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 "You've got reason enough for hating it," he said, startled not so much by her revelation as her dramatic way of making it. "I never heard of that tragedy."

"No, it was only an everyday incident, a pebble dropped into this big bowl where we're immersed. A little news like that doesn't make noise enough to sound out of this country."

"I didn't suppose the immensity of it, the vast emptiness like the sea, would be felt by a person born to it," he speculated, a mental picture forming of the dead man lying face to the sky, dust of retreating horsemen on the horizon.

"It's echoless," said she, her searching eyes set on its distances; "there's nothing to hurl back remorse for a cruel deed upon the guilty one. It goes out from a man like the passing wind, and troubles him no more. It's a land without an echo to strike back on the conscience and the heart."

"That makes sinning easy," he said, understanding her. "But why shouldn't it make a good man better, hold him up to himself, I mean, and steady him with a new nobility?"

"It does seem to work out that way now and then, but not often. Mainly its—its—mere boundlessness"—lifting her hands to support the impotency of her words—"enlarges the passions of men. Their appetites become grosser, their hates, their lusts, their wild, mad loves. All is intensified in them here out of proportion with the rest of the world. Passions seem to enlarge in men to fill the immensity of this thing without conscious boundary, this cruel thing that makes


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 them a part of itself."

It seemed to Barrett that this bitter indictment from the lips of youth and beauty who had suffered the cruelties of that land, cast a gloom over the morning. It was as if he had turned from the contemplation of a fair garden to see a black storm-cloud rising in silent portent of destruction, of lashing fury of wind, fierce shrapnel of driven hail. Yet he felt as if he should speak, to persuade her away from that brooding bitterness, so destructive to the soul of youth.

"Maybe all things grow big in men here," he said, "and out of bounds as we set them in our more conventional lives, because their tasks are bigger, their daily contact with immensity"

"You could have killed a man anywhere, you didn't need to come here to do it!"

The words burst from her as a charge laid at his door of a thing already done, bitterly reproving, dramatically severe.

"I didn't come here to kill anybody," Barrett returned, not even indignant over her implication of his intentions, his frank face lighting with his ready smile. "A man isn't under any obligation, it isn't a part of the cowboy curricula, is it?"

"As much a part of it as Latin to your alma mater," she insisted, still too grave even to reflect his smile. "If you ever expect to amount to anything in the judgment of men out here, you'll have to kill a man."

"Then I'll never be a master cowboy," he declared.

He felt that her judgment was prejudiced, due to what she had suffered in the tragedy that had clouded

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 her life. He did not believe that she meant to have him accept her reading of range life and range men literally. But it was strange that revulsion against that life had struck with roots so tenacious and deep into her young heart. The shadow of its somber days had clouded out all memory of its delights. He could not believe, even so, that she was quite sincere.

"But you like it here, you'd be lonesome for it and wish you were back if you went away," he said.

"Yes," she owned, with unexpected frankness, "I'd gtieve my heart out for it if I had to go away and never come back."

So she was only another woman after the original, the universal pattern, he thought, not smiling now as he looked with feeling sympathy into her quickly averted eyes. Not only a woman after the universal pattern, but a human being after the mold of the best and the worst, in all of whom there is the flaw of impatience and unrest with the best that today can give, and grief and heartbreak when they have thrown it away to speed to world's end after the fatuous promises which rise green and beckoning out of the desert Places of despair.

"How far is it to the post?" he asked her, seeing again with his quick imagery, perhaps with a tinge of jealous envy—considering what lay, before him of rough life in a blanket among the ants—young cavalry officers dismounting at the gate.

"Eighteen miles, due north over the military road. That's it," indicating the trail that passed the gate; "you came over it from Saunders."


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 "You have dances here sometimes, the folks coming over from the post?"

"Oh, plenty of them. I wish I could have delayed your eager plunge into the romance of the range—I intended to have them over. After you go, you know"

"After I go?"

"The officers and cowboys don't mix socially," she said, with some reluctance, expressing a great deal more in her repression than her words.

"Oh, I see."

More mental pictures of officers, waltzing officers, a succession of waltzing officers, but only one lady, as if the world contained but one. Cowbcy life had its disadvantages, not hithertofore seen.

"There's Uncle Hal in the door looking for you. I think he's going to introduce you to romance after breakfast—he's got on his fighting clothes."


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OMANCE was to be encountered at Eagle Rock camp; that was the very nearest point to the ranch-house which the elusive fay would approach for several weeks. So Hal Nearing declared at breakfast, which he presided over like a campaigner in the field, booted and belted, his pistols hanging on the back of his chair.

Barrett protested that he could find the camp, in spite of its forty-odd miles distance, if given directions; that it was unnecessary for his employer to go to the length of riding there with him. Nearing replied that he had no doubt that a sailor of the main would be able to keep his course over that unmarked expanse of land, but the superintendent of the working forces must be approached and handled.

"He's a little bit shy of green men," Nearing explained.

That revealed why he had not been turned over to Dan Gustin, Barrett understood. No less hand than the big boss' own could place a greenhorn in the acceptation of that mighty man, mightier than Barrett, in the speculations of that light moment, ever dreamed.

Barrett expected Alma to say something more in disparagement of range life and the men who followed it. Whether out of deference to her uncle, or due to a change in her mood, she did not attempt further dis-


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 couragement of the novice. Her gloomy spell of dissatisfaction appeared to have passed quite away; she chatted lightly through the meal, her clouded spirits seeming to have been transferred, like a Brahman's sickness, to her aunt.

The elder woman was downcast, nervous, distrait. Barrett saw that she looked often across at her husband with what he read as an unspoken appeal in her face, a fear in her eyes. That he had read her uneasiness perfectly was disclosed when it came to mounting and riding away. She came then to the porch and clung to her husband, a pain of great anxiety and distress evident in her bearing, as if he rode on a mission ambuscaded by perils, and not a simple journey across some forty miles of prairie and foothill plains.

What Nearing said to her, Barrett did not hear, for he withdrew apart out of delicacy. But he saw the rancher stroke her hair and caress her hand assuringly as he held it with a cavalier's gallant tenderness a moment before he kissed her and came down the steps to mount.

Alma went with Barrett to where the horses stood, to wish him well of his venture. But neither she nor Mrs. Nearing invited him to return to the house. He felt, as he swung into the saddle, that their silence told him he was riding out from his state of equality with them into a lower plane, from which he must come purged by advancements and success before he might stand in their presence again.

Out of regard for his strangeness to the saddle, the rancher set Barrett an easy pace, for which the sailor


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Rh were about to walk in, when out came an old witch to meet them,—

"How dare you," she cried, "tie your horses up to the posts without asking my permission?"

"Oh, never mind, old woman!" cried the brothers; "take us first into your palace, and give us something to eat and drink, and then talk about whatever you please, and scold us as much as you like."

The old witch consented, and gave them food to eat and wine to drink, and when they had all made merry, the witch asked them kindly,—

"What do you want, young men? What are you in search of?"

"We are in search of forty-one sisters for brides."

"I have any number of daughters."

So saying, the witch ran upstairs to a high attic, and brought down with her forty-one beautiful damsels.

The young men fell in love with them at once, and began preparing for the wedding, which was to be a very grand one.

In the evening when they were all married and happy, Starveling went out to look after the horses, which had been left standing outside. When his horse saw him he began to stamp and neigh with joy.

"I am so glad you have come, dear master," said the horse, "for I want to warn you against the witch. Listen! Before you go to bed to-night, tell your brothers each to dress up his young wife in his garments, while he puts on the dress of his wife; and


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 was duly appreciative. He had not mounted a horse in years before that morning, not since his early college days, in fact, when he had been considered a daring horseman among his polo-playing kind.

This was going to be different from playing polo on a level field, an hour or so at a stretch. The truth of this was shot through him from every aching joint, every saddle gall, as that forty-mile ride stretched out to seemingly endless distance. But he would take it as it came; his training through the past four years had built him up to that, let them pile it on as heavy as they might.

More than once that day he noted Nearing sizing him up to see how he was taking it, turning eyes which had more of contempt, he was certain, than faith in them, eyes that sneered for the figure the sailor cut, with his lifting in the saddle with the horse's stride.

Nearing advised him, kindly enough, that it would be well to sit down in the saddle, even going to some length to explain and illustrate how it was to be accomplished. Barrett did the best he could to catch the theory, if nothing more, and theory was about all he managed to get out of it. It was something like learning to write with simplified spelling when a man has been schooled in the accepted way. Many costly lessons under a fashionable riding-master had fastened the lifting habit upon this candidate for range proficiency. It was going to be equal to pulling teeth to get over it and learn a strange, new style.

The rifle slung in saddle holster, the barrel of it eoming under the hollow of the rider's knee, did not


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 add anything to Barrett's comfort. He had found the rifle there when he mounted, accepting it without question or comment as part of his equipment.

Nearing had said nothing about side arms, neither had Barrett ventured to reveal the entirely dependable, many-times proved pistol of man-size caliber concealed in his blanket roll. Perhaps pistols were not permitted recruits; maybe a man must progress to them, as to the tools belonging to advanced knowledge of the craft.

Nearing's easy-going pace held the travelers long on their way. While they were still several miles from Eagle Rock camp the sun dipped behind the hills, purple shadows came reaching across the plain like an incoming tide. They were mounting to this ridge which hid the sun, a long, grassy, upheaval, gray ledges breaking from its sides like the bones of a faminedead range beast. Gray-boled, stunted cedars grew along its summit, a thousand years of torture by drouth, fire and storm recorded in their twisted trunks and knotted branches.

"This is winter pasture, we keep the cattle out of here after the spring months to let the grass grow and cure where it stands," Nearing explained. He halted on the eminence, sweeping his hand to include the merely incidental hundreds of square miles which stretched brokenly into the west.

