to join him in his revelries.

As Barrett rode back to the squat log cabin in the hay meadows, his gloomy forebodings of failure attended him. Numerous schemes for taking up his purpose from a new angle presented, only to dissolve in the test of application. There seemed to be but one way to save the investors in the Elk Mountain Cattle Company, himself in particular, from complete loss


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 without bringing Nearing down to a fearful and unknown disgrace. Foolish as it appeared to him, senseless, unbelievable, this could be accomplished only in the killing of a man.

Barrett rebelled against the weakness of this argument. To him it seemed so insanely unreasonable that no man should have either the effrontery to advance it or the credulity to accept it. Yet he had accepted it, he did accept it. Dale Findlay must die. To save Nearing's honor, from what blotch of horrible stain only two men knew, that close-mouthed, dark-souled man must be shot like a wolf.

Imagine the situation, said Barrett, fuming and fevered in his rebellious, indignant mind. A hireling thief must be kept in a position where he could go on robbing with impunity, because one man had transgressed in some monstrous deed, the secret of which was Findlay's. And a man could not be shot out of hand, without excuse or justification, without strong provocation of some kind. True, Findlay had attempted Barrett's life. On that score Findlay's life was forfeit to him; for his future security he might shoot Findlay on sight and probably walk clear in the law. But there was no desire in him to do this, unmanly as such an attitude might seem.

Barrett felt himself to be in a blind lane, against the barriers of which he would wear himself out lunging to find an opening. Better to sleep on it, he reasoned; let it rest until tomorrow. He put it aside from his contrivings and speculations, and spread his blankets on new hay, and slept.


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AN had not returned when Barrett woke before sunrise next morning. It was not to be expected, Barrett considered, until Dan's money was gone; nothing for him to worry about, much as he liked the young chap and wished him better companions. Dan would resent it if he should go for him and fetch him back to the hay-making. Let him alone and he would return shame-faced and repentant in a day or two.

Barrett raked into windrows the hay cut the day before, and then spent considerable time working out which end of the was the bow. He got it straight after several experiments in fitting it to the wagon, and put on what he considered a tremendous load of hay, with the intention of driving it over to Nearing's barn after dinner.

It wasn't so much of a load, but it was fresh and fragrant, a fit offering on the altar of gratitude, Barrett believed, such as was due for the favors shown and the help extended in this venture. Nearing should have, by all courtesy and right, the first fruits of their labor there.

He drove this imposing load of hay around to the front of the cabin, and left it standing in the fairway of the harbor, as he thought of the grass-grown road letting through the gate into the highway. He was returning from feeding the team to prepare his own


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 dinner, when his attention was arrested by two horsemen approaching from the direction of the ranch.

There seemed to be something familiar in the pose of one of them. Barrett went on past the house, stopping near the wire fence at the roadside to wait the rise of the riders out of a little swale, thinking it might be some of the boys of the Diamond Tail whom he would not want to let pass without a friendly hail.

At the first sight of the riders as they came up out of the hollow, Barrett's heart fluttered and seemed to drop. Dale Findlay was the rider whose carriage seemed familiar, fixed but transitorily in his memory from the day he had seen the superintendent ride into Eagle Rock camp.

Barrett was unarmed; his revolver hung in the house, a hundred feet or more behind him, where he had left it that morning before going to work. It had seemed such an unfitting implement to drag around in the peaceful occupation of hay-making. Besides, the weight of it was considerable around the body of a sweating man.

Too late now he realized his over-confidence in his situation and pursuit. Dale Findlay, not a hundred yards away, had his gun out, carrying it raised high to throw down for a shot that he should not mean to cripple.

Barrett made a dash for the load of hay a few rods to the right of where he stood, hoping desperately to make that shelter before Findlay could throw a telling shot. As he ran he heard the crack of their guns, but he made it to the wagon untouched. There he waited


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 until they should ride past a little way, as he knew they would do, in their purpose of driving him into the open again.

Findlay rode by in a moment, his speed checked. He leaned over his saddle-horn, looking sharply along the load of hay, into which Barrett pressed himself until only his legs and feet were visible on the ground. Evidently Findlay could not see that much of him, for he threw a shot at the top of the load, calling to his companion some directions which Barrett could not catch.

Hoping, against all reason as he knew, that he could keep the hay between him and the two scoundrels who sought his life as coolly and systematically as they would brand a calf, Barrett broke from his hiding and ran for the house. He ran a quartering course, in such manner that Findlay's companion would see him first.

