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Title: The Settling of the Sage

Author: Hal G. Evarts

Release Date: July 18, 2006 [EBook #18856]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SETTLING OF THE SAGE ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: His knees sagged under him as a forty-five slug struck
him an inch above the buckle of his belt.]






THE SETTLING OF THE SAGE


BY HAL G. EVARTS



AUTHOR OF

"The Cross Pull," "The Yellow Horde," etc.





A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers -------- New York


Published by arrangement with Little, Brown and Company

Printed in U. S. A.




Copyright, 1922,

BY HAL G. EVARTS.


All rights reserved



Published January, 1922

Reprinted February, 1922

Reprinted March, 1922




The Settling of the Sage


I

A rider jogged northward along the road on a big pinto horse, a led
buckskin, packed, trailing a half-length behind.  The horseman traveled
with the regulation outfit of the roaming range dweller--saddle, bed
roll and canvas war bag containing personal treasures and extra
articles of attire--but this was supplemented by two panniers of food
and cooking equipment and a one-man teepee that was lashed on top in
lieu of canvas pack cover.  A ranch road branched off to the left and
the man pulled up his horse to view a sign that stood at the forks.

"Squatter, don't let the sun go down on you," he read.  "That's the
third one of those reminders, Calico," he told the horse.  "The wording
a little different but the sentiment all the same."

Fifty yards off the trail the charred and blackened fragments of a
wagon showed in sharp contrast to the bleached white bones of two
horses.

"They downed his team and torched his worldly goods," the rider said.
"All his hopes gone up in smoke."

He turned in his saddle and looked off across the unending expanse of
sage.  Coldriver--probably so named from the fact that the three wells
in the town constituted the only source of water within an hour's
ride--lay thirty miles to the south, a cluster of some forty buildings
nestling on a wind-swept flat.  Seventy miles beyond it, and with but
two more such centers of civilization between, the railroad stretched
across the rolling desolation.  North of him the hills lifted above the
sage, angling with the directions so that four miles along the Three
Bar road that branched off to the left would bring him to their foot
and a like distance along the main fork saw its termination at Brill's
store, situated in a dent in the base of the hills, the end of the
Coldriver Trail.

The man took one more look at the evidence left behind to prove that
the sign was no empty threat before heading the paint-horse along the
left-hand fork.  The crisp cool of early spring was blown down from the
slope of the hills.  Old drifts, their tops gray-streaked with dust,
lay banked in the gulches and on sheltered east slopes, but the new
grass had claimed the range to the very foot of the drifts, the green
of it intensified in patches watered by the trickle that seeped from
the downhill extremities of the snow banks.  He noted that the range
cows along his route were poor and lean, their hip bones showing
lumpily through sagging skin, giving them the appearance of milkers
rather than of beef stock.  The preceding summer had been hot and dry,
browning the range six weeks before its time, and the stock had gone
into the winter in poor shape.  Heavy snowfalls had completed the havoc
and ten per cent. of the range stock had been winter-killed.  Those
that had pulled through were slow in putting on weight and recovering
their strength.

A big red steer stood broadside to him, the Three Bar brand looming on
its side, and the man once more pulled up his horse and lost himself in
retrospection as he gazed at the brand.

"The old Three Bar, Calico," he remarked to the horse.  "The old home
brand.  It's been many a moon since last I laid an eye on a Three Bar
cow."

The man was gazing directly at the steer but he no longer saw it.
Instead he was picturing the old-time scenes that the sight of the
brand recalled.  Step by step he visioned the long trail of the Three
Bar cows from Dodge City to the Platte, from the Platte to the rolling
sage-clad hills round old Fort Laramie and from Laramie to the present
range.  Many times he had heard the tale, and though most of the scenes
had been enacted before his birth, they were impressed so firmly upon
his mind by repetition that it seemed as if he himself had been a part
of them.

His mind pictured two boys of somewhere round eighteen years of age
setting forth from the little home town of Kansas City, nestling at the
confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw.  A year later Cal Warren was
whacking bulls on the Santa Fe Trail while the other, William Harris,
was holding the reins over four plunging horses as he tooled a
lumbering Concord stage over the trail from Omaha to the little camp
called Denver.

It was five years before their trails crossed again.  Cal Warren was
the first of the two to wed, and he had established a post along the
trail, a rambling structure of 'dobe, poles and sod, and there
conducted the business of "Two for One," a calling impossible and
unknown in any other than that day and place.

The long bull trains were in sight from horizon to horizon every hour
of the day.  The grind of the gravel wore down the hoofs of the unshod
oxen, and when footsore they could not go on.  One sound bull for two
with tender feet was Warren's rule of trade.  These crippled ones were
soon made sound in the puddle pen, a sod corral flooded with sufficient
water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing
mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong.  But
transitions were swift and sweeping.  Steel rails were crowding close
behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows.  Bull trains grew fewer
every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade of two for one.

Bill Harris had come back to view the railroad of which he had heard so
much and he remained to witness and to be a part of the wild days of
Abilene, Hays and Dodge, as each attained the apex of its glory as the
railroad's end and the consequent destination of the Texas trail herds.
The sight of these droves of thousands implanted a desire to run cows
himself and when he was wed in Dodge he broached this project to his
boyhood pal.

It was the sincere wish of each to gain the other as a partner in all
future enterprise, but this was not to be.  Warren had seen the bottom
drop out of the bull trade and he would not relinquish the suspicion
that any business dealing in four-footed stock was hazardous in the
extreme and he insisted that the solution of all their financial
problems rested upon owning land, not cows.  Harris could not be
induced to farm the soil while steers were selling round eight dollars
a head.

Warren squatted on a quarter of land.  Harris bought a few head of
she-stock and grazed his cows north and west across the Kansas line
into the edge of the great unknown that was styled Nebraska and
Northwest District.  At first his range was limitless, but in a few
short years he could stand on the roof of his sod hut and see the white
points of light which were squatters' wagons dotting the range to the
far horizon in any direction he chose to look.  The first of these to
invade his range had been Cal Warren, moving on before the swarm of
settlers flocking into the locality of his first choice in such
alarming numbers that he feared an unhealthy congestion of humanity in
the near future.  The debate of farming versus cows was resumed between
the two, but each held doggedly to his own particular views and the
longed-for partnership was again postponed.

Harris moved once more--and then again--and it was something over two
decades after his departure from Dodge with the Three Bar cows that he
made one final shift, faring on in search of that land where nesters
were unknown.  He made a dry march that cost him a fourth of his cows,
skirted the Colorado Desert and made his stand under the first rim of
the hills.  Those others who came to share this range were men whose
views were identical with his own, whose watchword was: "Our cows shall
run free on a thousand hills."  They sought for a spot where the range
was untouched by the plow and the water holes unfenced.  They had
moved, then moved again, driven on before the invasion of the settlers.
These men banded together and swore that here conditions should be
reversed, that it was the squatter who should move, and on this
principle they grimly rested.

Cal Warren had been the vanguard of each new rush of settlers that had
pushed Bill Harris on to another range, and the cowman had come to see
the hand of fate in this persistence.  The nesters streamed westward on
all the trails, filing their rights on the fertile valleys and pushing
those who would be cattle barons undisputed back into the more arid
regions.  When the Warren family found him out again and halted their
white-topped wagon before his door, Bill Harris gave it up.

"I've come up to see about getting that partnership fixed up, Bill,"
Warren greeted.  "You know--the one we talked over in Dodge a while
ago, about our going in together when either of us changed his mind.
Well, I've changed mine.  I've come to see that running cows is a good
game, Bill, so let's fix it up.  I've changed my mind."

"That was twenty years ago, Cal," Harris said.  "But it still holds
good--only I've changed my mind too.  You was dead right from the
first.  Squatters will come to roost on every foot of ground and
there'll come a day when I'll have to turn squatter myself--so I might
as well start now.  The way to get used to crowds, Cal, is to go where
the crowds are at.  I'm headed back for Kansas and you better come
along.  We'll get that partnership fixed up."

A single child had come to bless each union in the parents' late middle
age.  The Harris heir, a boy of eight, had been named Calvin in honor
of his father's friend.  Cal Warren had as nearly returned the
compliment as circumstances would permit, and his three-year-old
daughter bore the name of Williamette Ann for both father and mother of
the boy who was his namesake, and Warren styled her Billie for short.

Each man was as stubbornly set in his new views as he had been in the
old.  The Harrises came into possession of the Warrens' prairie
schooner and drove off to the east.  The Warrens took over the Three
Bar brand and the little Williamette Ann slept in the tiny bunk built
for the son of the Harris household.

For a space of minutes these old pictures occupied the mind of the man
on the pinto horse.  The led buckskin moved fretfully and tugged on the
lead rope, rousing the man from his abstraction.  Distant strings of
prairie schooners and ox-bows faded from his mind's eye and he way once
more conscious of the red steer with the Three Bar brand that had
stirred up the train of reflections.  He turned for another glimpse of
the distant sign as he headed the paint-horse along the road.

"All that was quite a spell back, Calico," he said.  "Old Bill Harris
planted the first one of those signs, and it served a good purpose
then.  It's a sign that stands for lack of progress to-day.  Times
change, and it's been eighteen years or so since old Bill Harris left."

The road traversed the bench, angled down a side hill to a valley
somewhat more than a mile across.  Calico pricked his ears sharply
toward the Three Bar buildings that stood at the upper end of it.

Curious eyes peered from the bunk house as he neared it, for the
paint-horse and the buckskin were not without fame even if the man
himself were a stranger to them all.  For the better part of a year the
two high-colored horses had been seen on the range,--south to the
railroad, west to the Idaho line.  The man had kept to himself and when
seen by approaching riders he had always been angling on a course that
would miss their own.  Those who had, out of curiosity, deliberately
ridden out to intercept him reported that he seemed a decent sort of
citizen, willing to converse on any known topics except those which
concerned himself.

He dropped from the saddle before the bunk house and as he stood in the
door he noted half a dozen men lounging on the bunks.  This indolence
apprised him of the fact that they were extra men signed on for the
summer season and that their pay had not yet started, for the cowhand,
when on the pay roll, works sixteen hours daily and when he rests or
frolics it is, except in rare instances, on his own time and at his own
expense.

A tall, lean individual, who sat cross-legged on a bunk, engaged in
mending a spur strap, was the first to answer his inquiry for the
foreman.

"Billie Warren is the big he-coon of the Three Bar," he informed.
"You'll likely find the boss at the blacksmith shop."  The lanky one
grinned as the stranger turned back through the litter of log
outbuildings, guided by the hissing squeak of bellows and the clang of
a sledge on hot iron.  Several men pressed close to the windows in
anticipation of viewing the newcomer's surprise at greeting the Three
Bar boss.  But the man did not seem surprised when a young girl emerged
from the open door of the shop as he neared it.

She was clad in a gray flannel skirt and black Angora chaps.  The heavy
brown hair was concealed beneath the broad hat that was pulled low over
her eyes after the fashion of those who live much in the open.  The man
removed his hat and stood before her.

"Miss Warren?" he inquired.  The girl nodded and waited for him to
state his purpose.

"What are the chances of my riding for the Three Bar?" he asked.

"We're full-handed," said the girl.  "I'm sorry."

"You'll be breaking out the remuda right soon now," he suggested.  "I'm
real handy round a breaking corral."

"They're all handy at that," she said.  Then she noted the two horses
before the bunk house and frowned.  Her eyes searched the stranger's
face and found no fault with it; she liked his level gaze.  But she
wondered what manner of man this was who had so aimlessly wandered
alone for a year and avoided all other men.

"Since you've finally decided to work, how does it happen that you
choose the Three Bar?" she asked, then flushed under his eyes as she
remembered that so many men had wished to ride for her brand more than
for another, their reasons in each case the same.

"Because the Three Bar needs a man that has prowled this country and
gathered a few points about what's going on," he returned.

"And that information is for sale to any brand that hires you!" said
the girl.  "Is that what you mean?"

"If it was, there would be nothing wrong with a man's schooling himself
to know all points of his job before he asked for it," he said.  "But
it happens that wasn't exactly my reason."

A shade of weariness passed over her face.  During the two years that
her father had been confined to the house after being caved in by a
horse and in the one year that had elapsed since his death the six
thousand cows that had worn the Three Bar brand on the range had
decreased by almost half under her management.

"I'll put you on," she said.  "But you'll probably be insulted at what
I have to offer.  The men start out after the horses to-morrow.  I want
a man to stay here and do tinkering jobs round the place till they get
back."

"That'll suit me as well as any," he accepted promptly.  "I'm a great
little hand at tinkering round."

The clang of the sledge had ceased and a huge, fat man loomed in the
door of the shop and mopped his dripping face with a bandanna.

"I'm glad you've come," he assured the new-comer.  "A man that's not
above doing a little fixing up!  A cowhand is the most overworked and
underpaid saphead that ever lost three nights' sleep hand running and
worked seventy-two hours on end; sleep in the rain or not at all--to
hold a job at forty per for six months in the year.  The other six he's
throwed loose like a range horse to rustle or starve.  Hardest work in
the world--but he don't know it, or money wouldn't hire him to lift his
hand.  He thinks it's play.  Not one out of ten but what prides himself
that he can't be browbeat into doing a tap of work.  Ask him to cut a
stick of firewood and he'll arch his back and laugh at you scornful
like.  Don't that beat hell?"

"It do," said the stranger.

"I'm the best wagon cook that ever sloshed dishwater over the
tail-gate, and even better than that in a ranch-house kitchen," the
loquacious one modestly assured him.  "But I can't do justice to the
meals when I lay out to do all the chores within four miles and run
myself thin collecting scraps and squaw wood to keep the stove het up.
Now since Billie has hired you, I trust you'll work up a pile of wood
that will keep me going--and folks call me Waddles," he added as an
afterthought.

"Very good, Mr. Waddles," the newcomer smiled.  "You shall have your
fuel."

The big man grinned.

"That title is derived from my shape and gait," he informed.  "My
regular name is Smith--if you're set on tacking a Mister on behind it."

The girl waved the talkative cook aside and turned to the new hand.

"You'll take it then."

He nodded.

"Could you spare me about ten minutes some time to-day?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.  "I'll send for you when I have time."

The man headed back for his horses and unlashed the buckskin's
top-pack, dropping it to the ground, then led the two of them back
toward the corral, stripped the saddle from the pinto, the side
panniers and packsaddle from the buckskin and turned them into the
corral.  He rambled among the outbuildings on a tour of inspection and
the girl saw him stand long in one spot before the solid log cabin, now
used as a storeroom for odds and ends, that had been the first one
erected on the Three Bar and had sheltered the Harrises before her
father took over their brand.




II

The Three Bar girl sat looking from the window of her own room, the
living room of the ranch house, one end of which was curtained off to
serve as sleeping quarters.  The rattle of pots and pans came from the
big room in the rear which was used by Waddles as a kitchen and dining
hall for the hands.  The new man was still prowling about the place,
inspecting every detail, and she wondered if he could tell her anything
which would prove of benefit in her fight to stop the shrinkage of the
Three Bar herds and help her to face the drastic changes that were
reshaping the policies of the range country.

The Three Bar home range was one of many similar isolated spots where
the inhabitants held out for a continuance of the old order of things.
All through the West, from the Mexican border to the Canadian line, a
score of bitter feuds were in progress, the principles involved
differing widely according to conditions and locality.  There were
existing laws,--and certain clans that denied the justice of each one,
holding out against its enforcement and making laws of their own.  In
some spots the paramount issue was over the relative grazing rights of
cows and sheep, fanning a flame of hatred between those whose
occupations were in any way concerned with these rival interests.  In
others the stockmen ignored the homestead laws which proclaimed that
settlers could file their rights on land.  As always before, wherever
men resorted to lawlessness to protect their fancied rights, the
established order of things had broken down, all laws disregarded
instead of the single one originally involved.

In many communities these clashes between rival interests had furnished
opportunity for rustlers to build up in power and practically take the
range.  Each clan was outside the law in some one particular and so
could not have recourse to it against those who violated it in some
other respect; could not appear against neighbors in one matter lest
their friends do likewise against themselves in another.

This attitude had enabled the wild bunch to saddle themselves on
certain communities and ply their trade without restraint.  Rustling
had come to be a recognized occupation to be reckoned with; the
identity of the thieves was often known, and they visited from ranch to
ranch, whose owners possibly were honest themselves but had friends
among the outlaws for whom the latch-string was always out.  The
rustlers' toll was in the nature of a tribute levied against every
brand and the various outfits expected certain losses from this source.
It was good business to recoup these losses at another's expense and
thus neighbor preyed on neighbor.  Big outfits fought to crush others
who would start up in a small way, and between periods of defending
their own interests against the rustlers they hired them to harry their
smaller competitors from the range; clover for outlaws where all
factions, by mutual assent, played their own hands without recourse to
the law.  It was a case of dog eat dog and the slogan ran: "Catch your
calves in a basket or some other thief will put his iron on them first."

It was to this pass that the Three Bar home range had come in the last
five years.  As Billie Warren watched the new hand moving slowly toward
the bunk house she pondered over what manner of man this could be who
had played a single-handed game in the hills for almost a year.  Was he
leagued with the wild bunch, with the law, or was he merely an
eccentric who might have some special knowledge that would help her
save the Three Bar from extinction?

The stranger picked up his bed roll and disappeared through the
bunk-house door as she watched him.

The lean man who had first greeted him jerked a thumb toward an
unoccupied bunk.

"Pay roll?" he inquired; then, as the new man nodded, "I'm most
generally referred to as Lanky," he offered tentatively.  "Evans is the
rest of it."

The stranger hesitated appreciably; then:

"Harris will do all right for me--Cal for every day," he returned and
introductions had been effected.  It was up to each man to use his own
individual method of making his name known to the newcomer as occasion
arose.

There had been much speculation about the brand worn by the two horses.
The hands were a drifting lot, gathered from almost as many points as
there were men present, but none of them knew the brand.