"It's a better looking country than any we've crossed, it looks better to me, anyway," Barrett commented, scanning the grazing lands with a certain proprietary interest which perhaps was out of place, he thought, considering his subordinate state.


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 "Nothing equal to it in the northwest," Nearing said.

But he did not speak with the proud confidence of overlordship that his position among the mighty cattle barons warranted, Barrett felt. There was more in his manner of regretful melancholy, as of a landowner who views with bitter regret his possessions, incumbered by debts which soon must wrest them from beneath his hand.

Unschooled as he was in the resources of this country, Barrett saw as readily as a pioneer scout seeking a settlement for a Mormon colony would have seen, the shelter from winter storms that the broken nature of the land offered. Numerous small valleys were rank with cottonwood and willow, telling from a distance of water there, making, through their rapid summer growth, winter browsing for cattle when snow lay deep over the cured grasses on the range. Shelter was there among the wind-barriers of the promiscuous hills, with their low forests of cedar; nature had made a vast pasture to care for its herb-eating beasts in the days when it set the seal of winter over this rigorous land.

"That's Eagle Rock canyon, that one where you see the tall cottonwoods," Nearing pointed. "There's water there the year 'round, runs so swift in places it never freezes. Our camp's at the head of the canyon, not more than three miles on."

"I thought we must be pretty close," said Barrett, cheered by the assurance, "I saw a couple of men down there driving up the cows."

"Cows?" said Nearing, turning quickly. "Who?


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 What cows?"

"Down there among the trees—you'll see them come out in the open place in a minute."

"They don't drive up any cows in this country, bud; the only milk you'll ever get here will be out of a tin can. It's some of the boys driving out a few strays that have got in here—they will slip through, especially the cows with calves."

"Well, I don't blame 'em for that," said Barrett, feeling as cheap, very likely, as Nearing meant to make him feel, taking the sneering patronage of his tone.

Nearing said no more. He started down the slope to come into the little valley on a long angle, Barrett following painfully, for the gait was quicker now, as if the cattleman had become impatient of lagging to accommodate the saddle softness of his charge.

They were within a quarter of a mile of the bottom when the two men whom Barrett had noted reappeared from behind the screen of willows. Nearing stopped suddenly, putting out his hand to stay his companion.

The rancher drew cautiously behind a clump of cedars, Barrett following. A little while Nearing watched the two men below, who were swearing volubly at a cow and calf which persisted in galloping after the ten or twelve other cattle they were urging ahead of them.

"Who are they?" Barrett asked, a pretty well defined feeling growing on him that it wasn't honest business going on below.

"I'm not certain," Nearing replied, leaning to peer through the cedar boughs.


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 "Are they rustlers?"

"Keep still—till we see what they're up to," Nearing returned, cautiously, with lowered voice.

Barrett was no longer conscious of his weariness and saddle soreness. He was tingling with a resurge of the indignant feeling that had swept him last night over the unchecked robbery of these pirates of the plains, only now it came upon him intensified, hot as fire in his eyes.

"They're driving away our cattle, whoever they are," said Barrett.

In his eagerness to watch their movements he rode from the cover of the cedar clump. Scarcely a hundred yards below him one of the men was pursuing a head of the little herd which appeared bent on remaining behind with the rejected cow and calf.

This man, so intent on his business, which he pursued with the noise and confidence of security, did not see Barrett standing out in the open above him. He headed the rebellious animal back to join the little herd, not once looking about to see whether his movements were watched. Judging from their demeanor, the men were honest cowboys following their duty. Yet Barrett had a very good reason for believing they were not.

"Does that man work for us?" he inquired rather sharply, riding back to Nearing, who still kept his place of concealment behind the thick branches of the low cedars.

"He don't work for the Diamond Tail," Nearing returned, with emphasis that seemed to rebuke this assumption of partnership.


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 "I don't understand your indifference, Senator Nearing!" Barrett hotly gave it back to him. "That man's a thief, I had a run-in with him down at Saunders—Grimmitt and all of them said he was a thief. They're running off our cattle—our cattle—I don't care a damn how you like the sound of it!"

"Take it easy, Eddie, boy," Nearing placated, coming down at once from his high horse. "Maybe Findlay put those fellows to work, he's got the right to hire and fire without consulting me, I can't inquire into the character of every scab-leg cowboy that rides the range—I told you half of them were thieves."

"We've got a right to stop them and find out whether they belong to this outfit or not," Barrett insisted, starting as if he intended to go into the matter on his own account. Nearing checked him with a sharp word.

"It's all right, they're working them over the hill," he said.

"Why are they leaving the cow and calf?"

"They'll follow along," Nearing replied.

"So will I!" Barrett declared, with sudden outbreak again.

"They might be thieves, but I don't think so, from the noise they make," Nearing said. "Go straight along the ridge and head them off—I'll cut in behind them. We'll hold them up and find out where they're going with that bunch."

Barrett rode on as directed, pulling the rifle from the holster as he galloped. He shaped a course to bear down on the two men, who were now driving the little


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 bunch of cattle along at a lively trot. He hailed them in his good sea voice as he drew in after them, his horse sliding down the shale of the hillside in a cloud of dust.

The man who had rounded the straying beast back to the herd was the nearer of the two. As he turned, drawing sudden rein at the challenge, startled in every line of his pose, Barrett's identification of him was complete. It was the long-nosed man from the Indian Nation who claimed to be blood relation to the wolf.

If ever a man looked the justification of such a contention, this cattle-thief looked it then. He threw a shot across the sailor's bows, so close to him it nicked the steel pommel of his saddle. Quicker than the eye could mark his movements the fellow acted, and almost as quickly threw himself over the saddle, hanging to his horse Indian fashion, its body hiding all of him but one hand on the saddle horn, one foot hooked by its spur in the cantle.

Barrett threw up his rifle for a crack at the horse, hoping to pin the scoundrel down like a bug under a stone. The hammer clicked; the lever ejected nothing at Barrett's impatient jerk. The magazine was empty.

Cooled by this discovery to a sudden realization of his danger, Barrett drew up his headlong chase after the thief, who rode the farther side of his horse with as much facility as he sat the saddle. The cattle-thief threw another shot across his saddle; it struck Barrett's stirrup, making his horse wince and jump with a start that almost unseated him.

The other thief, who had ridden madly off at the first sight of this unknown challenger, evidently in the


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 belief that it was some misguided officer of the law, now came back to take a hand in the easy finish. Sheriff or no sheriff, the stranger was a greenhorn with an empty gun, for only a greenhorn would run into trouble with an empty gun. So the fellow doubtless reasoned, returning to his partner's help with a shrill, barking whoop.

Barrett jammed the useless rifle into the scabbard, wheeled and rode for the brush, heading in the direction Nearing said he would take to come up behind the thieves. But not in the hope of Nearing's aid, for Nearing was not in sight, his gun was not talking as it should have been doing in a crisis like that when it stood behind a friend. Not for Nearing's help, nor the hope of any man's help; only for a few seconds' time to get that blanket roll off and his hand on the weapon inside it.

Barrett worked gt the fastening of his bed roll with one hand, reining up for a precious moment when he looked back and saw the thieves waving arms and shouting to each other. The unknown of the pair turned back toward the cattle, which were standing bunched and panting, untroubled by human hunt and defense of life so long as it left them free to breathe in peace a little while.

The rustlers required but a moment to reach this understanding. No need in two of them chasing a defenseless man down and losing time and labor picking up the scattered cattle again, when one man could do the job in safety. So Barrett knew they argued, fumbling at the cords of his roll.


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 The fellow in pursuit began to shoot again. Fifty yards from the cover of willows along the little stream, Barrett's horse stumbled to its knees, falling with a catch of its breath that sounded like a sigh.

Barrett went on over the wounded creature's head, falling full length, clutching the reins as if life depended on the retention of his hold. When he lifted himself to his hand, dazed and breathless from the hard fall, he expected to meet the crash of the bullet that would end that first adventure of his upon the range.

The rustler had checked his pursuit, stopping perhaps not more than twenty yards from the place where Barrett had fallen. There he sat leaning forward, the high horn of his saddle against his lean gizzard, gun raised to throw the last shot. He seemed to be peering to see whether Barrett might be so badly wounded that another shot would be wasted on him.

Barrett's wounded horse lay between the men, the dust of the overthrow still hanging above the scene. And there on the ground beside it, not three yards from where he braced himself in his sick confusion, lay Barrett's broken blanket roll, the grip of his own pistol offering to his hand.

Moved by the hope this sight inspired, quickened out of his daze by the chance of giving the ruffian an equal fight, Barrett lunged toward the gun. At the same moment the rustler shifted his position to get a better view. At Barrett's start, he fired. The shot set Barrett's crippled horse thrashing and struggling to rise. In uprearing it received the rustler's second shot, which otherwise would have closed the day for Barrett,


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 with nothing more to be said.

The horse snorted blood, which spattered Barrett in a hot baptism as it sank down to struggle no more. Barrett had reached the shelter of the animal's body, his pistol was in his hand with one wrench from the encumbering folds of the blanket, when the rustler rode forward to pitch in his concluding shot at close range.

It seemed to Barrett that only the outstretched legs of his horse separated him from the oncoming rustler when he rose to his knees and fired. In a quickening dash of hoofs the thief's horse went past; the dust of its going was before his eyes, in his nostrils, with the ecent of earth long dry. On the ground a little way off the rider lay, his arms flung out as men who die by violence 'most commonly fling them when they fall, as if in protest against the blind turning of fortune which will not give them always the way of their own wilful hearts.

"You could have killed a man anywhere, you didn't have to come to this country to do it!"

Barrett heard those words again, heard them rise from the well of his conscience as plainly as he had heard them that morning from Alma Nearing's lips. But he had come to that country, and he had killed a man. There he lay, unworthy of life as he had been, violent, dishonest, aggressive toward the end that had overtaken him. Dead, his outstretched arms lifted above his head. But he had been a man, and the golden bowl that held the essence of his immortal soul was broken.