There was no ground, certainly, for Barrett's thought that this man would not be so deeply, so personally, concerned in killing him as Findlay. But this was the thing that flashed into his mind as he ran toward the cabin, holding a course that, if followed, must compel him to veer sharply to reach the door.

Barrett heard the first shot that followed his break from shelter strike the logs of the house. Others close after it snipped through the tall grass at his feet. Findlay was not firing those shots; he knew that as well as if he had turned to see. Findlay had not seen him yet; every foot was a precious gain. It was the hound-faced man, companion of Findlay on all his rides, who was throwing those wild shots. Findlay's aim would be more deadly.


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 What wild-rising thoughts press into the compass of a breath when a man flees the outreaching hand of death! In a yard Barrett reviewed the affairs of the Elk Mountain Cattle Company from its beginning to that day; reviewed his own life, its mistakes, its hidden things, its hopes and ambitions now so far away. Alma Nearing, Dan Gustin, Fred Grubb, all leaped up and whirled in the fast-spinning reel of panoramic review, the hot, burning urge of life speeding him on toward the open door.

It seemed as though his breast must burst in the pressure of that perilous flight, all life concentrated there, big, pulse-quickened, ready to leap away from the broken citadel which it warmed and sanctified. Dale Findlay was firing now, and Barrett was still a rod from the door.

At the very threshold the pang of a bullet smote him. The pain of it was as if a redhot bayonet had been plunged into his breast. Barrett sank to his knees, the day suddenly darkening, a hand thrown out to the doorpost; he fell within the door, arms spread as if to embrace the shelter his striving could not win in time.

But the life, the soul, that mysterious essence that quickens brain and heart, had fled for only a moment, as swallows fly in consternation at evening from a familiar resting-place at the fall of a bit of mortar, a fragment of soot. Death had not won dominion yet; the pale soul came fluttering back to its seat.

At the sound of a horse galloping into the dooryard, Barrett drew himself into the cabin, staggered to his


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 feet, closed and barred the heavy batten door.

A bullet splintered the oak near him, bursting through the thick plank as he drew the bar into the upright forks fitted rudely to support it. Blood was rising to his mouth as he turned to snatch his pistol from the nail beside the door. He knew a lung had been Pierced; the thought of death was upon him.

The one small window in the cabin, its glass long since shot out by passing cowboys, had been boarded up with sawmill slabs spiked to the logs. It would need a crowbar to pry them loose. These slabs were bullet-pitted outside, indicating that they had been put there by the former occupants of the place after the shining mark of their window panes had been dimmed. The room was dark, save only for the light that leaked in about the crevices of the door, a gloomy place for a trapped, wounded man to defend the failing shred of his life as he might.

Barrett believed he had but a few minutes to live. His hurt was in the right breast, a little way below the collar bone. With every inspiration of breath he could feel the blood bubble out of the wound; where it escaped into the pleural cavity there was a burning as if a stream of living fire wasted from his veins. And, strangely enough, inconsistent with his peril as it might be, Barrett's dominating thought was that he must die unavenged, unable to drag even one of his murderers down with him into the dark.

Findlay and the other man evidently believed him already dead; near the door they were talking of him as one accounted for and done. Barrett knew they


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 were still sitting in their saddles, not thinking it worth while to dismount over such a trivial affair.

Sick as he was, dizzy as the world and dark before his vision; racked by such agony as no man endures twice, the desire for revenge leaped as high in Barrett's heart as if life bloomed full behind it. For of all the human passions, vengeance is the first, the strongest, and the last.

Light came in between the logs at a place near the door where the earth plaster had fallen away. The hole was small, about a foct from the floor. Barrett pulled himself along the floor to the opening and squinted out. He could see the legs of a horse a little way from the cabin wall. The rider he could not see.

With pistol barrel he pushed cautiously against the hard adobe which filled the four-inch crack between the logs. The two men rode nearer; one tried the door with his foot from the saddle. Barrett heard Findlay order his man to inspect the window and, in his haste to improve the little time he believed to be his, he pushed incautiously against the blocking earth, dislodging a large piece which fell near Findlay's horse, startling the beast to a warning snort.

Findlay dashed away from the door. Peering through his chink, Barrett saw him, leaning and looking in his cautious way, lift his pistol and fire several quick shots into the door. Although he could see Findlay plainly, Barrett discovered that he could not train his pistol through the chink for a shot. At the best he could do little more than cripple the horse, but he fired, gripping, clinging, holding in reeling desperation


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 to the fast-running line of life.