A dark, thin-faced man with a slender black mustache was the first to
voice a query, not from the fact that his curiosity was large--it was
perhaps less than that of any other man in the room--but for the reason
that he chose to satisfy it at once.  Morrow's personality was cold and
bleak, inviting no close friendships or intimacies; uncommunicative to
a degree that had impressed itself on his companions of the last few
days and they looked up, mildly surprised at his abrupt interrogation.

"Box L," he commented.  "Where does that brand run?"

"Southwest Kansas and Oklahoma," the stranger answered.

"Squatter country," Morrow said.  "Every third section under fence."

Harris sat looking through the door at the valley spread out below and
after a moment he answered the thrust as if he had been long prepared
for it.

"Yes," he said.  "And that's what all range country will come to in a
few more years; farm what they can and graze what they can't--and the
sooner the better for all concerned." He waved an arm down the valley.
"Good alfalfa dirt going to waste down there--overrun with sage and
only growing enough grass to keep ten cows to the quarter.  If that was
ripped up and seeded to hay it would grow enough to winter five
thousand head."

This remark led to the old debate that was never-ending in the cow
country, breaking out afresh in every bunk house and exhaustively
rediscussed.  There were men there who had viewed both ends of the
game,--had seen the foremost outfits in other parts tearing up the sage
and putting in hay for winter feed and had seen that this way was good.

Evans regarded Harris curiously as he deliberately provoked the
argument, then sat back and listened to the various ideas of the others
as the discussion became heated and general.  It occurred to Evans that
Harris was classifying the men by their views, and when the argument
lagged the lean man grinned and gave it fresh impetus.

"It's a settled fact that the outfits that have put in hay are better
off," he said.  "But there's a dozen localities like this, a dozen
little civil wars going on right now where the inhabitants are so
mulish that they lay their ears and fight their own interests by
upholding a flea-bit prejudice that was good for twenty years ago but
is a dead issue to-day."

"And why is it dead to-day?" Morrow demanded.  "And not as good as it
always was?"

"Only a hundred or so different reasons," Evans returned indifferently.
"Then beef-tops brought ten dollars a head and they're worth three
times that now; then you bought a brand on the hoof, come as they run,
for round five dollars straight through, exclusive of calves; now it's
based at ten on the round-up tally.  In those days a man could better
afford to let part of his cows winter-kill than to raise feed to winter
the whole of them through--among other things.  These days he can't."

"And have your water holes fenced," Morrow said.  "As soon as you let
the first squatter light."

"The government has prohibited fencing water holes necessary to the
adjacent range," Harris cut in.  "If that valley was mine I'd have put
it in hay this long time back."

"But it wasn't yours," Morrow pointed out.

"No; but it is now, or at least a part of it is," Harris said.  "I
picked up that school section that lays across the valley and filed on
a home quarter that butts up against the rims."  He sat gazing
indifferently out the door as if unconscious of the dead silence that
followed his remark.  More men had drifted in till nearly a dozen were
gathered in the room.

"That's never been done out here--buying school sections and filing
squatter's rights," Morrow said at last.  "This is cow country and will
never be anything else."

"Good cow country," Harris agreed.  "And it stands to reason it could
be made better with a little help."

"Whenever you start helping a country with fence and plow you ruin it
for cows," Morrow stated.  "I know!"

"It always loomed up in the light of a good move to me," the newcomer
returned.  "One of us has likely read his signs wrong."

"There's some signs round here you better read," Morrow said.  "They
were posted for such as you."

"It appears like I'd maybe made a bad selection then.  I'm sorry about
that," Harris deprecated in a negligent tone that belied his words.
"It's hard to tell just how it will pan out."

"Not so very hard--if you can read," the dark man contradicted.

The newcomer's gaze returned from down the valley and settled on
Morrow's face.

"Do you run a brand of your own--so's you'd stand to lose a dollar if
every foot of range was fenced?" he inquired.

"What are you trying to get at now?" Morrow demanded.

"Nothing much--now; I've already got," Harris said.  "A man's interest
lays on the side where his finances are most concerned."

"What do you mean by that?" Morrow insisted.

"You're good at predicting--maybe you're an expert at guessing too,"
Harris returned.  And suddenly Evans laughed as if something had just
occurred to him.

Morrow glanced at him without turning his head, then fell silent, his
expression unchanged.

A chunky youngster stood in the door and bent an approving gaze on the
big pinto as he swung out across the pasture lot.  The boy's face was
small and quizzical, a shaggy mop of tawny hair hanging so low upon his
forehead that his mild blue eyes peered forth from under the fringe of
it and gave him the air of a surprised terrier, which effect had gained
him the title of Bangs.

"I bet the little paint-horse could make a man swing and rattle to set
up in his middle, once he started to act up," he said.

"Calico wouldn't know how to start," Harris said.  "A horse, inside his
limitations, is what his breaker makes him.  I never favored the idea
of breaking a horse to fight you every time you climb him.  My horses
are gentle-broke."

"But you have to be able to top off just any kind of a horse," Bangs
objected.

"That don't hinder a man from gentling his own string," Harris returned.

Bangs turned his surprised eyes on Harris and regarded him intently as
if striving to fathom a viewpoint that was entirely new to him.

"Why, it don't, for a fact," he said at last.  "Only I just never
happened to think of it like that before."

Morrow laughed and the boy flushed at the disagreeable ring of it.  The
sound was not loud but flat and mirthless, the syllables distinct and
evenly spaced.  His white even teeth remained tight-closed and showed
in flashing contrast to his swarthy face and black mustache.  Morrow's
face wore none of the active malignancy that stamps the features of
those uncontrolled desperadoes who kill in a flare of passion; rather
it seemed that the urge to kill was always with him, had been born with
him, his face drawn and over-lengthened from the inner effort to render
his homicidal tendencies submissive to his brain, not through desire
for regeneration, for he had none, but as a mere matter of expediency.
The set, bleak expression of countenance was but a reflection of his
personality and his companions had sensed this strained quality without
being able to define it in words.

"You listen to what the squatter man tells you," Morrow said to Bangs.
"He'll put you right--give you a course in how everything ought to be
done."  He rose and went outside.

"That was a real unhumorous laugh," Evans said.  "Right from the bottom
of his heart."

A raucous bellow sounded from the cookhouse and every man within
earshot rose and moved toward the summons to feed.

"Let's go eat it up," Evans said and left the bunk house with Harris.

"Did you gather all the information you was prospecting for?" he asked.

Harris nodded.  "I sorted out one man's number," he said.

"Now if you'd only whispered to me I'd have told you right off," Evans
said.  "It's astonishing how easy it is to pick them if you try."

"Waddles is a right unpresuming sort of a man in most respects," Evans
volunteered as they entered the cookhouse.  "But he's downright
egotistical about his culinary accomplishments."

All through the meal the gigantic cook hovered near Billie Warren as
she sat near one end of the long table.  It was evident to Harris that
the big man was self-appointed guardian and counsellor of the Three Bar
boss.  He showed the same fussy solicitude for her welfare that a hen
would show for her helpless chicks.

"Praise the grub and have a friend at court," Harris murmured in Evans'
ear.

Billie Warren had nearly completed her meal before the men came in.
She left the table and went to her own room.  When Harris rose to go he
slapped the big man on the back.

"I'd work for half pay where you get grub like this," he said.  "That's
what I'd call a real feed."

Waddles beamed and followed him to the door.

"It's a fact that I can set out the best bait you ever throwed a lip
over," he confessed.  "You're a man of excellent tastes and it's a real
pleasure to have you about."

Billie Warren opened the door and motioned to Harris.  He went into the
big front room that answered for both living room and sleeping
quarters.  A fire burned in the rough stone fireplace; tanned pelts,
Indian curios and Navajo rugs covered the walls; more rugs and pelts
lay on the floor.  Indian blankets partitioned off one end for her
sleeping room.

"You had something to tell me," she observed, after he had remained
silent for the space of a minute, sitting in the chair she had
indicated and gazing into the fire.

"And I'll have to start it a little different from the way I first
counted on," he said.  "Have any of the boys mentioned my name to you?"

She shook her head and waited for him to go on.

"You won't care much to hear it," he announced.  "I'd thought some of
spending two years here under some other name--but perhaps it's better
to come out in the open--don't you think?"

The girl had straightened in her chair and was leaning toward him, her
face white and her gray eyes boring straight into the man's.  She knew
now who he was,--the man she had more reason to despise than all others
on earth combined.  Of the Harris family she knew nothing at all except
that her father's lifelong regret had been the fact that the
partnership between himself and his oldest friend, William Harris, had
never been brought to pass.  And this regret had, in the end, led him
to try and cement that arrangement in the second generation.  Five
years before his trail had crossed that of the elder Harris for the
first time since he had taken over the Three Bar brand; and when his
will had been read she had known that on the occasion of that visit his
old friend had played upon this sentiment to trick him into making it.
On all sides of her she had evidence that men were wolves who preyed
upon the interests of others, and there was not a doubt that the father
of the man before her had preyed upon her interests through the
sentiment of her parent; no other possible theory could account for the
strange disposal of his property, the will dated and signed at the
exact time of his visit to the Harrises.

The tenseness of her pose was replaced by lethargic indifference and
she relaxed into her chair.

"I've known all the time you would come," she said.

"It's too bad, Billie," he said.  "It's tough having me wished on to
you this way."

"Don't play that game with me!" she flared.  "Of course you've
disproved every drop of human decency in advance."

"It sure looms up like that on the surface," he admitted ruefully.
"But I didn't have a hand in cinching you this way."

"You could have proved that by staying away.  I wrote you a year ago
that I'd donate you a half-interest in the Three Bar at the expiration
of the time if you'd only keep off the place.  But at the last moment
you couldn't resist having it all.  Ten more days and you'd have been
too late."

The man nodded slowly.

"Too late," he agreed and sat looking into the fire.

She had been almost a son to her father, had ridden the range with him,
managed the Three Bar during his sickness; and such was her loyalty to
his memory that not a trace of her bitterness had been directed toward
her parent.  He had loved the Three Bar and had always believed that
old Bill Harris, its founder, had loved it too.  His will had
stipulated that half of his property should go to the younger Harris
under the condition that the man should make his home on the Three Bar
for two out of the first three years after her father's decease.  The
whole of it was to go to him in case she failed to make her own home at
the Three Bar during her co-heir's stay, or in the event of her
marriage to another before the expiration of three years.

"Of course I'm tied here for two years," she said.  "Or left penniless.
If you can make it unpleasant enough to drive me away--which won't be
difficult--you win."

"I wouldn't count too strong on that," he counseled mildly.

"Then why did you come?" she insisted.  "Half of it was yours by merely
keeping away."

"Maybe I'm sort of tied up myself--in ways you don't suspect," he
offered.

"Very likely!" she returned; "sounds plausible.  You might offer to
marry me," she suggested when he failed to answer.  "You could gain
full possession at once that way."

He removed his gaze from the fire and looked long at her.

"It will likely come to that," he said.

"I'll put a weapon in your hands," she retorted.  "Whenever it does
come to that I'll leave the ranch--so now you know the one sure way to
win."

"I hope it won't pan out like that," he said.  "I'll be
disappointed--more than I can say."

She rose and stood waiting for him to go.

"Good night, Billie," he said.  "I expect maybe things will break all
right for us."

She did not answer and he went out.  Waddles hailed him in friendly
fashion as he passed through the cookhouse, then wiped his hands and
stepped into Billie's quarters.  Waddles was a fixture at the Three
Bar; he had ridden for her father until he had his legs smashed up by a
horse and had thereafter reigned as cook.  He was confidential adviser
and self-appointed guardian of the girl.  His mind was still pleasantly
concerned with the stranger's warm praise of his culinary efforts.

"That new man now, Billie," he remarked.  "He's away off ahead of the
average run.  You mark me--he'll be top hand with this outfit in no
time at all."  Then he observed the girl's expression.  "What is it,
Pet?" he inquired.  "What's a-fretting you?"

"Do you know who he is?" she asked.

Waddles wagged a negative head.

"He's Calvin Harris," she stated.

Instead of the blank dismay which she had expected to see depicted on
Waddles's face at this announcement, it seemed to her that the big man
was pleased.

"The hell!" he said.  "'Scuse me, Billie.  So this here is Cal!  Well,
well--now what do you think of that?"

"I think that I don't want to stay here alone with him while you're out
after the horses," she returned.

"Wrong idea!" the big man promptly contradicted.  "You've got to stick
it out for two years, girl.  The best thing you can do is to get
acquainted; and figure out how to get along the best you can--the pair
of you."

"That's probably true," she assented indifferently.  "I'll have to face
a number of things that are equally unpleasant in the next two
years--so I might as well start now.  He must have praised the food in
order to win you to his side in two minutes flat."

Waddles's face expressed pained reproach.

"Now there it is again!" he said.  "You know I'm only on one
side--yours.  Old Cal Warren had some definite notion when he framed
this play; so it's likely this young Cal is on your side, too."

"But even more likely not," she stated.

"Then what?"

"Why, then I'll have to kill him and put a stop to it," the big man
announced.  "But it's noways probable that it will come to that.  Let's
use logic.  He spoke well of my cooking--like you said--which proves
him a man of some discernment.  No way to get around that.  Now a man
with his judgment wouldn't suspect for one living second that he could
play it low-down on you with me roosting close at hand.  Putting two
plain facts together it works out right natural and simple that he's on
the square.  As easy as that," he finished triumphantly.  "So don't you
fret.  And in case he acts up I'll clamp down on him real sudden," he
added by way of further reassurance.

His great paw opened and shut to illustrate his point as he moved
toward the door and the Three Bar girl knew that when Waddles spoke of
clamping down it was no mere figure of speech.




III

Billie Warren heard the steady buzz of a saw and later the ringing
strokes of an axe.  The men had departed three hours before to be gone
for a week on the horse round-up but she had not yet issued from her
own quarters.  The music of axe and saw was ample evidence that her new
and undesired partner was making valuable use of his time.  She went
outside and he struck the axe in a cross section of pine log as she
moved toward him.

"We'll have to get along the best we can," she announced abruptly.  "Of
course you will have a say in the management of the Three Bar and draw
the same amount for yourself that I do."

He sat on a log and twisted a cigarette as he reflected upon this
statement.

"I'd rather not do that," he decided.  "I don't want to be a drain on
the brand--but to help build it up.  Suppose I just serve as an extra
hand and do whatever necessary turns up--in return for your letting me
advise with you on a few points that I happen to have worked out while
I was prowling through the country."

"Any way you like," she returned.  "It's for you to decide.  Any money
which you fail to draw now will revert to you in the end so it won't
matter in the least."

His reply was irrelevant, a deliberate refusal to notice her ungenerous
misinterpretation of his offer.

"Do you mind if I gather a few Three Bar colts round here close and
break out my own string before they get back?" he asked.

"Anything you like," she repeated.  "I'm not going to quarrel.  I've
made up my mind to that.  I'll be gone the rest of the day."

Five minutes later he saw her riding down the lane.  She was not
seeking companionship but rather solitude and for hours she drifted
aimlessly across the range, sometimes dismounting on some point that
afforded a good view and reclining in the warm spring sun.  Dusk was
falling when she rode back to the Three Bar.  As she turned her sorrel,
Papoose, into the corral she noticed several four-year-old colts in the
pasture lot.  As she returned to the house Harris appeared in the door.

"Grub-pile," he announced.

They sat down to a meal of broiled steak, mashed potatoes, hot
biscuits, coffee and raspberry jam.  She had deliberately absented
herself through the noon hour and well past the time for evening meal,
confidently expecting to find him impatiently waiting for her to return
and prepare food for him.

"You make good biscuits--better than those Waddles stirs up," she said.
"Though I'd never dare tell him so."  It was the first time she had
conceded that there might be even a taint of good in him.

"Well, yes--they're some better than those I usually turn out," he
confessed.  "Having a lady to feed I flaked the lard in cold instead of
just melting it and stirring her in like I most generally do.  I'm
right glad that you consider them a success."

When the meal was finished she rose without a word and went into her
own quarters, convinced that this desertion would certainly call forth
a protest; but the man calmly went about the business of washing the
dishes as if he had expected nothing else, and presently she heard the
door close behind him and immediately afterwards a light appeared in
the bunk-house window.

The rattle of pots and pans roused her before daylight.  Some thirty
minutes later he called to her.

"I've finished," he said.  "You'd better eat yours before it gets
cold," and the closing of the door announced that he had gone without
waiting for an answer.  She heard again the sound of saw and axe as he
worked up the dry logs into stove lengths.  At least he was making good
his word to the cook.  The sounds ceased when the sun was an hour high
and when she looked out to determine the reason she saw him working
with four colts in one of the smaller corrals.

He had fashioned a hackamore for each and they stood tied to the corral
bars.  He left them there and repaired to the big gates of the main
corral.  The two swinging halves sagged until their ends dragged on the
ground when opened or closed, necessitating the expenditure of
considerable energy in performing either operation.  She watched him
tear down the old support wires and replace them with new ones,
stretching a double strand from the top of the tall pivot posts to the
free ends of the gates.  Placing a short stick between the two strands
of heavy wire he twisted until the shortening process had cleared the
gate ends and they swung suspended, moving so freely that a rider could
lean from his saddle and throw them open with ease.

This completed to his satisfaction he fashioned heavy slabs of wood to
serve as extra brake-blocks for the chuck wagon.  Between the
performance of each two self-appointed duties he spent some little time
with the colts, handling them and teaching them not to fear his
approach, cinching his saddle on first one and then the next, talking
to them and handling their heads.

For three days there was little communication between the two.  It was
evident that he had no intention of forcing his society upon her, and
her failure to prepare his meals failed to elicit a single sign to show
that he had expected otherwise; the contrary was true, in fact, for he
invariably prepared enough for two.  It was clear that he exercised the
same patience toward her that he showed in handling the green
four-year-olds; and she was inclined to be a little scornful of his
method of gentle-breaking them.  She felt her own ability to handle any
horse on the range although old Cal Warren had gentled every animal she
had wanted for her own and flatly refused to let her mount any others.
Waddles was as insistent upon this point as her parent had been, but
never had she known a cowhand who took time and pains to gentle his own
string.