Nearing came galloping up, dust on his clothing as


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 if he, too, had suffered the humiliation of a fall.

"I tried to jump an arroyo, the damn horse fell and rolled me," he explained, more vexed on account of his mishap, it seemed, than interested in what had gone forward without his help.

Barrett jerked the rifle from beneath the carcass of his horse, offering it for his employer's inspection with severe countenance.

"That was one hell of a gun to hang on a man!" he said, opening the magazine to show that it was unloaded.

Nearing took the gun, a curious look of cheapness on his face.

"I didn't intend for you to use it, just to carry it out to camp, Ed. It's Dale Findlay's gun; he sent it over to town to have a new breech block put in. I didn't know we'd run into anything like this, any more than you did."

"You knew there was a possibility of it," Barrett returned shortly.

"Well, you seemed to have a gun of your own stuck around on you somewhere, from the look of things, kid."

"It was tied up in my blankets, I had to rum from that lizard like a rabbit."

"Roll him over," Nearing ordered.

Barrett moved the body of the slain thief to reveal his face. Nearing rode nearer, and peered down into the dusty features.

"He's an outsider, I've never seen him on the range. See if he's got any papers on him."


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 The only thing the fellow carried about him but his guns and ammunition was a patent medicine memorandum book, such as cowboys of that day generally kept a record of their time in to be presented in case of argument with the boss. This contained nothing; not even a mark. But Nearing took possession of it, along with the few dollars the range wolf owned, saying they must be turned over to the coroner.

"I heard a man at Saunders say he went by the name of Wells, and that he lived on Horse Creek," Barrett said.

"You can't go much on what you hear in this country. Where's his partner gone?"

"He stayed back with the cattle, I don't know where he is now."

"Well, it don't matter, I guess. Wait—I'll catch this one's horse for you."

Nearing said nothing more of the fight and its bitter ending, dismissing it as a mere incidental of the day. He did not congratulate Barrett on his victory, nor express any satisfaction over the recovery of the four or five hundred dollars' worth of stock. All of which appeared to Barrett very strange and unusual.

To Barrett the adventure was painfully exciting; its termination had left him shaken and weak. Spectres of remorse, fear, accusation, rose thick in his troubled mind. He had killed a human being, and this serene, unmoved, indifferent man beside him had not a word of comfort, condemnation or justification to utter.

Perhaps it was the way of the range to pass over tragedies such as this in silence; maybe it was no more


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 and no less than was expected of every man, any man, in the course of the day's duty. If Nearing had blamed him, rebuked him, found fault, cursed, railed—anything would have been better than that serene, unperturbed indifference.

There was nothing exhilarating in this business of shooting a man down, even in the unquestioned defense of one's own life. It was a fearful thing, a thing that clung to the heart like mould of the grave. Shadows of vengeance reached out after a man who slayed; the fires of remorse leaped within him and seared his soul.

"Feels like rain," said Nearing, as they rode on up the canyon, Barrett on the dead rustler's horse.

Barrett was not conscious of any atmospheric change that might denote the approach of rain. He would not have been conscious of it if flakes of snow had begun to drift against his face. All he could bring himself to think of, to turn with the ebullitions of a tortured and conscience-stricken mind, was that he had slain a man.

Night fell gray upon the two riders before they came to Eagle Rock camp.


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ALE FINDLAY, superintendent of the Diamond Tail, came riding in with five of his men shortly after the arrival of Barrett and Nearing at the cow camp. Seven more cowboys came straggling along an hour or two later, keeping the cook rattling his pots to serve their famished demands.

Barrett looked for his friend, Dan Gustin, among each group of arrivals, to meet disappointment in every ease. The cook, a one-legged Mexican, Alvino by name, said Dan was working out of Eagle Rock camp. He supposed he was too far away to make it in that night.

Barrett regretted this, for in Dan he felt that he had a passport to the toleration, if nothing more, of these saddle-weary men, who accepted his presence in camp with supreme indifference. Nearing had not gone to the trouble to introduce his charge to anybody but Findlay.

Findlay had not granted him so much as the grace of a word; his friendly hand had been overlooked with a cold aloofness that was more than disdain. One glance the superintendent had spared him, as he might have looked casually at a rock. There was no acknowledgment of even the kinship of kind in his indifferent eyes.

The cowboys were little behind their boss. Barrett felt the barrier that stood between him and them as palpably as if it were a hedge. He caught some of them


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 looking at him with curious contempt now and then, and one or two spoke casually to him, as if to find out what sort of a noise he would make.

Barrett thought that he understood the attitude of the men. His position among them was similar to that of a boy who has been led into the schoolroom by his mother, and formally presented to the teacher. He had felt all along that it was a mistake for Nearing to lead him out that way, and pass him on from hand to hand.

The more Barrett reflected on this, and looked back in review of Nearing's conduct of his case from the beginning, the more resentful of it he grew. It was a case of meditated coddling, a plan of Nearing's to belittle him and make life intolerable for him on the range. There was a reason, and a big one, somewhere in the secrets of that tottering enterprise, for Nearing's keenness to discourage him, sicken him with humiliation, drive him away. What was it? Was Nearing robbing the stockholders himself and pocketing the proceeds? Was all this plaint of rustlers but a pretense?

The outstanding event of the day would seem to answer this question with positive denial. There were rustlers, bold, contemptuous of the keepers of the herds, who came to the very door of this outpost and drove away cattle. Even now the horse wrangler was coming up the canyon with the body of the dead thief in his wagon. Nearing had dispatched this camp menial on the scavenging errand shortly after their arrival. The man had gone under protest, reluctantly, afraid, a lantern swung on the end of his wagon tongue.


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 On the arrival of the wrangler with his freight of death covered under a tentcloth, the cowboys left off their chaffing and chatter and small talk among themselves to stiffen up with a new interest in the greenhorn. Only then, indeed, the news went around that a man had been killed down in the canyon, and this kid was the one to credit for it.

They looked at Barrett with renewed curiosity, with something like approach to terms of, if not equality, recognition as a sort of man. It seemed incredible, their bearing said, that he should pop a man over that way; some strange freak of chance must have favored him, indeed. It was about the same as if a cat had whipped a bear.

Findlay, whose word in camp appeared to be supreme notwithstanding the presence of his employer, gave a few sharp directions on the arrival of the wagon, and stood watching while his men unloaded the melancholy freight and laid it under a tree some distance from the cabin.

The superintendent seemed to resent even this little part in the off-bearing of the wreckage of another hand. He walked about when the job was done, hands at his back, pipe in mouth, beyond the circle of the fire around which the men gathered presently for a cigarette before their blankets.

This Dale Findlay was a lean and sinewy man, thin of flanks, light-framed, tall. His countenance was dark and morose, as of a man whom cares had harassed and the laughter of life passed over. He was a severe, short-spoken man, thin-lipped, brown; a handsome man


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 in a stern, cold-hearted way, inscrutable as a stone; a man such as women like for the romance they suggest, but seldom know. His voice was the most disagreeable attribute of the man, according to Barrett's appraisement of him, surly and insulting as his demeanor toward the greenhorn had been. It was a feline growl, delivered through lips scarcely open, a nasal note in it most jarring and disturbing.

At the first sound of Findlay's voice Barrett groped back in his memory for the chamber that stored a record of it, confident that he had seen this man before. Not until he heard his louder, sharper, more snarling tones when he directed the unloading of the body, could memory open the door to that long-locked compartment.

Not this man, but the mate of a South Seas trading achooner in the port of San Francisco. Barrett could see him again, warping his small vessel up to the dock, singing his orders in his high, feline voice through thin lips scarcely open; see the bare-shouldered Kanaka seamen leap to their labor with white-rolling eyes of fear. It was the same voice in two different men, both of them tigers at heart.

Nearing and Findlay went inside the long low cabin, built of cedar logs, where they sat at a table, a lamp between them, in deep conference. Nearing did most of the talking, Barrett could see, forceful talking at times, judged from his manual emphasis. Findlay wore his pistol strapped about his gaunt waist; Nearing was unarmed.

Findlay sat low in his chair, sliding forward like a


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 weary or indifferent man, one arm on the table, his straight-stemmed briar pipe in his close-clamped mouth. Now and again he nodded, shook his head, or said some stingy word around his pipestem. And through it all Barrett had the impression that power sat on the side of the table with the silent man.

Barrett made no attempt to mingle with the men around the fire, although the blaze would have been welcome, for the night wind is cold in those high altitudes where frost is not unknown in the latter days of August. He stretched with elbow on the saddle taken from his dead horse, smoking his pipe, its stem so short the warmth of its bowl was felt on his face. Around the fire they were talking of the dead man, but none came over to question Barrett on his part in the tragedy. Perhaps because they were not certain of his status in camp, whether guest and equal of the big boss, or greenhorn come to bungle and stall around on the range.

The horse wrangler, last man to supper, owing to his unwelcome task, came over to where Barrett stretched, and squatted near. Barrett could hear the rustle of his paper as he rolled a cigarette, and the full breathing of his repletion as he sat there in the dark on his heels.

"Got a match, pardner?" the wrangler requested presently, after feeling himself over with muttered curses of disappointment.

Barrett supplied the need silently, knowing nothing of the etiquette of cow camps. He did not know whether it was his turn to speak; he was not going to court the contempt of any other man in that bunch by


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 being friendly out of his place.

"Ugly lookin' cuss, mean a mug as I ever seen on a man," the wrangler said.

Barrett supposed he referred to the husk of a man that he had hauled up the canyon. The wrangler had stated the fact very neatly; Barrett did not see where it called for comment or supporting testimony. He held his peace. There was a scuffing of as the wrangler adjusted himself more comfortably. Barrett could see that he was arranging himself upon his crossed legs.