Findlay's answering shot knocked dirt into Barrett's eyes. Blindly the wounded man fired again. To his surprise, no shot replied. He steadied himself with hand against the wall, and looked out, wondering dimly if his wild chance shot had hit.

But no; they had another plan for putting out the embers of life which they had discovered still warming their victim's heart. They were backing the load of hay toward the cabin; the smoke that blew ahead of it told that they had set it afire. They intended to block up the door with the burning load of hay and roast him like a grub in a nut.

Barrett believed it would be better to die in the open, fighting with his last breath, the trembling thread quickly cut by a bullet, than to lie huddled there in torture multiplied. He got to his knees, pistol in his left hand, his right arm numb from the wound in a numbness that seemed spreading, involving all his members.

He groped, with his pistol barrel until he found the bar across the door; pushed it, dislodged it. A moment 80, weaving upon his knees, he stood, like a seasick man upon a rolling ship. Then a darkness rose, and swept upward and over him, obscuring all the world.

Yet not insensible he lay there, smothered in this incomparable blackness, face to the floor. Some finer sense, some independent, projectible attribute, it seemed, stood sentinel outside that threatened door. Barrett saw, as a man in a dream, every turn of the wheels that brought the bulging end of the load of hay


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 nearer; saw the gray-green smoke rising in growing volume above the red flame that mounted and wavered and whipped in the wind; saw the scuffing feet of Findlay and his man as they pushed at the thick wagon-tongue, peering through the smoke and flame to guide the load precisely.

All this he saw, although his eyes were blinded in the obscuration of a blackness deeper than the deepest night, and his limbs lay heavy, helpless, immovable as if weighted with chains.

Perhaps the spirit, apart from his body save by some thin filament that soon must dissolve, hovered there cognizant of all this striving, this cruel determination, to have an insignificant human life. Whatever it was, Edgar Barrett saw without eyes, heard without ears, but did not feel again the pain of his wound or the dread of death.

Then away from this immediate scene the sentinel seemed to speed, discovering one riding swiftly, a coiled rope swinging at the saddle-horn, dust of the fleet horse gray in the green plain.

Nearer the rider came, yet there seemed a mist before his face. Barrett was conscious of a struggle to identify the rider, as a man rebels and fights to break through the inconsistencies of a dream, knowing that it is nothing more than a dream, and turns in relief, though still asleep, when he has thrown off the overriding terror of its shadow.

Dan Gustin, said that living sense that struggled in the wounded man's soul to pierce the mist before the rider's face; Dan Gustin, the man logically to be ex-


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 pected. Still the rider's face was obscured by the mist. Only the pistol was plainly evident in his hand, and the coiled rope swinging at the saddle-horn.

There was a soundless burst of flame from the rider's pistol; another, another. Quick mounting, frantic riding away, that leaping, soundless flame reaching after the murderous scoundrels. And then peace; profound, silent, sweet.

The mysterious sentinel returned again to report to Barrett's numb body the contact of cold water on his face. And there was the sound of a woman crying, piteous and low.

Barrett opened his conscious eyes again upon the day. Not far away from where he lay stood the burning load of hay, a saddled horse still straining on the rope that ran from saddle-horn to end of the ironlooped wagon tongue. The cabin he could not see, but the sky was over him, the breath of life was in his throat, the sound of a woman's low, choked sobbing in his ears.

Alma Nearing bent over him, her weeping changed at sight of his revival into a glad, a boundlessly thankful, cry.

It was as though death had yielded him one flash of consciousness that he might impress upon the records of human gratitude, scroll so sacred and so scant, the credit he must have been uneasy in his grave to have left ungiven. Then the door was closed again, and Barrett lay as the dead.


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UTUMN colors were coming into the sugar maples and quaking aspen in the patio where the fountain tinkled among the roses. As Barrett sat there in the afternoon sun with Alma Nearing, recovering from his weakness and his wound, the first fall of leaves, already touched by frost, showered at their feet.

A strong patient, fit to take the road; a rebellious patient against the soft restraint of his lovely nurse, who denied him his pipe with stern prohibition. Barrett argued that a man was well when the yearning to smoke came over him with such insistent and healthy urge.

"Tomorrow," she yielded. "But if the smoke gets into that tender spot in your lung and irritates it, and you take consumption, don't blame me."

"It's as sound as it ever was, Alma," he insisted, thumping his chest to prove his contention.

"Tomorrow; not one minute sooner."

Barrett looked moodily at the whirling shower of leaves that came down the wind from the maple tree. 'Alma, mischief in her eyes, reached behind her and produced his friendly little pipe.