In the afternoon of the third day she saw him swing to the back of a
big bay, easing into the saddle without a jar, and the colt ambled
round the corral, rolling his eyes back toward the thing clamped upon
him but making no effort to pitch.  He dismounted and stripped off the
saddle, cinched it on a second horse and let him stand, leading a third
out to a snubbing post near the door of the blacksmith shop where he
proceeded to put on his first set of shoes.

The girl went out and sat on the sill of the shop door and watched him.
The colt pulled back in an effort to release the forefoot that the man
held clamped between his leather-clad knees, then changed his tactics
and sagged his weight against Harris.

"You Babe!" the man ordered.  "Don't you go leaning on me."  He pared
down the hoof and fitted the shoe but before nailing it on he released
the colt's foot and addressed the girl.  "If I'd fight him now while
he's spooky and half-scared it would spoil him maybe," he explained.

"I gentle-break mine, too," she said, and the man overlooked the
inflection which, as plainly as words, was intended to convey the
impression that his ways were effeminate.  "If every man used up his
time gentling his string he'd never have a day off to work at anything
else."

"Why, it don't use up much time," he objected.  "They halfway break
themselves, standing round with a saddle on and having a man handle
them a little between spells of regular work--like cutting firewood and
such.  And it's a saving of time in the end.  There's three hundred odd
days every year when a man consumes considerable time fighting every
horse he steps up on--if they're broke that way to start."

"So your only reason for not riding them out is to save time," she said.

"If you mean that I'm timid," he observed, "why, I don't know as I'd
bother to dispute it."  He moved over and sat on his heels facing her,
twisting the ever handy cigarette.  "Listen," he urged.  "Let's you and
I try to get along.  Now if you'll only make up your mind that I'm not
out to grab the Three Bar, not even the half of it that's supposed to
be mine--unless you get paid for it--why, we're liable to get to liking
each other real well in the end.  I'll give you a contract to that
effect."

"Which you know would be worthless!" she returned.  "The will
specifically states that any agreements between us prior to the time of
division are to be disregarded.  A written contract would have no more
value than your unsupported promise and in view of what's happened you
don't expect me to place a value on that."

He pulled reflectively at his cigarette and she rather expected another
of the irrelevant remarks with which he so often replied to her pointed
thrusts.

"No," he said at last.  "But it's a fact that I don't want the Three
Bar--or rather I do if you should ever decide to sell."

"I never will," she stated positively.  "It's always been my home.
I've been away and had a good time; three winters in school and
enjoying every second; but there always comes a time when I'm sick to
get back, when I know I can't stay away from the Three Bar, when I want
to smell the sage and throw my leg across a horse--and ride!"

"I know, Billie," he said softly.  "I was raised here, up until I was
eight.  My feeling is likely less acute than yours but I've always
hankered to get back to where the sage and pine trees run together.  I
mentioned a while back that I was tied up peculiar and stood to lose
considerable if I failed to put in two years out here--which wouldn't
have been of any particular consequence only that I found out that the
Three Bar was going under unless some one put a stop to what's going
on.  I'll pull it out of the hole, maybe, and hand it back to you."

She was swayed into a momentary belief in his sincerity but steeled
herself against it, and in the effort to strengthen the crumbling walls
of her dislike she fell back on open ridicule.

"You!" she flared.  "And what can you do against it--a man that was
raised in squatter country behind a barb-wire fence, who has to gentle
his horses before he can sit up on one, who has hitched a gun on his
belt because he thinks it's the thing to do, and has stowed it in a
place where he'd have to tie himself in a knot--or undress--to reach
it.  And then you talk of pulling the Three Bar out of a hole!  Why,
there are twenty men within fifty miles of here that would kill you the
first move you made."

"There's considerable sound truth in that," he said.  He looked down at
his gun; it swung on his left side, in front, the butt pointing toward
the right.  "It's easier to work with it sort of out of the way of my
hands," he explained and smiled.

She found herself liking him, even in the face of the treachery he had
practiced against her father and was correspondingly angry, both with
herself and at him.  She left him without a word and returned to the
house.

He finished putting the shoes on the colt and as he turned him back
into the corral he observed a horseman jogging up the lane at a trail
trot.  He knew the man for Slade, whose home ranch lay forty miles to
the south and a little west, the owner of the largest outfit in that
end of the State; a man feared by his competitors, quick to resent an
insinuation against his business methods and capable of backing his
resentment.

Slade dropped from his horse and accorded Harris only a casual nod as
he headed for the house.  Slade's face was of a peculiar cast.  The
black eyes were set very close together in a wide face; his cheek bones
were low and oddly protruding, sloping far out to a point below each
eye.  His small ears were set so close to his skull that the
outcropping cheek bones extended almost an inch beyond them to either
side.  Yet there was a certain fascination about his face and bearing
that appealed to the spark of the primitive in women; that last
lingering cell that harks fondly back to men in the raw.  His age might
have been anywhere above twenty-six and under fifty-six.

He walked through the cookhouse and opened the door of the girl's
quarters without the formality of a knock, as if a frequent visitor and
sure of his privileges.

"How many times have I told you to knock?" she demanded.  "The next
time you forget it I'll go out as you come in."

Slade dropped into a chair.

"I never have knocked--not in twelve years," he said.

"It was somewhat different when I was a small girl and you were only a
friend of my father," she pointed out.  "But now----"

"But now that I've come to see you as a woman it's different?" he
inquired.  "No reason for that."

She switched the channel of conversation and spoke of the coming
round-up, of the poor condition of range stock owing to the severity of
the winter; but it was a monologue.  For a time the man sat and
listened, as if he enjoyed the sound of her voice, contributing nothing
to the conversation himself, then suddenly he stirred in his chair and
waved a hand to indicate the unimportance of the topics.

"Yes, yes; true enough," he interrupted.  "But I didn't come to talk
about that.  When are you coming home with me, Billie?"

"And you can't come if you insist on talking about that," she countered.

"I'll come," he stated.  "Tell me when you're going to move over to the
Circle P."

"Not ever," she said.  "I'd rather be a man's horse than his wife.  Men
treat women like little tinsel queens before, and afterwards they
answer to save a cook's wages and drudge their lives out feeding a
hunch of half-starved hands--or else go to the other extreme.  Wives
are either work horses or pets.  I was raised like a boy and I want to
have a say in running things myself."

"You can go your own gait," he pledged.

"I'm doing that now," she returned.  "And prefer going on as I am."

Slade rose and moved over to her, taking her hands and lifting her from
her chair.

The girl pushed him back with a hand braced against his chest.

"Stop it!" she said.  "You're getting wilder every time you come, but
you've never pawed at me before.  I won't have people's hands on me,"
and she made a grimace of distaste.

The man reached out again and drew her to him.  She wrenched away and
faced Slade.

"That will be the last time you'll do that until I give the word," she
said.  "I don't want the Circle P--or you.  When I do I'll let you
know!"

He moved toward her again and she refused to back away from him but
stood with her hands at her sides.

"If you put a finger on me it's the last lime you'll visit the Three
Bar," she calmly announced.

He stood so close as almost to touch her but she failed to lift a hand
or move back an inch, and Slade knew that he faced one whose spirit
matched his own, perhaps the one person within a hundred miles who did
not fear him.  He had tamed men and horses--and women; he raised his
arms slowly, deliberately, to see if she would flinch away or stand
fast and outgame him.  She knew that he was harmless to her--and he
knew it.  He might perpetrate almost any crime on the calendar and come
clear; but in this land where women were few they were honored.  One
whisper from the Three Bar girl that Slade had raised his hand against
her and, powerful as he was, the hunt for him would be on, with every
man's hand against him.

His arms had half circled her when he whirled, catlike, every faculty
cool and alert, as a voice sounded from the door.  Both had been too
engrossed to notice its noiseless opening.

"I've finished cleaning up round the shop and corrals," Harris said.
"Is there any rubbish round the house you'd like to have throwed out
and piled in a dry gulch somewheres out of sight?"

He stood in the door, half facing them, his left side quartering toward
Slade.  To the girl it appeared that the strange pose was for the
purpose of enabling him to take a quick step to the right and spring
outside if Slade should make a move and she felt a tinge of scorn at
his precaution even though she knew that it would avail him nothing if
Slade's deadly temper were roused by the insult.  Slade, who had killed
many, would add Harris to his list before he could move.

Slade's understanding of the quartering position and the odd sling of
Harris's gun was entirely different and as he shifted his feet until he
faced the man in the door, his movements were slow and deliberate,
nothing that could be misconstrued.

"Who summoned you in here?" he demanded.

Harris did not reply but stood waiting for some word from the girl.
She had a sudden sick dread that Slade would kill him and was surprised
at the sentiment, for no longer than an hour before she had wished him
dead.  She made belated answer to his original question.

"No," she said.  "Go on out, please."

He turned his back on Slade and went out.

"And you," she said to Slade, "you'd best be going too.  We've been too
good neighbors to quarrel--unless you come over again with the same
idea you did to-day."

At sunset the girl called to Harris and he repaired to the house and
found her putting a hot meal for two on the end of the long pine table,
the first time she had deigned to eat with him since that first meal.

"There's no use of our going on like this," she said.  "We've two years
of it to face; so it's best to get on some kind of a neutral footing."

For her own peace of mind she had tried to smother her dislike of him
and he was very careful to avoid any topic that would rekindle it.
They washed the dishes together, and from that hour their relations, to
all outward appearance, were friendly or at least devoid of open
hostility.  They no longer ate separately; she did not avoid him during
the day, and the second evening she prepared two places at her own
table in the big living room before the fireplace.

"It's so empty out there," she explained.

"With only the two of us at a table built for twenty."

He lingered for an hour's chat before her fire and each evening
thereafter was the same.  But he knew that she was merely struggling to
make the best of a matter that was distasteful, that her opinion of him
was unaltered.  Her bitterness could not be entirely concealed, and she
frequently touched on some fresh point that added to her distrust of
his present motives and confirmed her belief in his double-dealing in
the past.  There were so many of these points; his refusal to accept
her offer to give him his half-interest if he would stay off the place;
his weak insinuations that there was some reason why he must spend two
years on the Three Bar; his prowling the country for a year spying on
the methods she followed in running the outfit, half of which would
soon be his; his buying the school section and filing on a quarter of
land, the location blocking the lower end of the Three Bar valley.
Whenever she mentioned one of these he refused to take issue with her.
And one night she touched on still another point.

"What was the reason for your first idea--of coming here under another
name?" she demanded.

"I thought maybe others knew I'd been left a part interest," he said,
"and it might be embarrassing.  The way it is, with only the two of us
knowing the inside, I can stay on as a regular hand until the time is
up."

"You're so plausible," she said.  "You put it as a favor to me.  Did it
ever strike you that if the truth were known it might also be
uncomfortable for you?"

He smiled across at her and once more she frowned as she discovered
that he was likeable for all his underhandedness.

"Worse than that--suicidal," he admitted.

"If you mentioned what you think of me, that I've framed to rob you by
law, you wouldn't be bothered with me for long."  He laughed softly and
stretched his feet toward the fire.  "Look at it any way you like and
I'm in bad shape to deal you any misery," he pointed out.  "If you'd
drop a hint that I'm an unwelcome addition it would only be a matter of
days until I'd fail to show up for meals.  If you view it from that
angle you can see I'm setting on the powder can."

She did see it, but had not so clearly realized it till he pointed it
out, and for the first time she wavered in her conviction that he had
come simply to deprive her of her rights.  But the thought that her
father would not easily have willed away the home place to another
without being unduly influenced served to reinstate her distrust along
with a vague resentment for his having shaken it by throwing himself so
openly on her mercy.

"You probably thought to overcome that by reaching the point the whole
thing so patently aims for," she said.  "And you calculated
well--arriving at a time when we'd be alone for a week.  The whole
scheme was based on that idea and I've been patiently wondering why you
don't rush matters and invite me to marry you."

He rose and flicked the ash from his cigarette into the fireplace.

"I do invite you--right now," he said, and in her surprise she left her
chair and stood facing him.  "I'd like real well to have you, Billie."

"That's the final proof," she said.  "I'm surprised that you didn't
tell me the first day."

"So am I," he said.

She found no answer for this but stood silent, knowing that she had
suddenly become afraid of him.

"And that's the living truth," he affirmed.  "Other men have loved you
the first day.  You know men well enough to be certain that I wouldn't
be tied to one woman for the sake of owning a few head of cows--not if
I didn't want her for herself."  He waved an arm toward the door.
"There's millions of miles of sage just outside," he said.  "And
millions of cows--and girls."

He moved across to her and stood almost touching her, looking down into
her face.  When Slade had stood so a few days past she had been coldly
indifferent except for a shiver of distaste at the thought of his
touching her.  Before Harris she felt a weakening, a need of support,
and she leaned back from him and placed one hand behind her on the
table.

"You judge for yourself whether a man wouldn't be right foolish--with
all those things I mentioned being right outside to call him--to marry
a woman he didn't want for herself, because she had a few hundred head
of cows."  He smiled down at her.  "Don't pull back from me, Billie; I
won't lay a finger on you.  But now do you think it's you I want--or
the little old Three Bar?"

"You can prove it," she said at last.  "Prove it by going away for six
months--or three."

He shook his head.

"Not that," he said.  "I've told you I was sewed up in a right peculiar
way myself--which wouldn't matter a damn if it wasn't for this.  I'd
have tossed it off in a second if the girl on the Three Bar had turned
out to be any other than you.  Now I'm going to see it through.  The
Three Bar is going under--the brand both our folks helped to
found--unless some one pulls it out of the hole.  Believe me if you can
and if you can't--why, you know that one remark about my being
unwelcome here will clear the road for you, like I mentioned a few
minutes back."

He turned away without touching her and she had not moved when the door
closed behind him.

An hour past noon on the following day a drove of horses appeared at
the lower extremity of the valley and swept on toward the ranch.  As
Harris threw open the gates of the big corral he saw her standing in
the door of the cookhouse watching the oncoming drove.  Riders flanked
the bunch well out to each side to steady it.  There was a roar of
hoofs and a stifling cloud of dust as three hundred half-wild horses
clattered past and crowded through the gates, scattering swiftly across
the pasture lot back of the corral.  A dozen sweat-streaked riders
swung from their saddles.  There was no chance to distinguish color or
kind among them through the dust caked in the week-old growth of beard
that covered every face.

One man remained on his mount and followed the horses into the pasture
lot, cutting out fifty or more and heading them back into the corral;
for Waddles had decreed that they could have the rest of the afternoon
off for a jaunt to Brill's Store and they waited only to change mounts
before the start.

Calico stood drooping sleepily in one of the smaller corrals and Harris
moved toward him, intending to ride over with the rest of the men.

"The boss said for you to ride Blue," Morrow stated as Harris passed
the group at the gates of the corral.  "He's clear gentle-broke, Blue
is."

The men looked up in surprise.  Morrow had not been near the house to
receive instructions from the girl.  The lie had been so apparent as to
constitute a direct challenge to the other man.

Harris stood looking at him, then shrugged his shoulders.

"Whatever the boss says goes with me," he returned evenly.

A rangy blue roan swept past with the fifty or so others.  At least
once every round of the corral he laid back his ears and squealed as he
scored some other horse with his teeth, then lashed out with wicked
heels.

"I reckon that'll be Blue?" Harris asked of Evans and the lanky one
nodded.  The men scattered round the corral and each watched his chance
to put his rope on some chosen horse.  The roan kept others always
between himself and any man with a rope but at last he passed Harris
with but one horse between.  Harris nipped his noose across the back of
the intervening horse and over the blue roan's head.

Blue stopped the instant the rope tightened on his neck.

"You've been busted and rope-burnt a time or two," Harris remarked, and
he led the horse out to saddle him.  The big blue leaned back,
crouching on his haunches as the man put on the hackamore.  His eyes
rolled wickedly as Harris smoothed the saddle blanket and he flinched
away with a whistling snort of fear, his nostrils flaring, as the heavy
saddle was thrown on his back.

Harris tightened the front cinch and the blue horse braced himself and
drew in a long, deep breath.

"That's right, Blue, you swell up and inflate yourself," Harris said.
"I'll have to squeeze it out of you."  He fastened the hind cinch
loosely, then returned to the front and hauled on the latigo until the
pressure forced the horse to release the indrawn breath and it leaked
out of him with a groaning sigh.

"I wonder now why Morrow is whetting his tommyhawk for me," Harris
remarked as he inspected the big roan.  "You're a hard one, Blue.  I'll
let that saddle warm up on you before I top you off."

Every horse pitched a few jumps from force of habit when first mounted,
some of them indifferently, others viciously, then moved restlessly
around, anxious for the start.

"Well, step up on him and let's be going," Morrow ordered surlily.

Harris took a short hold on the rope reins of the hackamore with his
left hand, cramped the horse's head toward him and gripped the mane,
his right hand on the horn, and swung gently to the saddle, easing into
it without a jar.

"Easy, Blue!" he said, holding up the big roan's head.  "Don't you hang
your head with me."  He eased the horse to a jerky start and they were
off for Brill's at a shuffling trot.  Three times in the first mile
Blue bunched himself nervously and made a few stiff jumps but each time
Harris held him steady.  The pace was increased to a long, swinging
trot and he felt the play of powerful muscles under him as the blue
horse seemed to reach out for distance at every stride.

"You'd have made one good little horse, Blue," he said, "if some sport
hadn't spoiled you on the start."

"Don't speak loud or the blue horse might shy and spill his pack,"
Morrow remarked in a tone loud enough for Harris to overhear.  Evans
turned in his saddle and eyed the dark man curiously.

"He won't upset his load to-day," he prophesied.  "Harris is just past
the colt stage, round twenty-seven or eight somewheres, and has
out-growed his longing to show off.  But he'll be able to sit up in the
middle of anything that starts to move out from under him."