"You took him square between the eyes," he said, not discouraged in the least by the other's silence. "Purty good shootin' for a man that's down with a horse on top of him, I'm here to tell you, kid! Come fur?"

"Saunders," Barrett replied.

"Sheriff's office?"

"No."

The wrangler smoked his cigarette out in a long inhalation, crumbled the stub between his hard fingers, showering down a little rain of sparks.

"Thought maybe you was," said he.

Barrett did not feel that the conversational wedge had opened a very great chink of communication between them yet. He waited for the wrangler to make the move.

"Friend of the old man's?"

"No."

"Thought maybe you was."

Silence again. The wrangler was rustling another paper; Barrett struck a match, offering the light with-


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 out words.

"Much obliged, kid. Passin' through?"

"I've hired to Nearing."

"Hired out to him, heh?" the wrangler said, speculatively, his tone forecasting his next question. "What do you aim to do out here on the range, kid?"

"I had some thought of learning the cowpunchin' trade," Barrett replied, leaving it to be surmised that doubts had entered his mind on the wisdom of pursuing that ambition.

"Oh, cowpunchin'. I see. You shoot like a man that's had experience, but you don't ride like erry one. What you been workin' at, kid?"

"I followed the sea."

"Which?"

"Followed the sea."

"Where to, kid?" the wrangler asked, in kindly, rather consoling voice, as if he pitied a folly so ingenuously confessed.

"I was a sailor in the navy, at sea, on a ship, a battleship, with a flag on it, you know, and guns, cannon, torpedoes."

Barrett felt that the fellow was kidding him, and knew that a dozen pairs of ears at the fire were turned his way, listening to all they could catch.

"The—hell—you—was!" said the wrangler.

His amazement, his admiration, his altogether and unmistakable satisfaction, was so plain in the wrangler's voice that the compliment was greater than Barrett could have asked. The wrangler smoked a while, full of his sensation of surprise as he was of supper. Pres-


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 ently there was a sound of scuffing boots, and the wrangler rose to his feet. Barrett saw that he was offering his hand.

"Grubb is my name. Call me Fred," said the wrangler.

"Barrett is mine; call me Ed," the greenhorn returned, rising with alacrity to meet this friendly advance.

There was some turning and craning around the fire; two or three made a pretense of getting up for something else to see what was going forward between the wrangler and the greenhorn. The wrangler held to Barrett's hand with a paw as big, and almost as hard, as a horse's hoof. The glow of his cigarette showed that he was looking earnestly into the young stranger's face.

The wrangler delivered this in an earnest, low voice, giving Barrett's hand a mighty clamp at the end of his impromptu verse.

"Fine, old feller, fine!" Barrett praised him, forgetting for a moment the disquieting thing lying wrapped in tentcloth under the cedar tree.

"If you hear anybody speak of the poet of the Popo Agie, that's me. I'm the original and only cowboy,


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 poet, even if I ain't nothing but a horse wrangler."

Barrett said he was certain that Fred graced whatever calling he laid his hand to, and that the profession of wrangling was ennobled by numbering him among its practitioners. Fred modestly admitted that he had felt his mind running to the same opinion many a time. The poet wrangler sucked in the last of his cigarette, standing in pose of self concentration while he ground the stump of it between finger and thumb, as many poets scatter the fire of their hearts to see it flicker for a brief moment and die away in the unresponsive dark.

The men began to leave the fire for the bunks in that part of the long cabin set apart for them. Fred Grubb inquired of his new friend what equipment he had, and, on learning that he was provided with blankets, took him to the plank lean-to at the cabin's end.

"Them saddle-gallded hyeners is liable to throw boots at a man if he don't wake up first in the morning," the wrangler explained, with the bitterness of a man who had unpleasant recollections. "I'll bunk you in here with Alvino and me—we're gentlemen, even if our pay is low."

Barrett passed an unrestful night, in a fever of excitement, harassed by a thousand demons which rose in his imagination to plague him for the thing necessity had forced upon him. Short as the night was, he had found it already too long when the camp began to stir before perceptible dawn.

Some subtly developed trait, some sense that stands watchful in his subconscious mind, tells the cowboy


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 when to wake. He scents the oncoming dawn in his sleep as the humming bird scents honeysuckle miles beyond the range of its eye. No alarm clock is needed by the true ranger, no shouted summons to stir him from his bed while the stars are still brilliant and the "bowl of night" seems yet untroubled by the approach of day. But by the time he has his boots on, his first cigarette rolled, and stands to breathe the deep breath of another eighteen-hour day, there is a gray-fading on the edge of the eastern horizon, and presently the world is overspread with dawn.

Neither Nearing nor Findlay was present at breakfast; nothing had been said to Barrett concerning his duties. While vexed on this point, he was relieved to note that the thing rolled in tentcloth was gone from beneath the cedar tree. Fred Grubb had brought the horses in, but the rustler's animal upon which Barrett had completed his journey, was not among them.

There was a little more friendly spirit among the men this morning; several of them spoke to Barrett, two or three of the more decent looking ones introduced themselves and shook hands. This was cheering; the feeling of an outcast which had added to the gloom of his soul began to depart away from the sailor, who more than once during the night had regretted this long flight away from his sea. But none of them said anything about his riding away with them. As they finished breakfast they went' to the corral, roped the horse selected for the morning's work and, by pairs and fours, rode about their distant duties.

Grubb relieved the uncertainty when he came in for


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 breakfast. He said the boss, meaning Findlay, had instructed him to take Barrett on as assistant day wrangler, and keep him at Eagle Rock camp until further notice. The boss and the big boss had ridden away together at the first streak of morning. It was Grubb's opinion that they were going to the ranch.

There it was, under Fred Grubb's kindly hand, that Barrett learned that steps of progression lead up to the calling of cowpuncher, as in almost any calling worthy the name. He learned that a greenhorn could not at once ride with the elect, except in cases of extraordinary favor from those in charge. His beginning must be in a menial capacity, a subject of humiliating orders, a butt of broad jokes, coarse, often cruel.

He further learned what he had begun to suspect already; that a horse wrangler was not one who held argument with a horse. He was nothing more dignified than a groom who herded the animals out at night, if he happened to be a night wrangler, some of them with hobbles on their legs to prevent them running off, and herded them back to the corral at early morning for the lords of the range to select their mounts. Being a day wrangler, such as Fred Grubb, was a somewhat easier, if no more dignified, job.

There were a large number of horses at Eagle Rock camp in proportion to the men, as there were, and probably continue to be, in every cow camp. Fred said this was because every man on the Diamond Tail had from six to eight horses at his command, one of his own, the rest supplied by the company. In the busy days of the branding and roundup, a cowboy often used up four


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 horses a day, but in such quiet times as these, when there was nothing but straight riding to do, with a little dash after rustlers now and then, one horse a day was all a man needed.

Barrett gathered, also, not from direct revelation, but from Fred's manner of resentment, that the station of wrangler was a low one, that a man so engaged was scarcely counted a man, in truth. But one might rise from it, he was glad to learn; the best of them had traveled that road, although Fred himself never had been able to work upward to a saddle and a cowboy's pay.

It wasn't in him to do that kind of work, he said; the Poet Lariat, according to Fred's pronunciation, of the universe had designed him for nobler things. Temporarily he was engaged in this humble station—he had been filling it for more than twenty years, in fact—but it was only a makeshift. He'd walk on the heads of men who had jeered and despised him into his kingdom one of these days.

"Ain't much to do these days, not enough for half a man, let alone two able-bodied fellers like me and you," said Fred. "Just set around on the hills and think up poertry. I've thought up half a of it this summer, I'm goin' to put it in a book some day. I don't see what the boss was aimin' at when he put you over here, but me and Alvino we're glad to have you, Ed. I tell you, boy, it ain't every horse wrangler that's killed a man!"


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ARRETT believed that he understood the reason for his sequestration there in Eagle Rock cow camp. It was only a part of Nearing's plan to humiliate and discourage him, isolate him, cut him off by reason of his duties and subordinate position from any chance of coming at the facts upon which the disastrous conduct of the business rested. Nearing's attitude plainly told him that, if he didn't like what they had given him, the road was open to him to return whence he came.

In their long talk the night of Barrett's arrival at: the ranch, Nearing had covered the ground pretty thoroughly as far as his way of explanation went. All lines led back to the main point of the beginning: that he, Nearing, was the one and only man who could save the company from complete wreckage and the loss of all involved. He had even taken up the question of a receivership, opening on that theme when it lay just under the surface of Barrett's mind, with almost disconcerting penetration.

Receiverships in the cattle business were even more expensive and destructive than elsewhere, Nearing had said. Certain stockholders lately had threatened such proceedings. He had thrown his cards before them and told them to plunge into it if they thought they could save their money that way. Put the Elk Moun-


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 tain Cattle Company into a receivership for three years and there wouldn't be enough left of it to cut a shoestring out of. That's what he had made plain to them. The one thing to do was give him, Hal Nearing, ex-senator and man of reputation from sea to sea, time to develop his plans, to curb this drain of outlawry, and at least end the whole matter where it had begun.

Every hour's developments confirmed Barrett in his belief that there was something crooked in the inside office. Nearing seemed, through all his indifference over the affair, to resent the killing of the cattle thief.

Barrett knew that Nearing had not turned a hand to help him in that fight; he knew as well as if he had been there, that Nearing's horse had not fallen short in the jump over the arroyo, for the horse hadn't a spot of dust on him, the saddle was clean.

Through that idle, lonesome day, and the idle, lonesome days following it, Barrett pondered these things. The leak that drained the increase of twenty-odd thousand cattle was wide; surely not so easily hidden as to be undiscoverable.