"I can't bear your sufferings any longer," she said, laughing at his simple joy. "Smoke, even if it does make you sick."

"Somebody's always saving my life—this is the sec-


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 ond time for you," he told her, so gravely that the joy seemed to have departed from him.

"Are you sorry?" she asked.

"Only that I owe so much I'll never have lives enough to go around and pay my debts. First it was Dan, down at Saunders, then"

"Dan? Down at Saunders? When did you get into a scrape at Saunders, Ed?"

"It was that rustling gent, you know, the fellow from the Indian Nation, the one that—lost his life up in the canyon the evening I went to Eagle Rock camp with your Uncle Hal."

"Manuel told me about that one," she said, speaking as if she resented the conspiracy of secrecy that had kept this news from her in other sources.

Barrett had got the impression, as such sick fancies creep in and establish themselves sometimes, that he had told Alma all about meeting and fighting the rustler as he lay stretched out under Dale Findlay's bullet. He had the impression, moreover, that he had revealed a great many things which had been better kept to himself. This was a revelation to him now. He felt that he must not have emptied himself of quite all he knew.

"It was a sad and unfortunate thing for me," he said, leaving no room for doubt of his entire sincerity. "That thing kept bothering me all the time while I was laid up, coming up to haunt me like a mistake a man makes that costs somebody his life."

"He got just what was coming to him, all right!" she said, with strong indorsement of his deed. "I'd shoot one of those range wolves in a second if I caught


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 him running off our cattle. You remember I told you there's a never-dying feud between me and that tribe?"

"I remember. And the next time it was old Fred Grubb," hurrying on from the question of feuds and vengeance, not pleased to hear her talk of that. "The time that Mexican and Findlay played the joke on me, you know."

"What a fool I was to try to make you believe, even myself believe, it was a joke!"

"No; I don't see that you were," he said, after a philosophical pause, "It might have been; I could have been convinced that it was if Findlay hadn't followed it up so rough."

"The cowardly sneak!"

"You saved my precious remnant of a life that day. But you never told me, Alma, how you knew. You didn't just happen along; I thought I saw you coming, away down the road, while I was lying there where I kicked over in front of the door."

"But of course you didn't, you couldn't," she said, looking at him curiously.

Barrett shook his head, sunk in a solemn cloud of thought. He lived again that experience when all that was sentient in him had crossed the borderland of death, prone upon the cabin floor, the burning load of hay against the door.

"Findlay and that shadow of his, Worthy Glass"

"Worthy! Heaven help the rest of us!" said he.

"That's his name, the name on the payroll, anyway."


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 "Is it still there?"

"Yes," said she, sadly. "Findlay and that man came here that morning with an old slinking scoundrel named Thomson, a lawyer of evil repute. Dale and Uncle Hal were shut up with that old snake an hour or more. What they were trying to get out of him I don't know. I happened to be at the barn, saddling up to go to the post, when Dale and Glass came in for their horses. I heard Dale say they'd go on up to the hay ranch while they were at it, and clean that bunch out. I rushed to Uncle Hal, but he refused to take it seriously. At least he pretended to make light of it. I never have been able to understand, Ed, why he didn't go out and call them off."

Alma made this revelation reluctantly, shame for the confession in her low, sad voice. Barrett shook his head, slowly, as if he, too, had pondered it long, yet could not answer it.

"Jt was because he thought Dan and I ought to be able to take care of ourselves," he said, willing to manufacture an excuse for Nearing for her sake.

"Findlay knew you were alone; he knew very well that charmer of his was holding Dan in Bonita!"

"Cattle Kate?"

"Who else? Dan's been here a dozen times to see you and try to square himself for failing you when he was needed. Poor fool! he doesn't know himself that she was only stringing him along to help Findlay. She'd kill a man to help Findlay."

"She didn't impress me as a bad one," Barrett reflected.


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 "Not that way, not bad in the way the other ones in Bonita are bad. Only she's blind over Dale Findlay, poor soul. I know her well, I often stop and see her when I go through Bonita to visit the post."

She seemed to have dropped the thread of her recital. Barrett waited a little while for her to take it up again, then reminded her.

"When Senator Nearing refused to interfere with their innocent diversion, you saddled and rode after them yourself."

"They were about a mile up the road when I started. But they never looked back, they knew there wasn't a man on this ranch that would follow them!"

She said this bitterly, the scorn that she could so well express in the mere modulation of a word, the lifting of a brow, the toss of her head, was wanting there. There was much of sadness, something of shame.