They left the horses drooping at the several hitch rails before the
post and crowded in.  A few paused along the counters of merchandise
that flanked the left side of the big room while the rest headed
straight for the long bar that extended the full length of the opposite
side.  The Three Bar men had scarcely tossed off their first drink
before there sounded a clatter of hoofs outside and twelve men from the
Halfmoon D trooped in.

"Out of the way!" the foremost youth shouted.  "Back off from the pine
slab, you Three Bar soaks, and give parched folks a chance.  Two hours'
play and six months' work--so don't delay me."

The throng before the bar was a riot of color; Angora chaps ranging
from orange and lavender to black and silky white; smooth leather
chaps, and stamped, silver-ornamented and plain, with here and there an
individual design, showing that the owner had selected some queerly
spotted steer and tanned the pelt with the hair on to be fashioned into
gaudy vest and pants.  'Twas an improvident, carefree lot who lived
to-day with scarce a thought for to-morrow.  The clatter of sardine and
salmon cans mingled with the clink of glassware at the bar as the men
who had missed the noon meal lunched out of cans between drinks.

Some few detached themselves from the group and occupied themselves
with writing.  Several started a game of stud poker at one of the many
tables.  Harris wrote a few letters before joining in the play, and as
he looked up from time to time he caught many curious glances leveled
upon him.  Morrow had been busily spreading the tidings that a would-be
squatter was among them and they were curious to see the man who had
deliberately defied the unwritten law of the Coldriver Range.  When he
had finished his writing he crossed over to the group, tossed a bill on
the bar and waved all hands to a drink.

Waddles had instructed Evans to start the men back before the spree had
progressed to a point where they would refuse to leave Brill's and so
leave the Three Bar short-handed.  At the end of two hours he looked at
his watch and snapped it shut.

"Turn out!" he shouted.  "On your horses!"

"That goes for my men, too," the Halfmoon D foreman seconded.
"Outside!"

Morrow had not neglected to inform the men from the Halfmoon D that
Harris gentled his horses.

"Handle the little roan horse gentle," he advised as they moved toward
the door.  "Better hobble your stirrups before you crawl him."  Several
men turned and grinned.  In riding contests women were allowed to
hobble their stirrups while the same precaution disqualified a man.

Most of the men were young, scarcely more than boys, full of rough play
and youthful pride of accomplishment along with a desire to make a
presumably careless display of it.  A Halfmoon D youth mounted a blocky
bay and as he threw his leg across it he loosed a shrill yip and
reached forward to rake the horse's shoulder.  The bay dropped his head
and performed.  A half-dozen others followed his example and their
horses pitched off in as many directions.  All eyes were turned on
Harris as he neared the big roan.

"Oh, I might as well act up a little," he said to Evans.  "They seem to
be looking for it."

"He's a hard citizen, that roan," Evans remarked.  "I'll wrangle for
you, Cal."

Harris stepped over to the horse.

"I wonder what old Blue can do," he said.  He hooked the roan in the
shoulder as he mounted and the horse plunged his head between his knees
and rose in the air.  The big roan bawled and expelled a long-drawn
"wa-a-augh" each time he struck the ground, then savagely shook his
whole frame as he rose again.  The first four jumps Harris swung both
feet forward and hooked his shoulders and the next two bounds reached
back and raked his flanks, in accordance with the regulation rules
prescribed for contest riding.

"He's riding for the judges," a megaphone voice announced.  "Boy,
you've rode your horse!"

Blue varied his leaps, draping himself in fantastic curves, lighting on
a slant with his side arched out, sunfishing and swapping ends, then
threw himself over and smashed down on his back.  Harris slipped
sidewise and cleared himself.

"Fourteen long jumps," one man testified.  "One hell of a long time on
an eel like that!"

As Blue regained his feet Harris stepped into the saddle and rose with
him, the hackamore rope trailing loose under the horse's feet.  A
chorus of approving yelps broke out.

"Rake him from ears to tail roots!"  "Ri-ide 'im, rider!"  "Hang 'em up
into that horse!"  "Claw him!"  "Scra-a-atch him!"

This wave of questionable advice ceased as Blue, after three short
jumps, somersaulted forward and his rider made a headlong side-dive for
safety.

Evans had flanked the roan's course and he now leaned from the saddle
and seized the hackamore rope; as Blue scrambled to his feet he took
two quick turns of the rope and snubbed his head short to the saddle
horn.  The roan struggled and threw himself, his head still suspended
by the rope, rose and reared to strike savagely at the man who held
him, but Evans left his saddle and leaned far out, his right foot on
the ground, left still in the stirrup, and eased himself back into the
saddle as the fighting horse slid down.  He had never once lost his
hold which snubbed Blue to the horn, a pretty bit of wrangling.

"He's on the fight now," Evans said.  "I'll hold him solid till he
cools down--which won't be long, for Cal didn't cut him any; he was
swinging his feet free and never hooked him once."  He jerked his thumb
at the roan's shoulder and flanks where not a drop of blood appeared;
his hide would have been tattered indeed if Harris had driven home his
rowels each time he swung his feet.  "Nice ride."

Harris walked back to a small group that had not yet mounted, Morrow
among them.  His left side was quartering toward Morrow and apparently
he was addressing the group as a whole instead of any one man.

"The next time some one frames me to put on a show like that," he said,
"why, he'd better make certain beforehand about what part he's willing
to play in the performance himself--for next time I won't take it out
of the horse."




IV

It is said that there comes a day in the life of every handler of bad
horses when he will mount one and ride him out, master him and
dismount,--and forever after decline to ride another.  Riley Foster was
evidence of this.  For three years Rile and Bangs had been inseparable,
riding together on every job, and the shaggy youth topped off the
animals in Foster's string before the older man would mount them.  As
Bangs went about his work his faded blue eyes were ever turned toward
the Three Bar boss who stood in the door of the blacksmith shop.

The girl was vaguely troubled as she noted this.  Bangs and Foster had
returned for their second season at the Three Bar.  All through the
previous summer the boy had evidenced his silent adoration, his eyes
following her every move.

The scene round Billie was one of strenuous activity, every effort bent
toward whipping the remuda into shape for the calf round-up in the
least possible space of time.

Every rider must have nine horses in his string.  His five circle
horses needed but little training, the only necessary qualifications
being endurance and a sufficient amount of breaking to make it possible
to saddle them; the two night mounts must be partially broken to work
the herd, then switched to night guarding and thereafter used
exclusively for that.  But the two cow horses required long and skilful
training.  Every man gave one of his circle string the preliminary
training of the cow horse each season, the work resumed by the man to
whose string the horse was allotted the following year; thus new ones
were coming on to replace the older horses as fast as they were
condemned.

Four pairs of men worked within a hundred yards of the girl, taking
equal turns at riding and wrangling.  The one who wrangled put his rope
on a horse and led him out, snubbed him to the saddle horn and
frequently eared him as well, while the one who was to ride him out
cinched on his saddle and mounted.

Green horses were led out, one after another, to be saddled for the
first time, and those previously broken required a few work-outs to
knock the wire edge off their unwillingness to carry a rider after a
winter of freedom on the range.

Three men were shoeing horses tied to snubbing posts at ten-yard
intervals before the shop.  One animal that had fought viciously
against this treatment had been thrown and stretched, his four feet
roped to convenient posts, and while he struggled and heaved on the
ground Rile Foster calmly fitted and nailed the shoes on him.  Cal
Harris finished shoeing the colt he was working.

"That's the last touch," he said.  "My string is all set to go."

"You have five colts gentled for your circle bunch," she said.  "But
you didn't pick a single cow horse.  The boys have sorted out the best
ones and the few that are left won't answer for a man that insists on a
gentled string."

"Creamer and Calico will do for me," he said.  "I broke them myself and
maybe I can worry along."

"Did you break them like that?" she asked.  Bangs was topping a horse
that strenuously refused to be conquered and as they looked on the
animal threw himself.

"Like that?  Well, no--not precisely," Harris said.  "They're not
breaking horses.  They're proving that they're bronc-peelers that can
ride 'em before they're broke.  A horse started out that way will be a
bronc till the day he dies.  The first thing he knows some straddler
swarms him and hangs the spurs in him.  He bogs his head and starts out
to slip his pack--and from right then on he thinks the first thing to
do whenever a man steps up on him is to try his best to shake him off."

Three men were lashing their bed rolls and war bags on three pack
horses and when this task was completed they rode down the lane, each
one leading his pack animal.  Harris knew this as evidence that they
would start after the calves on the following day.  The custom was to
exchange representatives to ride with each wagon within a reasonable
distance, the reps to look after the interest of the brand for which
they rode.

"How many reps do you trade?" he asked.

"Three," she said.  "Halfmoon D, V L and with Slade."

The Halfmoon D lay some fifteen miles eastward along the foot of the
hills; the V L the same distance to the west, but cached away in a
pocket that led well back into the base of the range, a comparatively
small outfit owned by the Brandons, father and four sons, who made
every effort to keep the bulk of their cows ranging in their own home
basin and exchanged reps only with the Three Bar.

Slade's home place lay forty miles south and a little west and his cows
grazed for over a hundred miles, requiring three wagons to cover his
range.

During the afternoon the three reps came in to replace the men who had
left.  The surplus horses had been cut out and thrown back on the
range, only those required for the remuda remaining in the pasture lot.
The chuck wagon was wheeled before the cookhouse door and packed for an
early start.  Before the first streaks of dawn the men had saddled and
breakfasted.  It was turning gray in the east when four horses,
necessitating the attentions of four men, were hooked to the wagon.  A
man hung on the bit of each wheel horse while another grasped the bits
of the lead team as Waddles made one last hasty trip inside.

"This will be a rocky ride for a mile or two," he prophesied, as he
mounted the seat and braced himself.  "These willow-tails haven't had
on a strap of harness for many a month.  All set.  Turn loose!"

The men stepped back and the four horses hit the collars raggedly.  One
wheel horse reared and jumped forward.  The off leader dropped his head
and pitched, shaking himself as if struggling to unseat a rider, then
the four settled into a jerky run and the heavy wagon clattered and
lurched down the lane.

"Fine way to break work stock," Harris remarked to Evans.  "That layout
would bring maybe a dollar a head."

The men swung to their saddles and followed the wagon at a shuffling
trot.  From where she rode between Evans and Harris, the girl turned in
her saddle and watched two men throw open the gates of the big corral
where the remuda was held.  The wrangler, whose duty it was to tend the
horse herd by day, and the nighthawk who would guard it at night sat on
their horses at the far end of the corral and urged the herd out as the
gates swung back.  The remuda streamed down the valley, the two first
riders swinging wide to either flank while the nighthawk and wrangler
brought up the rear.

The four that pulled the wagon had settled to a steady gait and when
some three miles below the Three Bar Waddles wheeled to the right and
angled up the bench that flanked the bottoms, the wagon tilting
perilously in the ascent, then struck out westward across a rolling
country that showed not even a wagon track.  The big cook unerringly
picked the route of least resistance to the point from which the first
circle would be launched, striking every wash and coulee at a place
where a crossing was possible.

Shortly before noon the wagon was halted in a broad bottom threaded by
a tiny spring-fed stream.  The teams were unhitched; mounts were
unsaddled and thrown into the horse herd, which was then headed into
the mouth of a branching draw and allowed to graze.  Waddles dumped off
the bed rolls that were piled from the broad lowered tail-gate to the
wagon top and each man sorted out his own and spread it upon some spot
which struck him as a likely bed ground.

One man carried water from the stream.  Two others snaked in wood for
the chuck-wagon fire.  Still another drove long stakes in the shape of
a hollow square, stretching a single rope from one to the next and
fashioning a frail rope corral.

Harris and Evans took three poles that were slung under the wagon,
looped the top-rope of a little teepee round the small ends of them and
erected the three, tripod fashion, after having first pegged down the
teepee sides.  Harris brought the girl's bed roll and war bag from the
wagon and placed them inside.

"There's your house," he said.  "All ready to move in."

The men repaired to the creek bank and splashed faces and hands.  The
big voice of the cook bellowed angrily from the wagon.

"Downstream!  Downstream!" he boomed.  "Get below that water hole!"

Two men who had elected to perform their ablutions above the point from
which the culinary water supply was drawn moved hastily downstream.

It was not long before Waddles was dispensing nourishment from the
lowered tail-gate, ladling food and hot coffee into the plates and cups
which the men held out to him.  They drew away and sat cross-legged on
the ground.  The meal was almost finished when six horsemen rode down
the valley and pulled up before the wagon.

"What's the chance for scraps?" the leader asked.

"Step down," Waddles invited.  "And throw a feed in you.  She's still
a-steaming."

Four of the men differed in no material way from the Three Bar men in
appearance.  The fifth was a ruffian with little forehead, a face of
gorilla cast, stamped with brute ferocity and small intelligence.  The
last of the six was a striking figure, a big man with pure white hair
and brows, his pale eyes peering from a red face.

"The roasted albino is Harper, our leading bad man in these parts,"
Evans remarked to Harris.  "And the human ape is Lang; Fisher, Coleman,
Barton and Canfield are the rest.  Nice layout of murderers and such."

Harper's men ate unconcernedly, conscious that they were marked as men
who had violated every law on the calendar, but knowing also that no
man would take exceptions to their presence on that general ground
alone, and as they had neared the wagon each man had scanned the faces
of the round-up crew to make certain that there were none among them
who might bear some more specific and personal dislike.

The Three Bar men chatted and fraternized with them as they would have
done with the riders of any legitimate outfit.  Harper praised the food
that Waddles tendered them.

Billie Warren forced a smile as she nodded to them, then moved off and
sat upon a rock some fifty yards from the wagon, despising the six men
who ate her fare and inwardly raging at the conditions which forced her
to extend the hospitality of the Three Bar to men of their breed
whenever they chanced by.

Harris strolled over and sat down facing her, sifting tobacco into a
brown paper and deftly rolling his smoke.

"Has it been on your mind--what I was telling you a few nights back,
about how much I was loving you?" he asked.

"You had your chance to prove it by going away," she said, "and
refused; so why bring it up again?  The next two years will be hard
enough without my having to listen to that."

"Our families must have been real set on throwing us together," he
observed.  "I was cut off without a dime myself--unless I spent two
full years on the Three Bar."

She was angry with herself for believing him sincere, for being
convinced that he too, as he had several times intimated, was tied in
much the same fashion as herself.  The explanation came to her in an
illuminating flash.  The elder Harris must have nursed a lifelong
enmity against her father, who had believed him the most devoted friend
on earth.

She had often heard the tale of how her parent had, in all
friendliness, followed old Bill Harris step by step from Dodge City to
the Platte, to old Fort Laramie and finally to the present Three Bar
range.  Perhaps the one so followed had felt that Cal Warren was but
the hated symbol of the whole clan of squatters who had driven him from
place to place and eventually forced him to relinquish his hope of
seeing the Three Bar brand on a hundred thousand cows; that his
friendliness had been simulated, his vindictiveness nursed and finally
consummated by leaving his affairs in such fashion that his son must
carry on the work his trickery had begun.

The voice of Waddles reached them.  He was announcing a half-day of
rest, according to her orders.

"It's kill-time for the rest of the day," he stated.  "Make the most of
it."

For three weeks past, excepting for the trip to Brill's, the men had
toiled incessantly, breakfasting before sunup and seeking their bunks
long after dark.  Some immediately turned to their bed rolls to make up
lost sleep.  Others repaired to the stream to wash out extra articles
of soiled clothing before taking their rest.

Harris resumed where he had broken off some five minutes before.

"And I'd have tossed it off, as I told you once, if the Three Bar girl
had turned out to be any except you.  You've had a tough problem to
work out, girl," he said.  "I sold out my little Box L outfit for more
than it was worth--and figured to stop the leak at the Three Bar and
put the old brand on its feet."

His calm assurance on this point exasperated the girl.

"How?" she demanded.  "What can you do?"  She pointed toward the six
men near the wagon.  "During the time you spent prowling the hills did
you ever come across those men?"

"Not to pal round with them," he confessed.  "But I did cut their trail
now and then."

"Then don't you know what every other man in this country knows--that
those six and a lot more of their breed are responsible for every loss
within a hundred miles?  They can operate against a brand one week and
stop at the home ranch and get fed the next.  That's where the Three
Bar loss comes in.  And I have to feed them when they come along."

"Some day we'll feed them and hang them right after the meal," he said.
"They're not the outfit that's going to be hardest to handle when the
time arrives."

"What do you mean?" she asked.  "No one has ever been able to handle
them up to date."

"Did it ever strike you as queer that Slade could come into this
country twelve years back, with nothing but a long rope and a running
iron, and be owning thirty thousand head to-day?"

"He has the knack to protect his own and increase," she said.  "They're
afraid of Slade."

Harris absently traced the Three Bar in the dust with a stick, then
fashioned the V L and the Halfmoon D, the three brands that ranged
along the foot of the hills.  With a few deft strokes he transformed
the Three Bar into the Three Cross T, reworked the V L into a Diamond
Box and the Halfmoon D into Circle P, each one of the worked-overs
representing one of the dozen or so brands registered by Slade.  He
blotted out his handiwork with the flat of his hand.

"Don't you suppose that the owner of every one of those brands knows
that?" she scoffed.  "A clumsy rebrand would loom up for a mile.
Slade's no fool."

"Not in a thousand years," Harris agreed.  "I was just commenting on
how peculiar it was that the three brands he runs farthest north should
be so easy worked over into any one of the three that his range
overlaps up this way.  And I happen to know his farthest south brands
would work out the same way with the outfits at the other end of his
range.  But he earmarks all of his brands the same--with jinglebobs;
and jinglebobs most generally drop off and leave nothing but a good big
piece absent out of the ear."

"So you think a man as big as Slade is stupid enough to try his hand at
brand-blotting on all sides at once?" she asked.

"No; nor even once on one side," he returned.  "Not him.  The one fact
that the similarity of brands would make it easy to fall into the habit
is enough to keep every outfit watching him.  He couldn't start--and
knows it."