Sticking there at the camp would not accomplish anything. Barrett was seriously considering quitting the job after ten days of it, drawing off a distance, say to Saunders, and quietly taking up his investigation from the outside. He was singularly confirmed in his belief that this was the wisest and best course by no less person than the "poet lariat" of the plains.

It happened while they were playing seven-up under a quaking asp in a little mountain valley not far from camp one morning. Fred Grubb, who was a dry, beetle


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 sort of man, small and light, with a great iron-gray mustache of which he was unjustly proud, was shuffling the cards with thoughtful, distracted air.

"You ain't errey detective, are you, Ed?" he asked, in a curiously apologetic, half-sneaking way.

"Detective? Holy mackerel! What put that in your head?"

"Some of the boys was sayin' you was."

"Wise bunch, ain't they?"

"They say you're up here on the range after somebody, and every guilty, saddle-gallded crook amongst 'em thinks he's the one. I'm the only man in this outfit that's got a clear conscience and can step out and look the world in the eye. Even that poor old cuss of a Alvino killed a man down in Santa Fe and had to gallop. But he had a case; the skunk took both of his wives away from him."

"I should say he had a case! Well, if I were a detective I wouldn't be after Alvino. You can put his mind easy on that."

Fred offered the deck for the cut, abstracted from the game, mind-wandering, ill at ease.

"I thought maybe some of them fellers that put money in this company sent you out to track it down," he said.

"I'm here on my own hook, Fred."

Fred studied his hand, according to his rule, led an ace, fishing for the ten.

"You ain't related to one of them English lords, Ed?"

"No more than you are, Fred."


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 "I thought maybe you was."

Fred played out his hand, counted his points, gathered up his cards with deliberation, still thinking.

"One of them come over here about two years ago."

"A lord?"

"No, he wasn't no lord. I don't suppose he was any more than a low-class angel in that nobility across the water."

"A kind of a wrangler," Barrett suggested.

"I guess that's about where he'd 'a' classed. Somebody with money in the company, his daddy or aunt or somebody, got him a job, like they did you. He wore a red flannel shirt and back-east boots, black and shiny. Looked like a feller I saw actin' he was a minin' man in a play one time. I never saw a feller with so much laugh in him as that boy—he wasn't nothing but a big, applefaced kid, harmless as a pup, it seemed to me."

"What became of him, Fred?"

"They found him dead one morning down there about a mile the other side of where you shot that rustler."

"The hell you say!"

"Shot through the gizzard. They say he was a detective tryin' to find out who's gittin' the money out of this ranch. I don't know. Fellers'll say things like that."

"Well! Did they ever find out who killed him?"

"They never nailed it on anybody. His mother come over here, took the poor feller up and buried him in Cheyenne. If you ever go up there, take a walk around the graveyard, it's the purtiest place in town.


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 You'll see that boy's grave. 'Murdered May 14, 1886.' That's what it says on his tombstone. His mother had it put there. She was around here a month or two tryin' to find out who shot him, had detectives from Denver smellin' around. But I tell you, Ed, private and confidential, and I don't give a damn who knows it, when two certain men on the Diamond Tail don't want things found out, things ain't found out."

Barrett thumbed the cards, head bent in thought. Presently he looked up into his partner's face, his own very grave.

"I'd begun to think the same way myself, old feller," he said.

A moment the two pairs of eyes met in a deep, understanding gaze, much as solemnly and meaningly as men shake hands over a matter when they have come to a point in their mutual understanding where words are no longer necessary.

"I guess it's your deal," said Fred.

The game went on, an interminable relay in a game that had been stretching out for many days. Several hands were played, each man keeping a careful score for the final casting up when the series should close.

"What became of that rustler's body, Fred?" Barrett asked, quietly, between plays, his eyes on the cards.

"You can search me, kid. I've been wonderin', It was gone when I got up that morning. If I was guessin', but I ain't, kid—put that down in your little red pill book, I ain't—I'd say he must 'a' had friends not very far off."

"It looks that way," Barrett said, feeling rise in


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 him the same dark disquietude that had troubled him almost without cessation since the tragedy, the whisper of some far-reaching warning that the incident was not yet closed.

This feeling had been with him, cold in his heart as a sickness that would not yield to change, sunshine nor medicaments, in spite of the fact that, on the outward appearance of things, the killing of the rustler was completely erased from the minds of men. The coroner never had come to make inquest into the matter, the men in camp seldom spoke of it, and when they did so it was only casually, as of a minor event to fix something else in dispute definitely.

The rustler's body had vanished like a spirit; no wagon had come to carry it away. Barrett had slept little that first night, but he had not heard even the trampling of horses in the direction of the cedar where the body lay.

"If I was a man with money tied up in the Diamond Tail," said Fred, breaking in upon this train of disturbing thought, his voice that of a wholly disinterested man, "I wouldn't monkey around wranglin' horses away back of the line of battle, as the feller said. I wouldn't hire out to Hal Nearing in no kind of a job and let him plant me off where I'd be the most seen and the littlest heard man on the range."

"Fred, if you were a man in that fix, what would you do?" Barrett inquired, his outward manner as disinterested as the poet's own.

"I'd go down to Bonita and make a stall like I was a feller hidin' out from the law, and I'd warm up like


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200 you must do the same, or else everything will be lost, for the witch is a wicked old woman."

"All right! I will do just as you say," replied Starveling, as he went off to his brothers, and told them what the horse had said.

The brothers at once put on their wives' dresses, and dressed the young girls up in their own clothes. When night came they all fell asleep, with the exception of Starveling, who kept himself wide awake, curious to know what was going to happen.

At about midnight he heard the witch, just outside his door, calling her servants,—

"Servants! servants! harken to my call; come and cut off the heads of all my uninvited guests!"

The door opened, and in came the witch with her servants, and, rushing to the bed where they thought Starveling lay, they cut off the head of the witch's daughter, and then, running into all the other rooms, cut off the heads of the forty girls, leaving the forty-one young men all alive and well instead of the witch's daughters!

As soon as this was done. Starveling got up and went to his brothers, woke them, and told them what had happened; then the young fellows took their wives' heads and hung them up in their rooms. After having done this, they ran to their horses, mounted them, and rode away.

Early the following morning the witch got up and looked into each little room; but what was her surprise to see the heads of her own daughters hanging on the wall. She grew furious, and, ordering her shield of fire, started off after the young men,


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 a Dutch uncle to Cattle Kate."

"Dan Gustin mentioned her," Barrett said.

"Cowpunchers mostly do."

"What do you suppose she could tell a man that had money tied up in the Diamond Tail, Fred?"

"She could tell him who's rakin' in the chips, and why, if he could come up on the blind side of her."

"Cattle Kate," said Barrett, thoughtfully, as a man turning a trifling reminiscence in his mind.

"She knows who's ridin' the range for a hundred and fifty miles, when they come, where they go. Some say she's a spy for the rustlers—that's what these cattle barons say—but I don't know. Wouldn't be surprised if she was. All I know is a man's welcome to her door any hour of the day or night if he's hidin' out from the law."

"Bonita. That's the town I've heard the boys speak of, over by the post," said Barrett, in his reflective way.

"Twelve miles up the river from the ranch, squattin' on the edge of the military reservation like a louse."

They allowed the subject to close there, played out their hands, and went about the duties of the day. It was toward noon, when Fred Grubb, coming back to join his companion from an excursion into some far canyon for wild blackberries, reported that two men were approaching camp.

"One of 'em looks like old Manuel from the ranch," he said. "The other one's a stranger to me. You wasn't expectin' nobody, was you, kid?"

"Not a soul."

"Set down in your saddle, set down in your saddle!"


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 Fred scolded, his long patience with his friend's weakness breaking fretfully. 'Whenever you git in a hurry to go some place you begin gittin' up and settin' down like you had a bee under you."

"I know I do, Fred. But I'm workin' hard to get over it."

"You're comin' on all right, too, you're doin' fine—only when you git a little excited. You stick around with me three or four months and you'll ride like a man with the bark on."

"I hope so, Fred."

"Yes, I'll bet a dime that's old Manuel, and I ain't seen that old feller since Peter Nearing was superintendent of this ranch. He rides with his wings out, like an Indian. The one that's with him's a cowpuncher. He's a stranger to me."

Fred was right in his identification of Manuel, the Mexican from the ranch. He was unsaddling the two horses at the corral when the two wranglers rode into camp, the companion of his journey being nowhere in sight. Manuel returned Fred's rather patronizing greeting with low-spoken word, and dignity that wore the mask of meekness, according to his kind.

Manuel immediately produced a letter from the pocket of his shirt and delivered it to Barrett, following it by opening his saddle pouch and discovering several more. But his manner of delivering the one that he carried close to his person bore with it an unspoken injunction to mark its importance above all the rest.

This letter bore no stamp; it was addressed only with Barrett's name. Manuel paused, the other letters


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 in his hand, as if waiting for Barrett to acquaint himself with the contents of the first before other matters might come between him and it for even a moment. Barrett stood with reins over his arm, his horse familiarly nosing his shoulder, and opened the letter.

Barrett read it again to certify to his surprised senses that he had made no mistake. There was something in the old Mexican's eyes when he looked up that interrogated him. He nodded; the old man offered the remaining letters.

"Give me your horse, kid; I'll skin the saddle off while you read your mail," said Fred.

"Thanks, old feller, but never mind. I'll leave him saddled, I'll be needin' him right after dinner."

Manuel drew a step nearer as Fred went off with his own animal.

"The man with one thumb, señor. He has come to kill you." Manuel whispered this amazing information, at once walking away, his face as innocent of any sectet as a brown and wrinkled leaf.


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LOSE by the kitchen door where Alvino cooked and spread his salted foods, there stood a rude bench made of half a cedar log, the altar of ablution where the cowboys lined up and snorted like drowning horses over tin wash pans morning and night. As Barrett approached the cabin, a man rose from rinsing the dust of a long ride from his face and neck, calling loudly for a towel.