Barrett took her hand in the frankness of the understanding that had grown up between them. He held it in firm and sincere clasp while he looked into her eyes.

"Alma, I'd rather it was you that came than a regiment of cattlemen," he said.

She smiled, reached with her free hand and patted his, with the comforting, assuring caress of one much older and wiser than he.

"And then what?" he asked, holding very tightly to her hand.

"They rode off, and I snaked the wagon away from the door," she replied.

"And that was all?"

"That was all, Ed."


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 Barrett was not satisfied. He wanted to confirm or dismiss the impression he had that shots had been fired, that Findlay and Glass had retreated, dropping their devilish scheme to have his life by fire, only upon the argument of force. But this must wait a closer understanding, a more intimate footing between them, granting the hope that grew within him that it would come.

"Why didn't you let Dan in to see me, when you never denied old Fred?" he asked.

"I was sore at him, Ed. I wanted to punish him. And I wanted to tell you, before you saw him again, how Cattle Kate fooled the poor dunce, and honied him out of being there to help you. I thought you ought to know what a weak stick he is to lean on."

"It was my fault, as much as Dan's, I guess. I might have waited for him, or hunted him up and brought him home."

"You're all alike," she declared in mock contempt, flinging his hand away. "You'll stand together in that great fraternity of manly weakness, in spite of everything."

"Dan's a good boy," Barrett said, so simply serious that she nodded in agreement.

"Good, but weak."

"Well, it wouldn't do to turn the hose on many men's feet," said he.

"All clay," she nodded, that spark of humor which lit her face like a candle at a window growing in her soft dark eyes. "But I believe some of them are baked; they stand up better than others."

Barrett had no rejoinder for her pleasantry. A while


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 they sat in silence, Alma stretching her hand abstractedly to catch the falling leaves. Barrett looked at her covertly, as if to undertake something he might not be permitted to do, as he filled his pipe the second time and tried to suppress the crackle of the match. She was so engrossed by her thoughts that she did not interpose, nor put out a hand to deny him this solace so long suspended.

"Ed," she began presently, her gaze on the ground, "I asked Uncle Hal to discharge Findlay after that shooting. I never was so surprised and humiliated in my life as I was when he refused. The worst of it is, Ed, he can't."

"Yes, I know it," he replied.

"What do you suppose that man Findlay is, Ed?" she asked, turning to him suddenly.

"I believe he's the biggest crook on this range."

"He's the king-pin of the cattle rustlers in this part of the country," she said, her voice lowered to a fearful whisper, her face white. She sat a moment leaning toward him, as she had bent to impart her disturbing secret, her breath laboring, her manner painfully agitated. "Manuel knows, he knows more than anybody suspects. They wouldn't let him live an hour if they knew."

"I've suspected something of the kind," Barrett told her, no surprise quickening in him at her revelation.

"I've thought for a long time he's got some kind of a grip on Uncle Hal, he's changed so in the last three or four years. I knew it when he refused to discharge Findlay, yes, I knew it that night—that night he


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 he—pulled his gun on you out there by the gate."

"Alma!"

"I knew it! You took the blame, Edgar Barrett, to spare us the shame of his unspeakable deed. He tried to kill you that night because you knew too much. Tell me what it is."

"I provoked him, I didn't go at it right," Barrett excused, seeing that it would be useless to deny what she knew too well.

"There was something more than sudden irritation behind his attempt," she declared in great earnestness. "Uncle Hal never has been a man to shy at a shadow. You found out something between him and Findlay. What was it, Ed?"

"I was impatient, impertinent, maybe; but I was sore over that affair at Eagle Rock camp that day. I made the same demand that you did later—I said he had to fire Findlay and all his rustlin' gang. I didn't go at it right, you see."

"What did you say you'd do if he refused?" she asked him, shrewdly.

"Well, that's where I stumbled again, Alma. I made the blow that I'd take it up with the stockholders, tell what I knew, and try to oust him from the head of the company."

"And he would have killed you to keep you still!"

"He was tired that night, he'd been in the saddle two days, he told me. I had no right to bully him; maybe I got about what was comin' to me. Oh well, it was only a bluff, I think, anyway. His heart wasn't in it."

"Only you know better," she said, sadly. "He used


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 to be such a good man, such a frank, kind, generous man. I can't believe he's intentionally involved with Findlay, he must have been drawn into it by some subtle plotting to get him into it. Will you be honest with me, Ed, and tell me what you've found out?"