"Then what does it all amount to?" she asked.

"While folks watch him on that score he could work in a dozen ways that
don't concern those brands at all," he said.

The girl shook her head impatiently and looked across at the six men
who ate her fare.

"Look at them," she flared.  "Eating my food; and in a few nights
they'll be hazing a bunch of Three Bar steers toward the Idaho line.
Why doesn't some man that is a man kill that albino fiend and all his
whelps and rid the country of his breed?  Even Slade lets them put up
at his place."

"If they're pestering you I'll order them off," he said.

"And what effect would that have?" she inquired scornfully.

"The effect of causing them to climb their horses and amble off down
the country," he returned.  He sprawled on the grass, his head propped
on one hand as he regarded them.

"Then probably you'd better order them off," she suggested.  "You have
my permission.  Now's your chance to make good the lordly brag of
helping the Three Bar out of the hole."  She instantly regretted having
said it.  A dozen times of late she had wondered if she were turning
bitter and waspish, if she would ever again be the even-tempered Billie
Warren with a good word and a smile for every one.

Harris was, as always, apparently undisturbed by her words.  Far down
the bottoms she could see a point of light which she knew for a white
sign that read: "Squatter, don't let sundown find you here."  The man
before her had defied these sinister warnings scattered about the range
and publicly announced that he would put in hay on his filing, knowing
that he was a marked man from the hour he turned the first furrow.
Whatever his shortcomings, lack of courage was not one of them.

"I take that back," she said, referring to her words of a few moments
before.  Harris straightened to a sitting position in his surprise at
this impulsive retraction, and as he smiled across at her she divined
that this man, seemingly so impervious to her sarcasm, could be easily
moved by a single kind word.

"Thanks, Billie," he said.  "That was real white of you."

He rose and sauntered toward the wagon and Billie Warren felt a sudden
clutch of fear as he halted before Harper and she realized that he had
taken her words literally and intended ordering them off.

"I've been made temporary foreman of the Three Bar--just so the boss
could try me out on that job for an hour or two," he remarked
conversationally.  "So I'm putting in a new rule that goes into effect
right off.  When you boys ride away, in a few minutes from now, you can
tell folks that the grub line is closed as far as the Three Bar is
concerned."

Lang took a half-step toward him, his face reflecting his gathering
rage as his slow brain comprehended the fact that this speech was but
another way of announcing that he and his men would find no welcome at
the Three Bar from that moment on.  Harper caught his arm and jerked
him back.  The albino was an old hand and could rightly read the signs.

"The gentleman was remarking to me," he said to Lang; "not you."  He
turned to Harris, noting as he did so that every Three Bar man,
excepting those asleep, had suddenly evidenced keen interest in what
was transpiring there; several carelessly shifted their positions.
"There's no law to make you feed any man," he said to Harris.  "From
now on we'll pay our way--as far as the Three Bar is concerned."

His tones were casual; only his pale eyes, fastened unblinkingly on
Harris's face, betrayed his real feeling toward the man who,
notwithstanding the roundabout nature of his announcement, had
practically ordered him to stay away from the Three Bar for all time.

"But even in the face of that," he resumed, "we'll welcome you any time
you happen to ride down our way."

Every man within earshot understood the threat that lay beneath the
casual words.

"Then I'll likely drop in some time," Harris said.  "If you'll send
word where it is.  And I'll bring fifty men along."

The albino motioned his men toward their horses and they mounted and
rode off down the bottoms.  Harris walked back and resumed his seat
near the girl, who sat looking at him as if she could not believe what
she had just witnessed.

"You see it was just as easy as I'd counted on," he said.  "It'll be a
considerable saving on food."

"But how did you know?" she asked.  "Why is Harper afraid of you?"

"He's not," Harris said.  "Not for a single second.  But he's an old
hand and has left a few places on the jump before he came out here."

"And he thinks you know it!" she guessed.

"He don't care what I know; it's what he knows himself--that the wild
bunch is always roosting on the powder can even when it appears like
they're sitting pretty--that counts with him.  You thought I was taking
a fool chance of out-gaming him.  In reality I was taking almost an
unfair advantage of him, providing he had the brains he must possess to
have lived to his age."

She could find no ready-made answer to this surprising statement.  He
sprawled comfortably on the grass, turning over in his mind the
conditions that were but a repetition of the history of so many
frontiers; first the earliest settlers resenting the intrusion of the
later ones and resorting to lawless means of protecting their priority;
then the strengthening of the outlaw element, half the countryside in
league with the wild bunch, the two opposing factions secretly hiring
the predatory class to prey upon rival interests; then, inevitably, the
clean split, usually occasioned by the outlaws having increased in
power until they felt competent to defy both sides, to play both ends
against the middle, to commit atrocities that opened the eyes of those
who, believing they had subsidized the lawless, suddenly woke to the
fact that they had subsidized themselves; then the outlaws, in their
turn, discovering that every man's hand was against them; the ruthless
establishing of a definite line between those inside and those outside
the law, replacing the vague middle ground of semi-lawlessness.  Always
their friends fell away from them, those secretly leagued with them
fearing to be seen in their company, and those not too definitely known
to belong to their ranks invariably quitting them cold, often joining
forces against them and developing into more or less substantial
citizens, according to the standards of their day.

"Don't you know that the albino will kill you for that?" the girl asked
at length.

"Not unless he can stage it as a personal quarrel," he said.  "He'll
never follow it up as coming out of what happened to-day by taking it
out on me as temporary foreman of the Three Bar--for ordering him off."

"Why?" she puzzled.  "What possible difference would that make to a man
like him?"

"Just this," he said: "There's a good majority of folks that don't
relish seeing Harper's bunch ride up--that feed them through policy.
But whenever you make it plain to a man that he's compelled to do a
thing whether he likes it or not it's ten to one he'll balk out of
sheer human pride.  If Harper kills the Three Bar foreman on the
grounds that he refused to feed all his men--why then, right off, every
other foreman and owner within a hundred miles starts to resenting the
possibility that maybe the albino feels the same way toward him.
Harper knows that."

"But if your theory had been wrong?" she persisted.  "What then?"

"Then," he said, "then there'd have been hell and repeat.  I wasn't
just acting as me, a personal affair, but, as I took pains to remark
aloud, as the foreman of the Three Bar.  Every Three Bar man would have
gone into action the second Harper made a move at me.  You know
that--and Harper knew it."

She realized the soundness of this statement.  The one unalterable code
of the country, a code that had been fostered till it eclipsed all
others, decreed that a man should be loyal to the brand for which he
rode.  The whole fabric of the cow business was based on that one point.

"And a wrangle of that magnitude was something he couldn't risk,"
Harris said.  "It would stir folks up, and any time they're stirred a
mite too far Harper has come to the end of his rope.  Any other brand
could have done the same--only folks fall into a set habit of mind and
figure they must do what others do just because it's custom."

"But now they'll work their deviltry all the stronger against the Three
Bar," she predicted.  "They could wreck us if they tried.  You couldn't
get a conviction in five years.  Not a man would testify against one of
Harper's outfit."

"Then we'll put on a fighting crew and hold them off," he said.  "But
that's not the layout that will be hardest to handle in the long run.
Slade is the one real hard nut for the Three Bar to crack.  He can work
it a dozen different ways and you couldn't prove one of them on him to
save your soul.  He's one smooth hombre--Slade."

Harris rose and headed for his bed roll and the girl sought the shelter
of her teepee for a rest.  All was quiet near the wagon till Waddles
boomed the summons to feed.  After the meal a youth named Moore mounted
a saddled horse that was picketed nearby and rode up a branching gulch,
returning with a dry cedar log which he snaked to the wagon at the end
of his rope.  After a few hours' rest and the prospects of a full
night's sleep ahead the hands snatched an hour for play.

They sat cross-legged round the fire kindled from the cedar and raised
their voices in song.  Waddles drew forth a guitar and picked a few
chords.  Bentley, the man who repped for Slade, carried the air and the
rest joined in.  The voices were untrained but from long experience in
rendering every song each man carried his part without a discordant
note.  Evans sang a perfect bass.  Bangs a clear tenor; Moore faked a
baritone that satisfied all hands and Waddles wagged his head in unison
with the picking of his guitar and hummed, occasionally accenting the
air with a musical, drumlike boom.  They rambled through all the old
familiar songs of the range.  The Texan herded his little dogie from
the Staked Plains to Abilene; the herd was soothed on the old bed
ground--bed down my dogie, bed down--and the poor cowboy was many times
buried far out on the lone prair-ee.

Bangs had stationed himself so that he could see the girl and
throughout the evening his surprised eyes never once strayed from
Billie Warren's face.

She leaned back against the wagon wheel, enjoying it all, but her
complacence was jarred as she half-turned and noted Morrow's face,
drawn and bleak, unsoftened by the music.  Again the feeling of dislike
for him rose within her; but he was an efficient hand and she had
nothing definite against him.  At the end of an hour Waddles rose and
returned his instrument to the wagon.  The group broke up and every man
turned in.

Billie Warren lay in her teepee, her mind busily going over the events
of the day.  The night sounds of the range drifted to her.  A bull-bat
rasped a note or two from above.  A picketed horse stamped restlessly
just outside and a range cow bawled from an adjacent slope.  The
night-hawk had relieved the wrangler and she could half-hear, half-feel
the low jar of many hoofs as he grazed the remuda slowly up the valley,
singing to while away the time.

She reflected that Cal Harris was at least possessed of self-confidence
and that procrastination was certainly not to be numbered among his
failings.  It came to her that his interests, for the present, were
identical with her own.  As half-owner in the Three Bar it would be as
much to his advantage as to her own to build it up.  Waddles's warped
legs prevented his acting as foreman on the job and it might be that
the other man would find some way to prevent the leak that was sapping
the life from the Three Bar.  His half-ownership entitled him to the
place.  Billie Warren loved her brand and her personal distrust of
Harris was submerged in the hope that his sharing the full
responsibility with herself might be a step toward putting it back on
the old-time plane of prosperity.

The jar of hoofs had ceased and she knew that the remuda had bedded
down; and having at last reached a decision she fell asleep with the
crooning voice of the nighthawk drifting to her ears.




V

It seemed but a few fleeting moments before Waddles's voice roused her.

"Roll out!" he bawled.  "Feet in the trough!"

There was instant activity, the jingle of belts and spurs and in five
minutes every man was fully clothed and splashing at the creek.  It was
showing rose and gray in the east when the meal was finished and the
cook's voice was once more raised.

"All set!  Ru-un-n 'em in!" he called, and there came the rumble of
hoofs as the nighthawk acted on this order and headed the remuda toward
the wagon.  Two men mounted the horses that had been picketed close at
hand throughout the night and stationed themselves on either side of
the open end of the rope corral to guide the horse herd into it.

The horses could not be seen until almost upon them, looming suddenly
out of the dim gray of early morning and surging into the corral.  The
nighthawk and the two men already mounted rode around it, driving back
any horse that showed a disposition to leave the corral by a downward
slash of a doubled rope across his face and ears.  The men went in and
scattered through the milling herd, each one watching his chance to put
his noose on a circle horse of his own string.

When most of the men were mounted Billie urged Papoose over near
Harris's horse.

"Do you know how to throw a circle?" she asked.

"After a fashion," he said.  "I've bossed one or two in the past."

"Then we'd better be off," she suggested.  "Since you're the Three Bar
foreman it's for you to say when."

"I only preempted that job for ten minutes or so," he explained with
evident embarrassment.  "You surely didn't think I was trying to boost
myself into the foreman's job for keeps?"

"No," she said.  "But you're half-owner--and you can handle men.  I'm
giving you free rein to show what you can do."

Harris straightened in his saddle and motioned to the men.

"Let's go!" he ordered, and headed his horse for the left-hand flank of
the valley.  They ascended the first slopes, picked a long ridge and
followed it to the crest of the low divide between that valley and the
next.

Harris increased the pace and they swept up-country along the divide at
a steady lope.  When traveling or making a long day's ride on a single
horse the cowhand saves his mount and travels always at a trail-trot,
but with work to be done, three circles to be thrown in a day and with
a string of fresh horses for every hand, the paramount issue of the
circle is the saving of time rather than the saving of mounts.  As they
reached the head of the first draw that led back down into the valley
Harris waved an arm.

"Carp," he called, and a middle-aged man named Carpenter, abbreviated
to Carp, wheeled his horse from the group and headed down the draw.

A half-mile farther on they reached the head of another gulch.

"Hanson!" the new foreman called, and the man who repped for the
Halfmoon D dropped out.  One man was detailed to work each draw and
when some five miles up the divide there were but half the crew left.
Harris dropped down a long ridge and crossed the bottoms.  Far down the
valley the wagon showed through the thin, clear air.  The foreman led
the way to the opposite divide and doubled back, sending a man down
every gulch.

The girl rode with him.  Down in the bottoms they could see the riders
detailed on the opposite side hazing the cows out of their respective
draws and heading them toward the wagon.  The first few men left their
cows in the flat and veered past them to station themselves near the
wagon and block the valley, sitting their horses at hundred-yard
intervals across it.

Harris and the girl worked the last draw themselves and when they drove
their cows out of the mouth of it they found a herd already milled, two
hundred yards above the wagon.  Harris left her and circled the bunch,
estimating it.

A few belated riders were bringing their quotas to swell the herds.
Frequently a bunch of cows made a break to leave and many were allowed
to make good their escape to the safety of the broken slopes.  But
these were only marked stuff previously branded and any attempt
including a cow with an unbranded calf was instantly blocked.  Each
rider noted the brands of any cows which he let escape and more
particularly still he scanned them with an eye for the presence of a
"slick," an animal missed in previous round-ups and wearing no brand.
Slick cows were fair prey for any man who first put his rope on them
and he was entitled to run his own brand on a slick or to mark it with
the brand for which he rode and draw down a certain scale of premiums
at the end of the round-up season.

Harris changed mounts, throwing his saddle on the paint-horse.  When
the last rider appeared with his bunch and threw it into the herd
Harris signaled all hands to change mounts.  Half the men repaired to
the rope corral and caught up cow horses while the balance of the crew
held the herd, each one relieving some other as soon as he had saddled
a fresh horse.

When the hands commenced working the herd the Three Bar girl watched
the trained cow horses with an interest that was always fresh, for from
long experience they thoroughly understood every move of the game.

A sagebrush fire was burning fifty yards above the wagon and each man
rode past it, leaned from his saddle and dropped his running iron in
the flame.

The men worked round the edge of the bunch and slipped a noose on every
calf that was thrown to the edge of the constantly shifting mass.
Morrow roped the first calf and dragged it to the fire.  A cow darted
away with her calf and Bangs's horse whirled to head her back.  As
Bangs shook out his rope the horse changed tactics and abandoned the
course that would have carried him past to turn them, following in
close behind them instead.  After two preliminary swings Bangs made his
throw and missed.  The horse did not miss a step but kept on close
behind the calf while his rider coiled the rope.  The second throw fell
fair and the horse set his feet and braced himself as the calf hit the
end of the rope.

As much as she loved the round-up, many times as she had seen it,
Billie Warren had never become calloused to the brutalities perpetrated
on the calves.  She withdrew and sat in the shade of the wagon.  She
was downwind and the dust raised by the trampling hoofs floated down to
her, mingled with the odor of steaming cows, the acrid smoke of the
sage fire and the taint of scorched hair and flesh.

Some of the men handled their hot irons with makeshift tongs of split
sage, which were soon burnt through and replaced.  Others used slender,
long-handled pliers for the work.

The horses held the calves helpless, moving just enough to keep the
ropes taut.  Evans loosed a fresh-branded calf and rode over to the
wagon for a drink.  Several cows raced wildly round at a distance from
the fire.

"One of those old sisters will go on the prod and make a break for some
one right soon," he predicted to the girl.

A calf bawled in pain and a cow, maddened by the appeal of her
offspring, charged the group around the fire.  The horses that stood
there, holding calves, pricked their ears and watched her rush alertly
but before it was necessary for any one of them to dodge, Slade's rep
slipped his rope on her, jumped his horse off at an angle and brought
her down.

Evans pointed to where Harris, seated on the big pinto, was working
slowly through the center of the herd.

"He's gone in after another slick," Evans said.  "Watch the paint-horse
work."

Calico was moving after the animal Harris wanted, working easily and
without a single sharp rush that would cause undue disturbance among
the cows.

"A good cow horse is like a hound," Lanky observed.  "Let him spot the
critter you're wanting and nothing can shake him off."

Calico followed a serpentine course through the mass, crowded a
three-year-old to the edge and cut him out.  The animal attempted to
dodge back among his fellows but the paint-horse turned as on a pivot
and blocked him, then started him off in a straightaway run.

"There's a real rope-horse," Lanky said.  "I've been noticing him work.
Look!"

Calico had braced himself as the slick was roped, shoving his hind feet
out ahead, squatting on his haunches and raising his forefeet almost
clear of the ground.

"Cal broke him without shoes in front," Evans explained.  "His feet got
tender after he'd jerked a steer or two and he learned to sock his hind
feet ahead and take the jar on them.  He'll last two years longer that
way.  A horse that takes all the weight on his front feet in jerking
heavy stuff soon gets stove up in the shoulders and has to be
condemned.  This Cal Harris has one whole bagful of knowing tricks."

He rode back to the work after this endorsement of her choice of a
foreman.

Through all the turmoil the nighthawk slept peacefully in the shade of
a sage-clump.  Waddles dozed in the wagon but suddenly came to life
with a start and signaled to the wrangler who, in his turn, waved an
arm to the man nearest him.  The four wagon horses were roped and
harnessed while Waddles loaded the bed rolls on the tailgate and lashed
them fast.  The rope corral was dismantled and loaded.  The chuck wagon
veered past the herd and lumbered up the valley and the wrangler and
one other followed with the horse herd.