Alvino tossed the article demanded through the door, whence issued a stream of blue smoke from the burning grease of the midday bacon. This towel was half a grain sack, stiff with the accumulated dirt of weeks, the standing joke of the camp. The stranger turned it in his hands as if in the hope of finding a clear spot, cast it from him with a curse, drew a handkerchief half as big as a tablecloth from his pocket and began wiping his face. As he worked he leaned toward the kitchen door and poured a stream of Mexican upon Alvino, who could be seen dimly going about in his smoke.

At the sound of Barrett's coming the fellow turned from his abuse of the cook with a quick, wheeling start that crunched the gravel under his pivoted heel. The handkerchief he clutched in one hand, the other he dropped to his dangling pistol.

He was a tall, harshly built man of coarse, heavy, negroid features. There was a glow of ruddiness in his


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 yellow-brown skin, such as marks the Mexican mestizo, or person of mixed breed. It is as if these mixtures fire in resentment always at the world's knowledge of their baseness, which nature stamps upon them in its uncompromising way. Barrett saw that the thumb of the man's left hand was gone.

He looked at the fellow curiously, feigning a surprise that he did not feel, to see a guest in camp display such nervous hostility. He nodded, with a short word of greeting, passing over the fellow's act as if he had not noted it, but careful to leave his gun hand free as he reached for a basin. The half-breed grinned, rolling back his thick, blue lips from great yellow, horse-like teeth. But there was no friendly approach in his greasy, congested small eyes, padded in the puffed flesh of excesses and debaucheries.

A diversion in the arrival of Dale Findlay and two cowboys relieved the strain of the situation for Barrett, who was at the last stand of desperation, in truth, to know what tack to take. Manuel's warning, taken with the stranger's nervous, hostile watchfulness, convinced him that—he was about to be called upon to pay for the rustler's death. What to do save watch and wait he did not know. He welcomed the arrival of the superintendent, little as he liked him, greatly as he resented the fellow's insolent behavior at their first meeting.

Findlay had not been at Eagle Rock camp since the morning he rode away with Nearing, a matter of ten days past. Now, as he dismounted before the cabin, his two companions having stopped at the corral, the stranger went to meet him, a certain respect in his bear-


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 ing, a half-cringing gladness, as a dog goes to meet a harsh master. Greetings in that labial, mouthy speech to which the Castilian has degenerated among the Mexicans of the low caste, passed between them.

Barrett, not quitting his watchfulness, went on with his preparations to wash. His hand was on the water pail when Findlay turned to him, face black with displeasure, a curse on his thin lips.

"Put that horse away!" he ordered sharply.

Perhaps out of habit of long discipline Barrett did not hesitate, much as he resented the manner of the command. He sprang with the nimbleness of his years on deck to take Findlay's horse, his quick response, his very willingness, at once an apology for his apparent neglect of duty. Not that it was in fact a neglect of duty, for his service as wrangler did not include the unsaddling and turning out of any man's horse, let him be high or low. But Barrett did not want the enmity of this dark man to deepen against him for any act of his own.

The one-thumbed mestizo stood talking with Findlay a little while. The superintendent seemed to hear him with indifference as he turned up his sleeves and opened his collar to wash, dismissing him presently as he would a fawning dog. All this Barrett marked as he stripped the saddle from the hard-ridden horse. The mestizo withdrew a little way, where he stood smoking, something indomitable in his way of standing immobile, unruffled, villainously serene, as one appointed by fate waiting with certitude his hour.

Fred Grubb was not around the corral, nor at the


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 spring among the willows at the canyon head, where he commonly went to wash in the little stream that contended impatiently with the stones it could not wear out of its bed. The old Mexican, Manuel, sat with his back against the lean-to, hat over his eyes, his bearded face in shadow, hands hooked in front of his updrawn knees. He seemed also one appointed by destiny for a place in the drama of life which he had not yet come to play.

Barrett looked further for Fred, wanting a word with him, for he had it in mind to linger there, busying himself about the corral, until Findlay, the two men with him and this sinister half-breed should go in for dinner, then taking horse for the ranch. Not finding Fred anywhere, Barrett put the best face over his inward uneasiness that he could assume, and went back to the cabin.

Manuel still sat in the sun, motionless as a man asleep, although Barrett could see the turning of his eyes as he passed. The others were at the table, making a fierce assault on bacon and beans.

Barrett washed, prolonging the operation while he beat about for a straight path out of the perplexities which surrounded him. He must ask Findlay, now that he had come, for permission to ride one of the horses down to the ranch, not being provided, as the cowboys were, even as Fred Grubb was, with a horse of his own. In case of refusal, he would try to borrow Fred's horse, if it could be done without prejudicing the poet's job.

That was one question. But it stood behind the other, the more serious one. If the one-thumbed mon-


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 grel came from the rustlers' camp to avenge the death of their fellow—and there was no motive for a movement against Barrett's life in any other quarter—how did it come that he rode so openly and unafraid into the cowmen's stronghold? It seemed to affirm the suspicion that had come up continually in Barrett's mind since his arrival at the cow camp: that Dale Findlay had an interest in running off the cattle, and that some shameful partnership stood between him and Nearing, in which Findlay held the upper hand.

All pointed back to this suspicion with redoubled force. Nearing had shunned contact with the thieves that fateful day. He had appeared troubled, displeased, with the tragic climax of Barrett's interference. Findlay's resentment had been all too plain in his reception of the greenhorn, whose weak pretense in coming there did not cover his true purpose from even the humblest wrangler on the range.

Findlay's arrival with his two handy men had been timed to make conjunction with the Mexican half-breed. It was planned and concluded that Barrett should not leave that camp alive, and Dalf Findlay was the directing hand behind the cowardly plot. Nearing, if bent to a kindlier desire, was powerless or afraid to interpose. Barrett knew this as well as if the heavens had opened and revealed it to him, each act in the plot spread before his eyes.

To ride away without permission would be only to invite a speedy and more shameful end. They would hang him then, having the pretense to justify them that he was making off with a horse. The best course was


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 to get into it and out of it, if fortune might show him a knothole in a plank somewhere through which he might escape.

Alvino had spread the simple meal on one end of the long table, covered with oilcloth to which the dishes stuck to the spilling of much grease and semi-liquid foods, and profanity to season it all. The two cowboys sat across the table from the door, Findlay at the end, the mongrel Mexican alone, back to the entrance. Two plates were there beside him for the wranglers, the one farthest from him in the place where Barrett commonly sat. Barrett took his place, no greetings passing between him and any at the board.

Alvino always turned the plates bottom-side up to protect them from flies, that being his one nicety, and it is a poor man who cannot put forth one. As Barrett turned the dish over to receive bacon and beans, one of the cowpunchers across the table—he was a hound-faced fellow, with dark lopping hair about his ears—reached to the floor and picked up something, which he tossed directly into Barrett's plate. It was the towel which the half-breed had found too foul for even his greasy skin.

"There's a napkin for you, bud. They, tell me you fellers from the east just got to have 'em when you eat."

Barrett accepted the jest, quarrel-making as it was meant to be, in good part. He dropped the foul rag to the floor, wiped his plate on the sleeve of his shirt, and grinned.

"I can make out this meal without one, thank you," he said.


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 The Mexican at Barrett's right hand, his cheek puffed like a gopher's with the greasy food which he gorged as one famishing, turned his head with watchful, rolling eyes. He said nothing; he did not even grin when the two jokers across the table roared over this trick at the wrangler's expense. Only he turned his head that way, red eyes rolling, like a dog guarding against the incursion of one of his tribe while he gobbles up what he has found.

"I can make out, thank you, ma'am," the hound-faced man mocked, pitching his voice to imitate a woman or a child, or some weak and despicable thing far beneath the status of a man.

The pair of them laughed again at that, nudging each other with elbows as if to call attention to the confusion of the person whom they sought to humble and bring lower than his already small consequence in the world of cattle and the noble beings who rode at their tails, honestly or otherwise. But no smile broke the severe cast of Dale Findlay's face, no echo of the merriment, forced and derisive, issued from the thick lips of the mestizo, cramming fuel to feed the fires of his gros body.

Alvino was sitting near the stove, smoking his pipe after his invariable custom when he had cooked and spread out a meal. He was a man upward of sixty, thin and wiry, more Indian than Spanish blood in his veins. He always wore his hat, a black, broken-brimmed sombrero, under which he seemed to scowl with disfavor and contempt on those who came to lap up the greasy comestibles from his board. Now he sat there doubly


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 displeased and sour because of the rating the half-breed had given him, impotent by reason of his wooden leg and years to exact satisfaction from the ruffian after the manner of his kind.

In a lull of the forced merriment, Alvino rose and Picked up the towel. As he straightened up with it in his hand, his wooden leg slipped on the greasy floor, making him clutch at the nearest support to save himself a fall. The nearest object chanced to be the mestizo, upon whose shoulder the old man's hand fell heavily.

The mestizo, purple in sudden rage, quickly turned this harmless touch into a deadly pretext for working his murderous purpose against Barrett.

"Keep your hands off of me!" he roared, slewing to face Barrett, befouling him with a discharge of abuse.

Before Barrett could even protest the unjustness of the charge, the half-breed leaped to his feet, upsetting his chair, his pistol jerked out in such reckless haste or blind fury that it struck the table edge, delaying for one fortuitous moment the shot that must have ended the wrangler's career.

Barrett had not counted on such a sudden outburst, watchful as he was, and strained to a hair's edge. He felt now that his movements were encumbered by some subtle, unseen force, as a man in a dream, when he laid hand to his own gun and drew it with what speed he might. But he must have fallen dead, with more than one bullet through him, if it had not been for the interference of Alvino as the half-breed swung his pistol clear of the table to fire.