"Very little, Alma. I only know that Findlay's holding a club over him, driving him to stand by and see the company robbed in broad daylight. He told me himself that Findlay could drag him down to disgrace, ruin him, with a word. More than that he wouldn't tell. He refused my offer to help him on any terms. It seemed to scare him."

"Then it must go on, and on!" said she, despairingly.

"It can't be very long now," he comforted her, with the portentous calmness of one certain of his hour.

Alma shook her head, the shadow of a great sadness in her eyes.

"It's natural for you to think of squaring your account with Findlay, you'd be a coward if you didn't. But you can't get at him, Ed."

"We'll not talk about it," he said, with gentle finality.

"We must. It's been growing in your heart to kill him all the time, you talked of that, and nothing else, while you had fever. Manuel said you got up one night and went looking for your gun when you heard Findlay talking in the house. Do you remember?"

"I don't remember, Alma," he said, in the same gentle, calming voice.

"He owes it to you, the law would uphold you if


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 you shot him on sight. But you can't touch him; he's never alone, not for a minute, except when he comes into this house. All feuds end at the door; he knows he's safe here."

"I saw him alone at Bonita one night. Well, Charley Thomson was with him."

"Where were they?"

"Just leaving Cattle Kate's hotel."

"Of course. And I'll bet anything Kate was hanging around behind him with a gun under her apron. She'd have killed you, or any man that made a break to pull a gun."

"Yes, she was right there," he admitted, not having counted that circumstance before." But I didn't want to go after him then; I was willing to let that little joke of his pass."

"And the minute he got from under Kate's eye, Glass or another one of the three that always hang around him, stepped in behind. You'd have seen if you'd watched."

"I didn't watch. But Glass was in town, I saw him in the dance hall."

"You'll always see one of them right at hand, Ed. Another man's been after him a long time, I know it as well as you do, no matter how I found it out. If he can't get him, how can you?"

"I might have him arrested, in spite of my promise to Senator Nearing that I wouldn't," Barrett suggested, speaking of that course as one mentions a contemptible thing.

"You know why he asked you not to interfere."


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 "But you'd think a drowning man would want help, no matter what kind of water he's in."

"It must be that Findlay's got him mixed up in his cattle-stealing from other ranches besides this," she said. "I don't see what else Uncle Hal would fear so desperately. Nothing would ruin or disgrace him quicker than the discovery of that. They hung a cattleman for stealing when I was a little girl, took him from his house at night and left him strung to a pine."

"It may be that, Alma, but I hardly think it is."

Barrett thought of the young Englishman who had come there on a mission similar to his own, and of the inscription on his tombstone as quoted by Fred Grubb. All through the illness from his wound this thought had obtruded. He had come to the belief that Nearing had shot the stranger as he had attempted Barrett's own life, perhaps in a burst of passion and fear; that Findlay had witnessed the act, and held it over the cattleman with oppression that increased day by day.

Alma turned to him, a great earnestness in her eyes.

"We can find out what this secret power of Findlay's is," she said. "Will you help me do it? When we know what it is, we can break his cinch on poor old Uncle Hal."

"I'll help you find out what we can, Alma," he told her, not with dramatic emphasis, just in simple earnestness that had a far more convincing effect of sincerity.

"Where to begin, where to turn, without pulling the house down on our heads," said she.

"Cattle Kate," said Barrett, in the same assured, calm tone.


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 "Kate knows, if any living third person knows," Alma admitted, thoughtfully. "Or that old lawyer, Charley Thomson; I believe he knows."

"It would take money to get it out of him, and Findlay already has him roped. We'll have to count him out."

"Kate would know," said she, in her soft, thoughtful way. "But she'd never tell anything that would hurt Dale Findlay."

"If she got sore at him she would."

"That's a long shot, Ed."

"I believe we could cripple him, anyhow. But you might have to do something disagreeable to put it through."

"Count on me for anything, Ed."

"We'd have to make Kate jealous, that would be the easiest way. You can see the fire in that woman's eye that would burn a man up if she thought he'd double-crossed her."

"Kate's that kind of a girl," Alma agreed, looking at him sharply. "You seem to know her pretty well."

"I've only seen her once," he said.

"Oh, only once. And it would be my job to make her jealous?"

"Not unless you're game to go the limit, Alma. You might have to humble your pride and self-respect to the extent of talking to him once in a while"

"Oh, just talking to him wouldn't do it, Ed."

"Ride out with him, maybe, or go to a dance or two. Do they ever have any dances around at the ranches? The kind the cowboys are invited to, I mean."