In a short space of time the herd had been worked, the last calf
branded, and Harris led the men up the bottoms.  As they rode each one
reported the brands of all stock which he had let break away from his
bunch before reaching the herd.  Each rep entered the number and kind
of his own brand so reported to the former tally taken of the herd.

Five miles up the valley, at the spot where Harris had crossed it a few
hours before, they found the wagon waiting at the new stand, the corral
refashioned and the remuda inside it.  It was but ten o'clock but the
first circle had commenced at four.  The noon meal on the round-up was
served whenever the first circle was completed.  The men fell
ravenously on the hot meal, changed to fresh circle horses and started
again.

It was falling dusk when the herd gathered in the third circle had been
worked and the last calf branded for the day.  The men had unsaddled
and spread their bed rolls before Waddles had announced the meal.  The
nighthawk came riding up on the horse he had picketed prior to going to
sleep before sunup at the first stand.  His bed roll was lashed on a
half-wild range horse he had roped and it sagged to one side, having no
pack saddle to keep it from slipping, and he spoke in no gentle terms
of an outfit that would pull out without troubling to throw his pack
saddle from the wagon or taking pains to picket an extra horse.  His
fretfulness passed, however, as he smelled the hot coffee and he
repaired to the wagon, his ill humor dissipated.

There was no music that night, every man retiring to his bed roll the
instant he finished his meal.

At the end of the first week out from the ranch Harris pulled up his
horse beside the girl's and showed her his tally book.

"We've run Slade's mark on more calves than we have our own," he said.
"That's one way he works."

"But that's not his fault and it doesn't mean anything," she said.
"His cows are sure to drift.  This first strip we've worked is the
southernmost edge of our range and his north wagon works the strip
right south of us.  We're sure to find a number of his cows.  As we
double back on our next lap we'll not find the same proportion."

"Not quite--but plenty," he predicted.  "We've marked more calves for
Slade in one week than all his three wagon crews will mark for the
Three Bar in a year.  The first three weeks of each season your men do
a little more work for Slade than they do for you.  It's a safe bet
that the Halfmoon D does the same, and so on through every brand that
joins his range.  That puts him way off ahead."

"But that is pure accident," she said.

"It's pure design," he stated.  "His boys are busy shoving his cows
from the middle all ways so that when fall comes he has a good inside
block that's only been lightly fed over.  They fall back on that for
winter feed.  Last winter, when cows were dying like rats, his men were
out drifting Slade's stuff back toward his middle range."

"That's  true  enough,"  she  admitted.  "But----"

"But you thought he was doing it as a favor to you--getting his surplus
off your territory so your own cows would have a better chance.  That's
the same kind of talk he floated all round the line; playing the
benevolent neighbor when in reality the old pirate had deliberately
planned, year after year, to overcrowd your range and feed you out."

"But his men would know," she objected.

"Not many of them would grasp the whole scheme of it," he said.  "You
hadn't thought of it yourself.  He'd detail a pair of boys to shove a
few hundred head way off to the south.  A few days later another couple
would be throwing a bunch off northeast.  See?  And what if a few of
them did surmise?  They're riding for his brand."

The girl nodded.  That unalterable code again,--the religion of being
loyal to one's brand.  Not one of Slade's men would balk at doing it
knowingly; each would do anything to advance his interests as long as
he drew his pay from Slade.

"I doubt if there's a dozen men within two hundred miles that haven't
lifted a few calves now and then for the brand they were riding for.
That's the way it goes.  A rule that was fine to start--loyalty to the
hand that paid you; then carried too far until it's degenerated into a
tool that's often abused," he said.

As they talked Harris detailed men for each draw but when they reached
the point where they were due to drop down and cross the valley he
pulled up his horse.

"You take the rest of the circle, Carp," he instructed Carpenter.  "I'm
going to ride off up the ridge a piece."  The girl regarded him
curiously.  No less than three times in the last week he had stopped
midway of the circle and asked her to complete it.  Now he had turned
it over to Carp and he signaled her to remain with him.

"Where are we going?" she asked as she watched the men ride down toward
the bottoms.  "And why?"

"Back the way we came," he said.  "And maybe I can show you why."

He headed back the divide they had just followed until he came to the
saddle at the head of a draw that led down to the valley.  Far below
them they could see a rider hazing a bunch of cows out into the
bottoms.  High on the right-hand slope of the gulch lay a notch, a
little blind basin watered by the seepage from a sidehill spring, and
there on the green bed of it a dozen cows with their calves grazed
undisturbed.  For perhaps five minutes Harris lolled sidewise in the
saddle and watched them.  Then a rider appeared on the ridge that
divided that draw from the next, dropped in below the cows and headed
them back over the ridge into the draw from which he had appeared.
Even at that distance she recognized this last man as Lanky Evans.
Harris resumed his way down the divide and she knew that he had
discovered some irregularity for which he had been seeking.

"Who was the man that overlooked those cows?" she asked.  "Who worked
that draw?"

"Morrow," he said.  "His eyesight is getting bad.  That's the second
time this week--and the last.  I've detailed Lanky to work the gulch
next to him every circle so that he could drop over the ridge and see
what was going on.  That's why he's always late coming in--not because
he's lazy but because he's been working almost a double shift."

"Then Morrow is an inside man for Harper," she said.  "Drawing Three
Bar pay and working against us too."

"Yes," he said.  "Only he's an inside man for Slade."

"But how could his leaving those calves behind benefit Slade?" she
demanded.

"How could it benefit Harper?" he countered.  "Can you tell me that?"

She could not and motioned for him to go on.

"None of Harper's men has a brand of his own," he said.  "They're
living on the move.  They can't wait for calves to grow up.  The way
they work is to run a bunch of beef steers across into Idaho.  They'll
pick up another bunch there and shove them across the Utah line and
repeat by moving a drove of some Utah brand up in here.  Only beef
steers--quick turning stuff.  You know about the reputation of the O V
and the Lazy H Four."

She knew all too well.  There was a half-feud, a smoldering distrust
displayed between cowmen on each side of the three State lines, a
triangle of ill feeling.  It was current rumor that the O V and the
Lazy H Four, ranging far southwest of the Three Bar, would traffic in
any steers that came from across either the Utah or Idaho line.  In the
corner of those States were similar outfits that were receiving
stations for rustled stock from the opposite sides.  But they were good
neighbors and kept hands off so far as brands on their home range were
concerned.  It was part of the game, and as long as their own interests
were not disturbed the adjacent outfits were blind.  The triangular
feud had been fostered to a point where the thieves were immune.  Even
if a direct complaint should be brought against them they had but to
ride across into another State and a sheriff following them would be
helpless, the inhabitants resenting this intrusion into their affairs
by an officer from another State, truly having no right there, and
refusing to aid him even if they did not actually oppose his passage.

"But how would it benefit Slade?" she repeated.

"Why, suppose that Morrow overlooked a nice bunch of Three Bar calves
all along this first strip next to Slade's range," Harris said.  "Then
some Slade rider happens to drop along after our wagon has moved on and
he hazes them off south.  Later another picks them up and shoves them
along another half-day's drive--way beyond where our boys ever work,
even beyond the strip covered by Slade's north wagon, the only one that
carries a Three Bar rep; what then?"

"The calves would still be with mothers wearing the Three Bar mark,"
she said.  "After they leave the cows they're slicks, fair game for the
first man that puts his rope on them--and Slade wouldn't risk running
one of his own brands on them before they left the cows."

"Not one of his own, no," Harris said; "only one that's going to be his
later on.  Did it ever strike you as queer that Slade, whose way is to
crush every new outfit, should suffer a soft-hearted streak every year
or so and befriend some party that had elected to start up for himself
right in the middle of Slade's range?  And later buy him out?  That's
the way he came into nearly every brand he runs."

"He's impulsive in his friendships," she defended.  "He has always been
like that."

"And his impulses embrace some right queer folks," Harris remarked.
"Several of those dinky little owners have moved out right sudden with
a dozen riders from some other outfit fanning along close behind;
McArthur didn't even get moved, for the Brandons went on the war trail
before he had time to start.  But it transpired that he was all set to
go because Slade showed bill of sale for Mac's holdings, dated only the
day before.  That's how he came to own every one of those brands that
match up so close with those of every outfit that overlaps his range."

"But if he actually dealt with so many as you believe, some one of them
would be sure to have trouble later on and tell of it," she argued.

"And it would be the word of a self-confessed thief against that of the
biggest owner within two hundred miles, and Slade would laugh at
him--or kill him, according to whatever mood he happened to be in."

They had turned their horses down a long ridge that led to the wagon in
the bottoms.

"I'll mention to the boys that Morrow sold out the interests of the
Three Bar while he was drawing down your pay.  They'll pass sentence on
him right sudden.  Four hours from now they'll have dry-gulched him so
far from nowhere that even the coyotes can't find him."

"Not that," she said.  "Turn him over to the sheriff.  You caught him
in the act."

"In the act of missing a few cows on his detail.  The sheriff would
hold him almost an hour before he let him go."

"Then give him his check and send him off the Three Bar range," she
said.

Harris waited till the herd had been worked and the men had gathered
round the wagon.  Then he handed Morrow a check.

"Here's your time," he said.  "You can be leaving almost any time now."

Every man knew that Morrow had been caught at some piece of work
contrary to the interests of the Three Bar.  The discharged hand gave a
short ugly laugh.

"As soon as you pussyfooted into the foreman's job I knew it was only a
question of time," he said.

"Exactly," Harris returned.  "Pack your stuff."

"A foreman has a scattering of a dozen or so men to back him up,"
Morrow observed with a shrug of one shoulder toward the rest of the men.

Harris turned to the girl.

"I resign for about sixty seconds," he said and swung back toward
Morrow; and again all hands noted his queer quartering stand.  "I'm not
foreman right at this minute," he said.  "So if you had anything in
particular to address to me in a personal vein you can start now.
Otherwise you'd better be packing your stuff."

Morrow turned his back and headed for the rope corral.  When he had
saddled one horse and packed his effects on another he turned to Evans.

"You helped frame this on me," he said.  "I thought I saw you messing
over into my detail a few days back."

"Right on the first ballot," Lanky assented.  "I'm only riding for one
brand at a time."

"One day right soon I'll run across you again," Morrow prophesied.

"Then I'll take to riding with my head over my shoulder--surveying my
back-track," Lanky promised.  "Because we'll most likely meet from
behind."

For the first time Morrow's bleak face changed expression, the lines
deepening from the strain of holding himself steady in the face of the
contemptuous insults with which Lanky casually replied to his threats.

He started to snarl an answer, his usual self-repression deserting him,
but Harris waved an impatient hand.

"Drag it!" he snapped.  "Get moving.  If I had my own way we'd lead
your horse out from under you--and we will if I ever hear of your
turning up on the Three Bar range again."




VI

Billie Warren rode with Harris on the last lap of the circle.  There
were but two men remaining with them.

"Moore!" Harris called, and the man turned his horse down the head of a
draw that would lead him out into the bottoms a trifle less than a mile
above the wagon.  Harris heard a shrill whistle behind him and turned
sidewise in the saddle to look back, saw that Moore had regained the
ridge and was signaling.  They turned and rode back to him.

"There's another," Moore said, pointing down the gulch.  "It's getting
to be a habit."

A dead cow lay on a little flat a hundred yards below.  For three
consecutive days some rider had found a fresh-killed Three Bar cow.
Every animal had been shot.

"I'll look this one over myself," Harris decided.  "There's only two
more gulches to work.  Each one of you boys take one."

The girl followed him as he turned down the first steep pitch.  They
pulled up their horses and sat looking at the cow.  A trickle of blood
oozed out of a hole between her eyes.  Harris rode in a circle round
the spot.

"He downed her from some point above," he said.  "Not a sign anywhere
close at hand."  He surveyed the ridges that flanked either side of the
draw and the little saddle-like depression at the head of it from which
they had just descended.  From beyond this gap came the shrill nicker
of a horse, the sound chopped short as if a man had clamped his hand on
the animal's nostrils to silence it.  Harris turned swiftly to the girl.

"It's a plant," he said.  "Ride--hard!"

He suited his action to the words and jumped his horse off down the
bottoms.  He waved her over to one side.

"Keep well away from me!" he ordered.  "They don't want you."

They hung their spurs into their mounts and the horses plunged down the
steeply-pitching bottoms, vaulting sage clumps and bounding along the
cow trails that threaded the brush.  Two hundred yards below the cow
the draw made an elbow bend.  The girl rounded it and as Harris
followed a jump behind he felt a jarring tug at the cantle of his
saddle and the thin, sharp crack of a rifle reached him.  The gulch
made a reverse bend and as they swept around it Harris swung sidewise
in the saddle and looked back.  They were entirely sheltered from any
point on the divide six hundred yards behind them.  He pulled his horse
to a swinging trot and they rode down the sloping meadow that led
straight to the main valley.

"It was certainly stupid of me not to know right off that it was a
decoy," he said.  "A man just out to act spiteful would have piled up a
dozen cows at one stand and left.  He's downed one every day--in plain
sight of the divide we'd follow on the circle, knowing that I'd soon
ride down to look one over myself.  All he had to do was to cache
himself on the far side, watch for me to ride down, wait until the rest
had gone on and climb to the divide and pot me.  And it would have been
so dead easy to turn the tables and bushwhack him," he added
regretfully.  "If only I'd have used my head in time."

A sick chill swept the girl as she thought of an enemy with the
patience to kill a cow every day, use it for a decoy and wait for a
chance at his human prey.

The cows that grazed on the meadow raced off ahead of them.  A bunch of
wild range horses swept up the broken slopes and wheeled to watch them
pass.

"We didn't get started any too soon," Harris said.  "His horse wasn't
more than a hundred feet beyond the notch when he blew off and warned
us--not time for me to get cached and drop him as he topped the ridge."

The girl's eyes suddenly riveted on a small round hole in the cantle of
his saddle where the ball had entered.  On the inside and far to the
left extremity of the cantle a ragged gash showed where if had passed
out.  The shot had been fired as he wheeled round the sharp bend,
quartering away from the man above, but even then the ball had not
missed his left hip to exceed an inch.

She started her horse so suddenly that before he realized her purpose
she was well in the lead and going at a dead run toward the mouth of
the gulch where it opened out into the main bottoms two hundred yards
beyond.

From the opposite slope riders were hazing cows out of their respective
draws; some had reached the wagon; others were coming down from above.
The running horse caught every man's eye as the girl careened out into
the center of the valley, rose in her stirrups and waved an arm in a
circle above her head.  In five seconds riders were whirling in behind
her from all directions as she headed for the wagon.

She waved those already on the spot toward the rope corral.

"Change horses!" she called, and as each man rode in he caught up a
fresh horse.

"Scatter out; some of you below where we came down, some above," she
said.  "Five hundred to the man that brings Morrow in."

"It's no use, Billie," Harris counseled mildly.  "He's plum out of the
country by now.  It'll be dark in three hours--and it's right choppy
country over there."

Waddles interposed and seconded her move.

"Let 'em rip," he said.  "There's just a chance."

Bangs was the first to change mounts.  The boy's physical
qualifications were as sound as his mental ability was limited and it
was his pride to have a string of mounts that included the worst horses
in the lot.  He rode from the corral on Blue, holding the big roan
steady, and headed up the ridge a mile below where Harris and the girl
had come down.  Rile Foster chose the next; five riders were but a few
jumps behind.  Harris did not change horses but searched hastily in his
war bag and slipped the strap of a binocular case across his shoulders
and rode off with the girl as she finished cinching her saddle on a
fresh horse.

In less than five minutes from the time she had reached the wagon the
last Three Bar man had mounted and gone.  Harris rode with her up a
long ridge that led up to the divide; they followed another into the
next bottoms and ascended the second divide.  This was sharp and rocky,
its crest a maze of ragged pinnacles.  He chose the highest of these
and dismounted to sweep the range with his glasses.  The low country
beyond them was broken and choppy, a succession of tiny box canyons and
rough coulees.  Off to the right he made out Rile Foster working
through the tangle.  Somewhere beyond him Bangs would be doing the
same.  Riders came into view off to the left, crossing some ridge, only
to disappear once more.  The high point afforded a view of every ridge
for miles.  After perhaps half an hour Harris caught five horsemen in
the field of his glasses.  They were riding in a knot.

"They've picked up his trail," he said.  "But he'll have too long a
lead.  He'll be fanning right along and they'll have to work out a
track.  In less than two hours it will be dark--and by morning he'll be
forty miles from here and up on a fresh horse."

He rested his elbows on the ground to steady the glasses as he trained
them off in the direction the five men had gone.  Twice he saw them
cross over ridges.  Then a tiny, swift-moving speck came into his field
of view, traveling up the slope of a distant divide.  The ant-like
rider dipped over the crest of it and was gone.

"He's more than five miles in the lead of them," he said.  "Across
rough country too.  There was just a chance that he would work back
through these breaks below us instead of making a ride for it, and we
could have spotted him from up here.  We might as well be going."

They mounted and headed to the right along the divide.

"If Rile is in sight we can wait for him," he said.  "And see if he's
picked up any tracks."

A half-mile along the ridge they saw Foster off through the breaks and
he was working back their way.

"Thanks, Billie," Harris said.  "For losing a circle trying to run him
down."

"I'd have done as much for any Three Bar man," she returned.

"Of course," he said.  "I'd have expected that.  But all the same I'd
hardly looked to see you show much concern over what happened to me."

"I don't want to see even you shot in the back," she said.  "Is that
answer enough?"

"It shows that I'm progressing," he smiled.  "Maybe my good qualities
will grow on you until you get to thinking right well of me."

They waited till Foster joined them on the ridge.

"Bangs crossed over a mile below," Rile said.  "We might pick him up."

"Any sign?" Harris asked as they moved down the divide.

"A bunch of shod horses went down through there a few days back," Rile
said.  "Three or four men likely, with a few pack horses along.  There
was a fresh track, made this morning, going up-country alone.  He
likely stayed at their camp all night, wherever it is.  I worked
across, thinking he might go back to it; but there was no down trail.
He's pulled out."