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 What had been the old man's intention when he came across the room to pick up the towel, whether to provoke the great ruffian to some further insult upon his humble head and take the vengeance which the weak sometimes exact upon the strong, Barrett never knew. But now, as the half-breed's arm swung around to bring his gun to bear, Alvino struck him in the back with a butcher knife which he had up to that moment concealed about him.

The long blade, driven by the righteous fury of the old man's avenging arm, struck entirely through the half-breed's deep chest. As he stood there, his eyes grown great in terrible understanding of what had overtaken him, Barrett saw the point of the knife protruding. It must have cleaved his heart.

The shot that would have found lodgment in Barrett's body with a foot further swing of the weapon, broke the sugar bowl in the middle of the table as the half-breed's finger pressed the trigger when death ripped out his foul soul by the roots.

"Cuidado, keed!"

Alvino shouted his warning, at the same time motioning Barrett to the door.

Before Barrett could jump for it, the fallen ruffian's body barring his way, Findlay sprang up, cutting off his retreat, slinging out his gun as he leaped. Barrett stood for a moment, frantic as some wild thing cornered beyond escape.

There was a window behind the two men facing him across the table. But they were on their feet, guns out, looking to Findlay as if to ask him whose lead it was


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 going to be in the last hand of this unequal game.

"All set! Drop them guns!"

Fred Grubb was issuing commands from the door, where he stood with a double-barreled shotgun thrown down to cover generally Findlay and the two on a line with him on the other side of the table.

Much as he had been despised, little as his courage had been counted, if ever reckoned at all; low as his position, abused as he had been with impunity all the years of his service as wrangler, there was something in Grubb's voice and manner that would not admit parley or delay. Findlay was first to grasp the amazing truth. He dropped his gun within the margin of that second that would have counted his last if he had demurred. The others, gaping in amazement, cowed and wilted in front of that weapon with which a blind man could scatter death, opened their nerveless fingers and let their pistols fall.

"Come on out, kid!" Grubb called.

Barrett lost no time backing from the room, Findlay drawing aside out of the door before the added menace of his gun, to let him pass.

"Prance out of there, you fellers, all of you!" was Grubb's next command.

They came, Findlay first, the two cowpunchers with hands held high to show the entire honesty of their present intentions, even though it did not vouch for the future.

"Boss man, I hate to have to take a gun to you," said Grubb, "but I ain't the man to stand by and see my pardner done up in cold blood. Don't tell ma


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 I'm fired, for I ain't; I resigned when I loaded up this gun with buckshot a minute ago. Waltz over there te that krel, and line up agin the fence!"

As the three marched at Grubb's orders, the poet, who had so unexpectedly developed the qualities of a first-class fighting man, whispered to Barrett:

"Our horses're back of the house—all set—I turned every head but them out on the range. Bolt for 'em kid! I'm with you."


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T MAKES me sweat vinegar when I think how near I come to bunglin' that job," Fred Grubb said.

"I'm the fellow that bungled, walked right into their hands when I knew," Barrett said. "If you hadn't come when you did, I was goin' to make a break for the stove, but I suppose they'd 'a' got me before P'd ever made it."

"They sure would, kid."

The pair had ridden an hour or more in flight from Eagle Rock camp, saving breath to cool a hotter bowl of porridge than they had left, as they expected they would be called on to do before going many miles. But whether Findlay did not hold them worth pursuit, or whether the start had been so great that it was hopeless before those at camp could catch horses and set out, they did not know. Nobody had lifted the hills behind them as the miles reeled out. Grubb was coming to the opinion now that no start after them had been made.

"Findlay's bankin' on you leavin' the range after this, I guess. He thinks you've got a craw full by now. Well, we might as well take it easy now; we'll need all our plugs's got in 'em if they do take a notion to come."

"How did you know they were going to gang me,


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 Fred?" Barrett inquired, not able to account for the poet's opportune appearance with his shotgun.

"Manuel tipped it off to me. He helped me run them horses off. But I wasn't lookin' for 'em to start anything at the table, Findlay likes to eat when he's eatin' and fight when he's fightin'. That's why I kind of took my time. And I nearly bungled the job!"

"Did that Mexican Alvino stuck work for the Diamond Tail?"

Fred rode on a little way, looking very serious and sober. Presently he shook his head.

"No, that feller never worked here. Ed, that feller was side-pardner of the rustler you shot, I saw him sneakin' around down there when the boss sent me to pick up them remains and haul 'em in. Is there any needcessity for me to say more?"

"Not a bit."

Several miles again without words, Barrett with thoughts enough crowding his mind to make him oblivious to whatever danger might be behind them, Fred watching unremittingly for the first hat to show above the hill and grow suddenly into a man. The poet carried his shotgun across his shoulder, rather clumsily and uncomfortably.

"Well, I'm out of a job, Ed."

"It looks like I'm with you."

"What do you aim to do, kid?"

"They sent for me to come to the ranch."

To himself Barrett had answered the same question as he rode away from Eagle Rock camp. He was not going to stand around any longer and allow Nearing


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 and his partners in this open robbery to load anything more on him. Here was where he struck out to start something of his own. Just what his next definite move would be, he did not know, but he did know that he had evidence enough of crooked dealing and collusion with thieves and murderers to smoke somebody out of his hole.

He reasoned and planned along this intention as he rode, reaching the conclusion that his first work would be to go to Nearing and demand the discharge of Dale Findlay, and the complete clearing out of the gang that worked under him. It made no difference what the superintendent might hold over Nearing, the eattleman would have to face it and set that scoundrel adrift. That would be the first business ahead of him at the end of that ride.

"Well sir, I'll tell you what me and you could do, and be right where you could keep counters on matters and things around this ranch, as the feller said."

Fred spoke as if he had been talking all along at a pace with his speculations and thoughts. He was then, as he had been from the first moment of his appearance with his unromantic but effective weapon, entirely cool and undisturbed by the adventure in which be had played a small hero's part.

"What's that, Fred?"

"Well sir, I know of a place where a couple of fellers out of a job could light and clean up some money between now and winter, if they had the grit and the sand to face the music."

"You do? Where is it, what's the scheme?"


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 "Place up the river about seven miles from the ranch where a couple of brothers from Iowa took up claims side by side, built their house so it stood half way over the line on each end. They could live together that way and each one of 'em hold down their claim accordin' to law at the same time. Finest track of hay land in this country, them two claims."

"Well, we couldn't buy 'em out, Fred. You don't mean to chase 'em off, do you?"

"They're already chased, the Diamond Tail boys chased 'em. That land I'm speakin' of is on the Diamond Tail."

"You mean we'd turn grangers, Fred?"

"Somebody'll take up them claims again one of these days. Might as well be me and you. That's a kind of a marshy land in spots, I've seen elks by the hundred there, right now you can see 'em sometimes, mixin' with the cattle as tame as anything on the Diamond Tail."

"You don't mean that, Fred. Who ever heard"

"Wait till you see with your own eyes; that's all I got to say."

Fred seemed offended that his friend should doubt his word, incredible as it seemed to one not accustomed to that country. Barrett hastened to set it right by acknowledging his hasty judgment, and Fred went on with his talk about the chance that lay out there for the taking.

"Them two boys from Iowa put a bob-wire fence all around them two claims. They got a contract from the quartermaster at the post to sell him hay, and


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 Nearing let 'em go ahead till they had it all mowed and stacked, then he sent Dale Findlay over there and set their tails afire. Them two boys never looked back from that day to this, I'll bet you."

"How much hay could a couple of fellers out of a job cut and sell up there, do you suppose?"

"Well, I ain't no hay man, Ed, but one of them boys from Iowa told me they aimed to sell a couple of hundred tons. Nearing's kep' them fences up, he's saved that hay and cut it two seasons now. It's about ready for some enterprisin' fellers that'll pull together and stand by each other to step in and take up that land and enjoy life a little on their own hook. Them claims went back to the gover'ment when them two fellers let Findlay and the boys bluff 'em off. I know an old lawyer over at Saunders, Charley Thomson—maybe you've heard of him?"

"Never did."

"Charley Thomson could fix up the papers and head us right with the land agent over at Saunders. We'd be headed right then, we'd have our papers to show for it, and Uncle Sam he'd be back of us if we had to put up a fight to hold our own."

Barrett heard this man, whom he had judged to be subjugated and poor in spirit before the developments of that day, with thrilling admiration. He thought it must be the wine of emancipation in the poet's heart, the new-sprung courage of one who had declared his independence from a long bondage and staked all recklessly on the adventure. Confidence seemed to have come to him when he threw his gun down on the boss.


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 "It sounds good, Fred, and I don't doubt we'd be in our rights, but it would mean a fight to hold the land, we'd be outcast and branded, the hand of every cowman on the range would be against us."

"Let 'em come, damn 'em all! I've saved up wrath enough in the days of my life to last me a long time with them cattle barons! They're spraddlin' out over this country like they're bigger'n the Almighty, bluffin' out honest men that'd make homes here and plow up the land and turn it into something. Killin' 'em off sometimes, burnin' 'em out and drivin' 'em on. I think one of the lowest tricks a man ever done was to let them two boys from Iowa put up that house and fence their land, and spend all that money and do work worth hundreds of any man's money the way Hal Nearing did, and then run 'em off."

"That was a kind of a low-down trick."

"Of course, a feller with money in the Diamond Tail might hang back on goin' into a thing that'd look like cuttin' off his own nose, for if two nesters stuck it out in that valley more of 'em would come. It's the best grazin' on this range, and a man with money in the Diamond Tail"

"It's already gone to hell!" said Barrett, with the bitterness of a man robbed by a friend.

Fred Grubb rode a little while again in his reflective way of silence. Then:

"If a man with money in the Diamond Tail was right on the spot to watch the last jackpot he might step up with his gun in his hand and git some of it back when the crooks went to cash in, Ed."