"I saw him," Harris said.  "He's gone."

They stopped in the saddle of the ridge where a fresh track showed the
spot Bangs had crossed.

The girl was looking at Harris and saw a sudden pallor travel up under
his tan and as she turned to see what had occasioned it he crowded his
horse against her own.

"Don't look!" he ordered, and forced her horse over the far side of the
ridge.  "You'd better ride on back to the wagon," he urged.  "There's
been some sort of doings over across.  Rile and I will ride down and
look into it."  Without a word she turned her horse toward the wagon.

"It's God's mercy she didn't see," Harris said, as the two crossed back
over the ridge.  "Isn't that a hell of a way for a man to die?"

But the girl had seen.  Her one brief look had revealed a horse coming
round a bend in a little box canyon below.  A shapeless thing dragged
from one stirrup and at every third or fourth jump the big blue horse
side-slashed the limp bundle with his heels.

As the two men reached the bottoms the frenzied horse had stopped and
was fighting to free himself of the thing that followed him.  He moved
away from it in a circle but it was always with him.  He squealed and
kicked it, then dashed off in a fresh panic, side-swiping his pursuer.

Harris's rope tightened on his neck and threw him.  As he rolled over
Foster's noose snared both hind feet and he was held stretched and
helpless between two trained cow horses while the men disengaged the
bundle that had once been Bangs.  One boot heel was missing and his
foot was jammed through the stirrup, evidence that the horse had
pitched with him and the loosened heel had come off, allowing his foot
to slip through as he was thrown.

Harris pointed to a burnt red streak across the right side of Bangs's
neck.  He unbuttoned his shirt and revealed a similar streak under his
left armpit.

Old Rile cursed horribly and his face seemed to have aged ten years.

"They learned that from the albino," he said.  "It's an old trick that
always works.  They dropped a rope on him and jerked him, pried off his
heel, shoved his boot through and laid the quirt on his horse.  Blue
did the rest."

Both men knew well how it had happened.  Bangs had run across the camp
of some of the wild bunch, men he had known for long, and the
slow-thinking youth had suspected no more danger from riding on up to
them at this time than at any other.  He had told them of the shot
fired at Harris and they had known that some other Three Bar man would
find the trail leading from the direction of their camp.  And Bangs
would mention having found them there, linking them with the
bushwhacker.

When Bangs had left a pair of them had ridden a distance with him and
accomplished their aim.

"It's coming dark," Harris said.  "And by morning they'll be thirty
miles away.  That sort of a killing was never fastened on to any man
yet."

The old man raised a doubled fist and his face was lined with sorrow.

"Bangs was almost a son to me," he said.  "I taught him to ride--and
we've rode together on every job since then.  You hear me!  Some one is
going to die for this!"

It was an hour after sundown when they reached the wagon with all that
was earthly of Bangs lashed across the blue horse and it was midnight
before the five men who had followed the trail returned with the word
that they had been unable to even sight the man they tracked.

During the next week the girl inwardly accused the men of
heartlessness.  They jested as carelessly as if nothing unusual had
occurred and she heard no mention of Bangs.  It seemed that it took but
a day for them to forget a former comrade who had come to an untimely
end.  Rile Foster had disappeared but on the fifth day he turned up at
the Three Bar wagon and resumed his work without the least explanation
of his absence.

The old man was gloomy and silent, his face set in sorrowful lines as
he went about his work, and it was evident that he was continually
brooding over the fate of the youth he had loved.  It seemed to the
girl that the men were even more cheerful and thoughtless than usual,
that they concerned their minds with every conceivable topic except
that which was uppermost in her own.  The death of Bangs had affected
them not at all.

She could not shake off the remembrance of the boy's adoring gaze as
his eyes had followed every move she made and in some vague way she
felt that she was responsible for the accident.  She often rode near
Rile Foster, knowing what was in his mind.  He spoke but little and, in
common with the rest, he never once mentioned Bangs.

At the end of a week Slade rode up to the wagon as the men were working
the cows gathered in the second circle of the day.  He jerked his head
to draw her aside out of range of Waddles's ears.

"How's the Three Bar showing up this spring?" he asked abruptly.

"Better than ever," she retorted and he caught a note of defiance in
her voice.

"You're lying, Billie," he asserted calmly.  "The Three Bar will show
another shrinkage this year."

"How do you know?" she flashed; and the distrust of him that Harris had
roused in her, lately submerged beneath the troubling thoughts of
Bangs, was suddenly quickened and thrown uppermost in her mind.  In
gauging him from this new angle she sensed a ruthlessness in him that
was not confined solely to business efficiency; he would crush her
interests without a qualm if it would gain his end.

"I know," he asserted.  "It's my business to know everything that goes
on anywhere near my range.  There's not another outfit within a hundred
miles that's on the increase.  They're just hanging on, some of them
making a little, some of them not.  You say you want to run the Three
Bar brand yourself.  There's not a man in this country that would touch
a Three Bar cow if you was hooked up with me."

"And then the Three Bar would be only one out of a dozen or more Slade
brands," she said.  She pointed to the men that worked with the milling
cows in the flat.  "That's what I want," she said.  "To run an outfit
of my own--not one of yours."

For no reason at all she was suddenly convinced of the truth of
Harris's suspicions concerning Slade.  She noted that his eyes traveled
from one man to the next till he had scrutinized every one that worked
the herd.

"Are you looking for Morrow?" she demanded, and instantly regretted her
remark.  Slade's face did not change by so much as the bat of an eye
and he failed to reply for a space--too long a space, she
reflected--then turned to her.

"Morrow--who's he?" he asked.  "And why should I look for him?"

"He rode for you last year," she said.

"Oh!  That fellow.  I recall him now.  Bleak-looking citizen," he said.
"And what about him?"

"You tell me," she countered.

"That new foreman of yours--the fellow that was scouting round alone
for a few months--has been talking with his mouth," Slade said.  "If he
keeps that up I'll have to ask him to speak right out what's on his
mind."

"He'll tell you," she prophesied.  "What then?"

"Then I'll kill him," the man stated.

The girl motioned to Lanky Evans and he rode across to them.

"Lanky, I want you to remember this," she said.  "Slade has just
promised to kill Harris.  And if he does I'll spend every dollar I own
seeing that he's hung for it," she turned to Slade.  "You might repeat
what you just told me," she suggested.

Slade looked at her steadily.

"You misunderstood me," he stated.  "I don't recall any remark to that
effect or even to mentioning the name of Harris.  Who is he, anyhow?"

Evans slouched easily in the saddle and twisted a smoke.

"Now let's get this straight what I'm to remember," he said.  "Mr.
Slade was saying that he planned to down Cal Harris the first time he
caught him out alone.  I heard him remark to that effect."  He turned
and grinned cheerfully at Slade.  "That's his very words--and I'd swear
to it as long as my breath held out.  I'll sort of repeat it over to
myself so that I can give it to the judge word for word when the time
comes."

Slade favored him with a long stare which Lanky bore with unconcern,
smiling back at him pleasantly.

"I've got my little piece memorized," Evans said; "and in parting let
me remark that Cal Harris will prove a new sort of a victim for you to
work on.  If you tie into him he'll tear down your meat-house."  He
turned his horse and rode back to the herd.

"I'll play your own game," the girl told Slade.  "If anything happens
to another man who is riding for me and I have any reason to even
suspect you were at the bottom of it I'll swear that I saw you do the
thing yourself.  The Three Bar is the only outfit with a clean enough
record to drag anything up for an airing before the courts without
taking a chance.  This rule of every man for himself won't hold good
with me."

She moved toward the wagon and Slade kept pace with her, leading his
horse.  There was no sign of life around the wagon and the jerky
movement of a hat, barely visible through the tips of the sage,
indicated that Waddles was washing out some clothing at the creek bank
fifty yards away.

Slade leaned against the hind wheel on the far side from the herd and
looked down at her.

"You're a real woman, Billie," he said.  "You better throw in with a
real man--me--and we'll own this country.  I'll run the Three Bar on
ten thousand head whenever you say the word."

"I'd rather see it on half as many through my own efforts," she said.
"And some day I will."

"Some day you'll see it my way," he prophesied.  "I know you better
than any other man.  You want an outfit of your own--and if the Three
Bar gets crowded out you'll go to the man that can give you one in its
place.  That will be me.  Some day we'll trade."

"Some day--right soon--you'll trade your present holdings for a nice
little range in hell," a voice said in Slade's ear and at the same
instant two huge paws were thrust from the little window of the
cook-wagon and clamped on his arms above the crook of his elbows.
Slade was a powerful man but he was an infant in the grip of the two
great hands that raised him clear of the ground and shook him before he
was slammed down on his face ten feet away by a straight-arm thrust.
His deadly temper flared and the swift move for his gun was
simultaneous with the twist which brought him to his feet, but his hand
fell away from the butt of it as he looked into the twin muzzles of a
sawed-off shotgun which menaced him from the window.

It occurred to him that the nighthawk must have been restless and had
elected to wash at the creek bank instead of indulging in sleep, thus
accounting for the bobbing hat he had seen, for assuredly it did not
belong to the cook, as he had surmised.  The face behind the gun was
the face of Waddles.

"I'm about to touch off a pound of shot if you go acting up," Waddles
said.  "Any more talk like you was just handing out and you'll get
smeared here and there."

"Are you running the Three Bar?" Slade asked.

"Only at times, when the notion strikes me," Waddles said.  "And this
is one.  Whenever you've got any specific business to transact with us
why come right along over and transact it--and then move on out."

Billie Warren laughed suddenly, a gurgle of sheer amusement at the
sight of the most dreaded man within a hundred miles standing there
under the muzzle of a shotgun, receiving instructions from the mouth of
the Three Bar cook.  For Slade was helpless and knew it.  Even if he
took a chance with Waddles and won out he would be in worse shape than
before, for if he turned a finger against her old watchdog and friend
he would gain only her deadly enmity.

"Waddles, you win," Slade said.  "I'll be going before you change your
mind."

As the man walked toward his horse which had sidled a few steps away
the big cook gazed after him and fingered the riot gun regretfully.

The wagon did not move on when the men had finished working the herd as
the rest of the day had been set aside for kill-time.  An hour after
Slade's departure the hands were rolling in for a sleep.  The girl saw
Rile Foster draw apart from the rest and sit with his back against a
rock.  He was regarding some small object held in his hand.  As he
turned it around she recognized it as a boot heel and the reason for
Rile's absence was clear to her.  He had back-tracked the blue horse to
the scene of the mishap.

She was half asleep when a voice some distance from the teepee roused
her by speaking the name of Bangs.

"I've a pretty elastic conscience myself," the voice went on.  "I'm not
above lifting a few calves for the brand I'm riding for or any little
thing like that, but this deal sort of gorges up in me.  They'll never
cinch it on to any man--they never do.  Old Rile is brooding over it.
He'll likely run amuck.  One way or another he'll try to break even for
Bangs."

Billie recognized the voice as Moore's and knew that one of her men, at
least, had not forgotten Bangs.  It was the first time an intimation
that the affair was other than an accident had reached her ears.

In the evening, after resting, the men once more gathered round a fire
for an hour's play.  They had evidently blotted out the memory of a
friend who had raised his voice with theirs on the last such event, for
they sang mostly the rollicking airs with even more than the usual
amount of chaff between songs.  But there was one old favorite that
they did not sing.  At last Waddles swung into the tune of it and as
they buried the poor cowboy far out on the lone prair-ee she noted the
difference at once, and more clearly than ever before she divined the
reason why cowhands were apparently so devoid of sentiment, refusing to
be serious on any topic, passing off those things nearest to their
hearts with a callous jest.  It was only that there were so many rough
spots in the hard life they led that they avoided dwelling too
seriously on matters that could not be rectified lest they become
gloomy and morose.  There were warm hearts under the indifferent
exteriors.  For now the voices were soft and hushed and she knew that
every man was thinking of the lonely mound of rocks that marked the
last resting place of Bangs.




VII

The calf round-up was nearing the end.  Two weeks would see the finish
and supply the final tally.  The figures had already progressed to the
point where they gave evidence of another shrinkage from the count of
the previous year; and during one of the weekly half-day periods of
rest three members of the Three Bar personnel found their minds
occupied with a problem which excluded all thoughts of sleep.  The
problem in each case was the same but each one viewed it from the
individual standpoint of his own particular knowledge of the subject.

Harris sat on a rock and reviewed the plans he had formulated for the
salvation of the Three Bar brand, realizing the weak spots and mapping
out some special line of defense that might serve to strengthen them.
In the seclusion of the wagon Waddles was carefully rereading a
much-thumbed document for perhaps the hundredth time.  A man had come
in at daylight with the mail from Brill's and Billie Warren was within
her teepee poring over her share of it.  The men had finished theirs
and were sleeping.

The girl read first the four letters in the same handwriting, one to
mark each week she had been on the round-up.  The fifth was from Judge
Colton, her father's old friend, to whose hands all his affairs had
been entrusted.  After scanning this she read again the other four.
Ever since her last visit to the Coltons, just prior to her father's
death, the arrival of these letters had been as regular as the
recurrence of Sunday, one for each week, and in moments of despondency
over the affairs of the Three Bar she drew strength from them.  Very
soon now, in the course of a few months at the outside, she and the
writer would meet away from his native environment and in the midst of
her own.  Always before this had been reversed and her association with
Carlos Deane had held a background of his own setting,--a setting in
startling contrast to her log house, nestling in a desert of sage.  The
Deane house was a wonderful old-fashioned mansion set in a grove of
century-old elms and oaks.  She knew his life and now he would see her
in her natural surroundings.

Perhaps it was her very difference from other girls that had first
interested Carlos Deane, and the fact that he stood out from others,
even among his own intimates, that had drawn her interest to him.
Deane had been an athlete of renown and a popular idol at school and
his energy had been brought to bear in business as successfully as in
play.  In a hazy sort of way she felt that some day she would listen to
the plea that, in some fashion or other, was woven into every letter;
but not till the Three Bar was booming and no longer required her
supervision.  Everything else in the world was secondary to her love
for her father's brand and the anxiety of the past two years of its
decline eclipsed all other issues.

Her reflections were interrupted by Harris's voice just outside her
teepee.

"Asleep, Billie?" he asked softly.

"No," she said.  "What is it?"

"I've thrown your saddle on Papoose," he said.  "Let's have a look
around."

She assented and they rode off up the left-hand slope of the valley.  A
mile or so from the wagon Harris dismounted on a high point.

"Let's have a medicine chat," he offered.  "I've got considerable on my
mind."

She leaned against a rock and he sat cross-legged on the ground, facing
her and twisting a cigarette as an aid to thought.  Her head was tilted
back against the rock, her eyes half-closed.

"They say folks get disappointed in love and go right on living," he
observed.  "I wonder now.  I've met quite a scattering of girls and
maybe there were a dozen or so out of the lot that sized up a shade
better than the rest.  Looking back from where I sit it occurs to me
that it was a right colorless assortment, after all.  I've heard that
men run mostly to form and at one time or another let it out to some
little lady that there's no other in the world.  That's my own state
right about now.  Are you always going to keep on disliking me?"

"I don't dislike you," she said.  She was still convinced of his
father's trickery toward her own; but Cal Harris's quiet efficiency and
his devotion to Three Bar interests had convinced her, against her
will, that he had taken no part in it.  "But if you brought me out here
to go into that I'm going back."

"I didn't," he denied.  "But I drifted into it sort of by accident.  No
matter what topic I happen to be conversing on I'm always thinking how
much I'd rather be telling you about that.  Whenever I make some simple
little assertion about things in general, what I'm really thinking is
something like this, 'Billie, right this minute I'm loving you more
than I did two minutes back.'  You might keep that in mind."

The girl did not answer but sat looking off across the jumbled
foothills, rock-studded and gray with sage.  Some distance from them a
bare shale-slide extended for half a mile along a sidehill, barren and
devoid of all vegetation.  Here and there, far off across the country,
vivid patches on the slopes indicated thickets of willows and birch
growing below spring seeps.  A few scattered cedars sprouted from the
rocky ledges of the more broken country and a clump of gnarled,
wind-twisted cottonwoods marked a distant water hole.  A whitish glare
was reflected from an alkali flat in the bottom of a shallow basin.
Twenty miles to the north the first rims of the hills rose out of the
low country and through the breaks in them she could see long sloping
valleys of lodgepole, the dark green relieved by the pale silvery sheen
of aspen clumps; dense spruce jungles of the more precipitous slopes
topped by rugged peaks covered with perpetual snow; certainly no soft
or homelike scene.  One must be filled with a vast love of it--or die
of it--for without that love of the open life would be a deadly thing
to bear in a desert of sage.

"I've always loved it," she said.  "Whenever I've been away there
always came a time when I was restless to get back.  I've always felt
that it would kill me to leave with the idea that I'd never see the
Three Bar range again.  But now the country has changed.  At times it
seems as if it would be a vast relief to me to leave it all behind."

"It's the people that have changed," he said.  "It's only the history
of all frontiers.  The first settlers win it for themselves.  Then
clashing elements creep in; sheep and cattle wars; stockmen and
squatter quarrels; later the weeding out of the wild bunch--parasites
like Harper's crew: still later there'll be squabbles between the
nesters themselves; jumping claims and rowing over water rights.  Then
it will all iron out, the country will settle up according to its
topography and give its best to the human race.  You may grow to think
you hate the hills for what happens to you individually during the
change--but it's in your blood to love them and that love will always
return."

"It may return if the Three Bar weathers the change," she said.

"We'll weather it," he asserted cheerfully.  "Shall I tell you how?"

"Yes.  Tell me," she said.  "I'd like to know.  The Three Bar is going
to show another loss this year."

"And likely the next," he assented.  "Maybe still another.  But that
will be about all."

"That will surely be all," she said.  "Two more years of decrease and
there won't be enough left of the Three Bar to divide."

"Listen," he said, tapping his knee with a forefinger to emphasize his
point.  "Cal Warren always wanted to put the Three Bar flats under
cultivation.  He's probably told you that a hundred times."