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 "Something to that," Barrett admitted, in humor grim enough to go any length, spare nobody in the reckoning he was determined to force. 'But we'd need horses and machinery, and money to buy grub. We can't reach up and pull that stuff out of the air."

"I've got some salted down"—Fred patted his girdle to signify where he carried it—"and I know a man the gover'ment's got up here teachin' them sneakin' Arapahoes to farm, that'll lend us some mowers and rakes. I know he will, for them dam' Indians won't no more make hay than they'll eat it. He told me I could have 'em last year when I was figgerin' on breakin' out on this move, but I didn't have erry pardner I could bank on that time. He got cold chisels down to the end of the spine of his backbone when it come to takin' possession of the land."

"I don't guarantee this one to stand without hitchin', Fred."

"We might ride past and take a look at that land," Fred suggested. "It's right on the gover'ment road, a little ways from Bonita."

"All right."

"Springs bust up out of the ground around there, like the weight of the mountains gushed 'em up, makin' little lakes as clear as lookin' glasses, Irrigated all from underneath, never need a ditch to grow all the stuff a man could plant. I call it Marsh Meadows."

"You must have been spying out the land a long time, to know it the way you do."

"Yes, I've had my eye on it ever since that little Alma Nearing was a kid. But I never thought of nestin'


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 there while Peter Nearing, her paw, was alive. He was the one white cowman I've ever knew."

No pursuit developed to trouble the friends as they rode their way, Jogging at considerably sharper pace than Barrett and Nearing had covered the same ground but a few days before. Fred Grubb was as light in the saddle as a leaf, as much a part of his horse as the best cowboy on the range. Barrett often had wondered why he never had advanced from wrangler to the better paid, more respected pursuit. He felt that he knew the poet well enough now, considering the latter's confidences, to ask him as they rode through the waning day.

"Well sir," said Fred, in his oratorical manner of prefacing even the most trivial matters, "it was because I never had the guts in me to sock a redhot iron up agin the silk-soft hide of a little calf."

"That would be an ordeal for a poet," Barrett agreed, wondering how he, himself, would have come up to this trial if his education on the range had progressed that far.

"A man hardens to it gradual, they say," Fred went on, "seein' it done, seein' it done, smellin' the burnt hair and fried livin' flesh, but it never was in me to set like cement to the sufferin's of any creature the Poet Lariat of this here universe ever turned loose in the world."

"I believe you, old feller."

"I will take my gun and kill a bird or beast I want to eat, end 'em sudden and humane, and that's all right; I'll straddle the wildest outlaw bronco that ever busted the lights out of a man, and I'm here to tell you,


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 kid, without any blowin', it takes a purty frisky horse to slam me. I can throw a rope with any man that ever rode between the Rio Grande and the Little Missouri, but it ain't in me to take an iron from the fire and hold it on a roped calf till the meat sizzles. I wouldn't do it for all the gold of Gopher!"

Sunset was over the valley that had called to Fred Grubb's heart through so many years with the appeal of home, when the two riders drew rein on the brow of the last hill to look down into its peace, all glorified as if nature had set a halo upon it. Behind it some five or six miles the mountains stood, green of deciduous forest trees in the canyons, dark green of pine and cedar on the slopes. Far away one tall peak, wrapped in a wimple of snow, flashed in the sun; on either hand the valley, green with sweet grasses, parked here and there with clumped trees, spread into the trailing blue which came down like fold on fold of impalpable soft curtains to deny the exploring eye.

Barrett gasped in astonishment, moved by the serene beauty of it as he never had felt his emotions stir when confronting some of the mightiest spectacles in nature that the world offers. There was the quality of appeal in this blue-curtained stage, mountains guarding it against the rigors of the north, that struck at once the desire to step upon it and begin the play.

The low-walled log house built by the unfortunate brothers on their claims stood in the foreground, its shadow reaching out toward the travelers. There stretched the lines of posts encircling the half section of rich meadow lands, the protected grass lush and tall.


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 A little way beyond the house a small lake pictured its border of tall sedge, clear and still as a mirror, just as Fred Grubb had said. Cattle stood in the ease of repletion all about the valley, far-spread, numerous. Barrett wondered if they belonged to the Diamond Tail, and put the question to his friend.

"Yes, them mountains is the line of the Diamond Tail," Fred replied. "Them's your cattle down there, Ed; looks like they're comin' up home, don't it?"

"I'm afraid I haven't got enough left in them to make a pair of shoestrings from their hides," Barrett told him, already accepting as having come to pass Nearing's prophecy of the condition meddling would bring.

"Well, what do you think of the lay of the land?"

"It's the finest sight I ever saw, Fred. It feels to me like home."

"I always think I'm the heir of the Almighty and this is the estate that's come down to me when I look over that valley," said Fred. "Do you think we could buckle on our guns and hold them crooks off like a couple of men?"

"We can try it like a couple of men," Barrett said.

And that was all there was to the compact. The two adventurers turned their horses and resumed their journey to the ranch, this detour to view the seat of their future hopes having delayed them somewhat. Only Fred Grubb said, by way of settling all details:

"I've got to go to the ranch to get my time, then we'll rack on over to Saunders and see Charley Thomson. When we come back with our shootin' papers we'll go on over and take possession."


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LMA was at the gate like a vigilant warden when the two fugitives from the distant cow camp rode up in the twilight. She was surprised to see Fred Grubb, who was in buoyant humor, exalted in spirit by his new freedom, his manly independence, the prospect of coming at last into the green paradise of his dreams. He swung from the saddle lightly, the shotgun in his hand, and made her a gracious, if not too graceful, bow.

Fred delivered this rather crippled, though gallant tribute with all outward evidence of entire spontaneity, although Barrett was very well able to account now for the poet's silence during the last two or three miles of the ride. Alma, carrying out her part of what appeared to be a set ceremony between them, sank low in a slow curtsy, grave as if her troubadour, in fact, had come to her castle hall with his lute beneath his arm.

"That's a new one, Fred, you precious old humbug!" she said, laughing now, giving each of them a hand in warm welcome.


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 If troubles hung over her, thought Barrett, they made no shadow.

She told Barrett that Nearing had gone to Saunders two days ago, and was not expected home before tomorrow. Manuel had not returned from Eagle Rock camp. Teresa, his wife, was worried. Had they any news of him?

"We delivered the letters you sent," Barrett explained, halting at the disagreeable news that lay behind the messenger's detention in camp.

"The horses was all out on the range," Fred explained. "I expect he had some trouble ropin' one to fetch him back. He'll be along."

Taking his cue from Fred's diplomatic avoidance of any explanation, Barrett seconded this opinion. Fred doubtless had his own delicate reasons for leaving it to the old Mexican to break the news of what had happened at camp. It was a commendable modesty in the hero of that cowardly plot against his life, Barrett thought; Fred Grubb's stock rose in his appraisement a sharp advance, although it stood pretty well near the top at that.

Mrs. Nearing came to the porch, where Barrett saw her leaning and listening.

"Who's there, Alma?" she inquired, her voice strained, impatient.

"Mr. Barrett and Fred, from Eagle Rock camp."

"Have they brought any word of your Uncle Hal?"

"No, Auntie Hope, they came from Eagle Rock camp," Alma returned, gently patient with the elder woman's querulous anxiety.


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 "Tell Teresa to give them some supper in the kitchen," Mrs. Nearing instructed, turning again into the house.

"You must excuse Aunt Hope's appearance of inhospitality, Mr. Barrett—both of you. She's been half crazy with neuralgia."

"It's plain that she isn't herself, no apology is necessary," Barrett assured her.

"Don't bother about supper for a couple of ex-wranglers like us, Alma; we'll rustle up something down in the cook-house, we'll open a can of salmon—I know right where to lay my hand on it."

"Ex-wranglers, Fred?" said Alma, surprise big in her voice. "You're not fired, are you?"

"No, I had the honor of resignin' one time in my life. Here comes Manuel now, he'll give you all the accoutrements of the case. Me and Ed we'll go on down to the and rustle around/b2"

"I'll fix you some supper myself," Alma stopped him with sweet hospitality. "Mr. Barrett, you are my guest, you are here on"

"Orders," Barrett supplied, quick to express his willingness to serve.

"My orders," she amended. "Put your horses away and come right back to supper, both of you."

"Ordera! her orders!" said Fred, as they went together to unsaddle their horses. "Was she the one that sent for you, Ed?"

"You heard what she said."

"I thought it was Hal Nearing wanted to see you when you said they sent for you to come to the ranch."


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 Fred whistled to himself in expression of astonishment from time to time as he put his horse in the barn and gave it a charge of the hay cut, as he well knew, from the very land he expected soon to take possession of as his own.

"You go on up to the house and see her, Ed," he insisted, gravely. "I'll nose up a can of salmon and root me up some crackers—that's good enough for a feller like me."

"She wants you, too. Didn't you hear her ask you?"

"She asked me, but she don't want me," the wise poet returned. "Three's a crowd, as it used to say on the candy hearts. You go on up."

Fred was not to be shaken from his can of salmon cand crackers, hard as Barrett tried to bend him.

"No, you go on up there by your lonesome and have it out with her," he said. "Maybe she wants to marry you, Ed. I'd be a purty lookin' feller hangin' around in a case of that kind, wouldn't I now?"

"Come on, you old fool!"

"Not for all the gold of Gopher!" Fred declared, with great solemnity, only to break out the next breath with a loud, unpoetic laugh, slap his young friend on the back and push him off toward the house.

There was no supper spread for him when Barrett returned to the house. Alma had forgotten her obligation of hospitality while listening to Manuel's recital of what had taken place at Eagle Rock camp.

They stood outside the kitchen door, Alma, Teresa and Manuel, the old man's horse close by. Manuel was making his report in Spanish, a language strange to