"A thousand," she amplified.  "But the sentiment of the country was
against it the same as it is to-day."

"But it's not," he contradicted.

"Then why all those signs?" she asked.  "They run every squatter out
now just as they always did."

"Who?" he asked.  "Do you have a hand in it?"

"No," she said.  "The others do."

"Probably they think the same of you," he pointed out.  "There's just
one man in this country that profits by keeping that no-squatter
sentiment alive."

"You must hate Slade," she observed.

"I haven't any feeling toward him one way or the other," he asserted.
"He's an obstacle, that's all.  That's the way he would feel about me
if I stood in his way.  There's at least one Slade in every locality
and in every line of business throughout the world.  Ambition for
power.  He wants the whole countryside.  If he'd win out on that he'd
want the next--and finally he'd want the world."

"He has this particular part of the world under his thumb," she said.

"But he won't have for long," he insisted.  "He's topheavy and ripe for
a fall.  Those signs are all that saves him from going to pieces like
an over-inflated balloon.  He's the only man we'll have to fight."

"What convinces you of that?" she asked.

"See here," he urged, the emphasizing forefinger tapping again.  "This
will always be range country.  It will only support a certain number of
cows.  If the Three Bar had a section in hay to winter-feed your stuff
you could run double what you do now on the same range.  It's the same
with every other small concern.  There's only a few spots suitable for
home-ranch sites and every one of those has a brand running out of it
now--excepting those sites down in Slade's range.  If all those outfits
put in hay it wouldn't cut up the range any more than it is now--except
down Slade's way.  Every outfit in the country could run twice as many
head as they do now--except Slade.  He couldn't."

"Why?" she asked.  "Why wouldn't that apply to him as well?"

"Because he's strung out over a hundred miles.  The minute farming
starts there'll be squatters filing on every quarter where they can get
water to put it in crop.  There's twenty places Slade would have to
cover by filings to hold his range where the others would only have to
file on one to control the amount of range they're using now."

She nodded as she caught this point.

"Folks have fallen into a set habit of mind," he explained.  "You think
because every squatter is burned out that every outfit but the Three
Bar is against sticking a plow in the ground.  The rest probably feel
the same way--know they haven't a hand in it but figure that you have.
As a matter of fact, it's Slade alone.  That's how I got a line on
Morrow the first night I landed.  I said something about putting in hay
and he came right to the front and made a red-hot anti-squatter talk.
I knew right off he was Slade's man."

"How could you be sure of that?" she asked.  "I've heard men with every
outfit express the same views."

"Morrow hasn't a brand of his own," Harris said.  "He wouldn't lose a
dollar if the whole range was under fence.  He's drawing down money to
keep that feeling alive.  You'll find one with every outfit in this
country.  And the chances are you'll find every one of them overlooking
a few calves on his circle--same as Morrow did.  There's a persistent
rumor to the effect that any man who burns out a squatter can drop in
at Slade's and get five hundred dollars in cash.  The wild bunch will
handle every case that turns up if that rumor is true."

"The sheriff has never been able to pick up a single one of the men who
have burned those squatters out," she said.

"And he never will without some help," Harris agreed.  "Alden's hands
are tied.  He's only an ornament right now and folks have come to
believe he's real harmless.  But Alden is playing his own game
single-handed the best he can.  One day he'll get his hooks into some
of these torch-bearers so deep they'll never shake them out.  The
homestead laws can't be defied indefinitely.  The government will take
a hand and send marshals in here thicker than flies.  Then the outfits
that have hedged themselves in advance are on top.  The rest are
through."

"But what can the Three Bar do against Slade until those marshals
come?" she asked.

"There's a difference between sacking an established outfit with a big
force of hands and burning out some isolated squatter roosting in a
wagon," Harris said.  "I've filed on water out of the Crazy Loop to
cover the section I bought in the flats.  We can pick men and give them
a job with the Three Bar between spells of doing prove-up work.  We can
put in a company ditch to cover all the filings, pay them for working
on it and charge their pro-rata share of improvements up against each
man's final settlement.  When they've made final proof we can buy out
those who want to sell."

"The cost of a project like that would be too big for the Three Bar to
stand," she objected.

"I'll put it up," he offered.  "The money from the sale of the little
old Box L.  I want to see this go through.  We can square accounts when
the Three Bar makes the top of the hill."

He pointed to a bunch of cows that fed in a bottom below them.

"Look at that.  Every color under the sun--and every shape.  Let's put
the flats in hay, girl, and start grading the Three Bar up.  We'll weed
out the runty humpbacked critters and all off-color she-stuff; keep
only straight red cows.  It doesn't take much more feed to turn out a
real beef steer than one of those knife-backed brothers down in the
flat.  We'll gather our own cows close to the home ranch and shove
other brands off our range, throw forty white-face bulls out close
round the place and start building up real beef; steers that will bring
fifty a head where those runts bring twenty-five.  And big red
she-stock will bring more money too.  In five years we'll have a
straight red brand and the Three Bar will be rated at thirty dollars a
head, come as they run on the range, instead of round ten or twelve as
they'd figure us now.  We'll have good hay land that will be worth more
by itself than the whole brand is to-day.  Say the word, girl, and
we'll build up the old outfit that both of our folks helped to found."

The girl had closed her eyes as he painted this picture of
possibilities and except for the difference of voice it might well have
been old Cal Warren speaking; the views and sentiments were the same
she had so often heard her father express.  Next to the longed-for
partnership with old Bill Harris the dream of his life had been to see
the Three Bar flats a smooth meadow of alfalfa.

"I'll put a bunch of terriers in there that will be hard for Slade to
uproot," Harris said.  "What do you say, Billie?  Let's give it a try."

"I'd like to see it done," she said.  "But so much depends on the
outcome.  I'll have to write Judge Colton first.  He has all my affairs
in charge."

Harris smiled across at her.

"That's right peculiar," he observed.  "The Judge is holding the reins
over my little prospects too.  They've tangled your interests and mine
up all along the line it seems.  You drop a line to Judge Colton and
sort of outline the plan.  Maybe he'll see it our way."

They mounted and rode back to the wagon and the girl went straight to
Waddles with the proposition Harris had urged.  The big man had fallen
asleep with the paper he had been perusing still clutched in his hand.

"Tell him to go his best," Waddles advised, when she had outlined
Harris's scheme.  "He'll put a bunch of terriers on the Three Bar that
will cut Slade's claws.  If they burn out the boys Cal Harris puts on
the place then there'll be one real war staged at the old Three Bar."

"He's been telling you," she accused.

"He did sort of mention it," Waddles confessed.

"Then his idea is to import a bunch of gun-fighters," she said.  "I
won't have a bunch of hired killers living at the Three Bar."

"These boys will just be the sort that's handy at knowing how to avoid
getting killed themselves," Waddles evaded.  "You can't rightly blame
any man for that.  And besides, Slade has to be met on his own ground."

"Do you think Slade is at the bottom of the Three Bar losses every
year?" she asked.

"Every hoof," Waddles stated.  "Every last head!  Maybe the albino's
layout rustles an odd bunch on and off.  But Slade is the man that's
out to wreck your brand."  The big cook heaved a sigh as he reached a
decision on a matter which had been troubling him for days.  "That's
what Cal Warren was afraid of--Slade's branching out our way like he
had already toward the south.  And that's one reason he left things
tied up the way he did."

He tapped the much-thumbed document on his knee and handed it to the
girl.

"You and Young Cal have been sort of half-hostile," he said.  "Cast an
eye over that and maybe it'll help you two youngsters to get along."

Three times the girl read every word of the paper while Waddles smoked
his pipe in silence.  Then she sat on the gate of the wagon and gazed
off across the sage; and she was picturing again the long trail of the
Three Bar cows; but this time she was reconstructing the scene at the
end of it.  Instead of one man scheming to trick an old friend at the
last crossing of their trails she now visioned two old men regretting
that the life-long hope of a partnership had never been fulfilled and
planning to cement that arrangement in the next generation.  For old
Bill Harris had left her a full half-interest in everything he owned on
earth with the single stipulation that she retain her half of the Three
Bar for five years after her father's death.

"But why?" she asked presently.  "Why did he do that for me?  He'd
never seen me since I was three years old."

"He did it for the girl of old Cal Warren, the best friend he had
topside of ground," Waddles said.  "Your dad and Bill Harris had been
pals since they was hatched."

"But why didn't they let us know?" she insisted.  "Instead of tangling
it up in this round-about way?"

"Bill Harris had a soft spot in his heart for the old Three Bar the
same as your daddy had," Waddles said.  "They knew there was hard times
and changes ahead and both hated to think of the old brand going under
or changing hands.  They was afraid that if both you and the boy knew
your path was going to be carpeted soft in any event that you might
sell out if things got to breaking wrong.  This way it looked like
you'd be sure to stick.  But they both knew too that when old folks go
mixing into young folks' affairs without consulting them, things are
liable to get all snarled.  So they hedged it for both of you."

"How?" she asked.  "What if either or both of us should have refused to
abide by the terms?"

"Then both properties would have been split between the two of you, the
same as if you'd carried them out," he said.  "You didn't go and think
now, Pet, that them two wise old heads was going to leave the
youngsters in the lurch!  They was planning the best they knew.  Your
dad told me to keep an eye on the general lay.  And Judge Colton sent
me that copy to have on hand to sort of iron things out when I thought
best.  I'm telling you because I know you wouldn't quit the Three Bar
as long as there's two cows left."

"Does Cal know?" she asked.

"Not a word," Waddles asserted.  "He's likely considerable puzzled
himself.  But he's of a optimistic turn of mind, Cal is, and white
folks too.  He surmises things will break right some day, knowing his
own dad and havin' visited round a day or two with yours.  'I don't
know what they're at,' he says to me.  'But they was both square
shooters, those old boys, and whatever it was they didn't aim to cook
up any misery for either the little girl or me, so what's the use to
fret?'  You drop the Judge a line, girl, and turn Harris loose to rip
up the Three Bar flat and seed it down to hay."

She nodded and slipped from the end-gate of the wagon, taking the paper
with her.  Harris was soaking a flannel shirt in the little stream,
flattening it in a riffle and weighting it down with rocks.  She went
straight to him and sat on the bank, motioning him to a seat by her
side.  He dried his hands and took the paper she held out to him.

"What's in the wind?" he asked.

She nodded to indicate the document and he sat down to look over it.
His quizzical expression was erased as he saw his father's name and the
girl watched his face for some evidence of resentment as he read on.
Their status was now reversed, for Bill Harris's holdings had been
easily double those of her own parent.  She saw the sun wrinkles deepen
at the corners of his eyes as he grasped the text of it and he looked
up at her and laughed.

"Now we're resting easy," he said.  "An even trade."

"Uneven," she dissented.  "Of course you know that I'll not take
advantage of that."

"Accounts are all squared off between us now," he said.  "And of course
you'll do just what it says."  He held up his hand as she started to
dissent.  "Don't you!" he reproved.  "Let's let that end of it
slide--rest for a while.  Maybe some day we'll lump both into one and
the two of us boss the whole job."

She rested a hand on his arm.

"Of course you know I'm sorry for a number of things I've said to you,"
she said.  "But I want to thank you for being too decent to return them
in kind.  You're real folks, Cal."

"Good girl, Billie," he thanked her.  "As to what you said, it's
remarkable that you didn't say more.  I knew you weren't crabbing over
what you might lose for yourself but over the thought that your father
had been tricked.  I tried to put myself in your place and if I'd been
you I know I'd have kicked me off the place, or told Waddles to turn
loose his wolf."

He switched abruptly away from the topic in hand and reverted to the
subject they had discussed an hour past.

"We've a clear field now with nothing on our minds but the job of
putting the Three Bar on its feet," he said.  "The Three Bar is a
pretty small outfit the way things are to-day but in a few more years
the brand that runs three thousand head will be almost in the class of
cattle kings.  The range will be settled with an outfit roosting on
every available site.  The big fellows will find their range cut up and
then they're through.  If the Three Bar files on all the water out of
Crazy Loop and covers the flat with hay we'll control all the range for
a number of miles each way.  There's not another site short of
Brandon's place west of us--twelve miles or so; about the same to the
east; still farther off south of us.  We'll be riding the crest."

"If we can only hold on against Slade," she agreed.  "But can we?"

"Watch us!" he said.  "The Brandons would file on their home basin and
put the V L bottoms in hay to-morrow if they could.  McVey's been
wanting to do it on the Halfmoon D ever since he bought out the brand
five years back.  They're all afraid to start.  But they'll be for
us--and follow us as soon as we show them it can be done.  Art Brandon
is repping with us and I've been sounding him out.  You talk to him.
In the meantime you try and get a letter off to the Judge to-day."

The girl nodded.

"We'll try it," she said.  "I know that Cal Warren would rather see the
Three Bar go to pieces from its own pressure, fighting from the inside
to grow, than to see it whittled down from the outside without our
fighting back."

She crossed to her teepee to write the letter asking Judge Colton's
advice on this matter which would mean the turning point in Three Bar
affairs.  An hour later a man rode away from the wagon, his bed roll
packed on a led horse, heading for Brill's with the message that meant
so much to the Three Bar.  As he left Harris handed him two letters he
had written weeks past, before leaving the ranch.

Presumably only the three of them knew of the intended move but in the
course of the next few days it had become rumored among the men that
the Three Bar was to turn into a farming outfit.  The girl learned that
Carpenter was the source of these whispers.  Hanson, the rep from the
Halfmoon D, apprised her of this fact.

Ever since the departure of Morrow Carp had been sullen.  Twice he had
taken exceptions to some order of Harris's but the new foreman had
patiently overlooked the fact.  However on the fifth day after the
departure of Horne with the letter to Judge Colton, Harris whirled on
the man as he made an anti-squatter remark when the hands were gathered
for the noon meal.

"That'll be all," he said.  "I'll figure out your time.  You took
things up where Morrow left off.  Now you can go hunt him up and
compare notes."

"Can't a man speak his mind?" Carp demanded.

"He can talk his head off," Harris said.  "But he can't overlook any
Three Bar calves on his circle while I'm running the layout.  Morrow
tried that on while he was breaking you in."

Carp surveyed the faces of the men and started to speak but changed his
mind and headed for the rope corral.

"He's a cringing sort of miscreant," Moore said as Carp rode off.  "He
was even afraid to speak up for himself--thought maybe the boys would
pass sentence on him before he could get out of sight.  I expect Carp
is poor sort of folks."

"That's going to leave us short-handed," Harris said to the girl.
"Morrow, Carp and Bangs--three short.  Horne ought to get back from
Brill's to-day.  We've only one more week out so I guess we can worry
through."

"How did you know?" she asked.  "About Carp, I mean."

"Lanky caught him overlooking a bunch of cows with calves," Harris
explained.  "Lanky is worth double pay."

The Three Bar girl had noted that Carpenter had been much with Bentley,
Slade's rep, since Morrow had gone.  She had come to be suspicious of
all things connected with Slade.

"Are you watching Bentley?" she asked.

Harris shook his head.

"No use," he said.  "Slade wouldn't work that way.  Bentley is his
known representative and anything Bent might do would reflect on Slade.
Slade only works through one or two others who arrange for all the
rest.  Morrow is likely one of his right-hand men.  He'd fix it for
Carp without Slade's name even coming into it at all.  Carp might have
a good idea where the money came from but he'd draw it from Morrow and
never get to the man behind.  We'll never get anything on Bentley for
that reason--because he's known to draw Slade's pay."

"Then how can we ever prove anything on Slade?" she insisted.

"It's ten to one we can't," he said.  "Even if one of his chief fixers
should turn him up it wouldn't work.  It would be the same old
story--the word of an owner against that of a self-confessed thief.  We
may have to handle Slade without proof."

Horne came back from Brill's in the early evening and another man rode
with him.

"Alden," Billie said.  "I wonder what the sheriff is doing out in here."

The sheriff stripped the saddle from his horse and the wrangler swooped
down to haze the animal in with the remuda as Alden joined Harris and
the girl.  He was a tall, gaunt man with a slight stoop.  His keen gray
eyes peered forth from a maze of sun-wrinkles surmounted by bushy
eyebrows, the drooping gray mustache accentuating rather than
detracting from the hawk-like strength of countenance.  He dropped a
hand on the girl's shoulder and looked down at her.

"How are things breaking this season, Billie?" he asked.  "Everything
running smooth?"

"About the same," she said.  They were old friends and the girl knew
that Alden would help her in any possible way.

The sheriff turned to Harris.

"I see you've settled down to a steady job, Cal, instead of browsing
round the hills alone.  I run across Horne at Brill's and he was
telling me about some one gunning for you from the brush.  Morrow, he
says.  Do you want me to pick Morrow up?"

"It would only waste your time," Harris said.  "We couldn't prove it on
him--the way things are."

"Fact," Alden agreed.  "But I could hold him till after you're back at
the ranch.  Some day folks may wake up and need a sheriff.  It's hard
to say."

The men had finished working the herd and were crowding around the
wagon for their meal.

"You go ahead and eat, Billie," Alden said.  "Cal and I'll feed a
little later on.  I've got a fuss to pick with Cal."

Billie left them together and the sheriff squatted on his heels.

"What's this rumor about your farming the Three Bar?" he asked.  "Horne
said all the hands were guessing, but I haven't heard anything about it
outside."

"And I don't want it leaking out before we start," Harris said.  "But
we're going to break out the flat.  I had the plans all laid and sent
word off.  Things are moving toward the start right now."

"It'll stir things up," Alden predicted.  With one forefinger he traced
a design in the dust, then blotted it out.  "I'll play in with you the
best I can."

"We've got to make a clean split," Harris said.  "Get the wild ones
definitely set apart.  Then they can be handled."  When he spoke again
it was apparently as if to himself.  "Al Moody sprung it in the
Gallatin country a few years back," he said reflectively.  "And old Con
Ristine worked it on the Nations Cow-trail twenty years ago.  It always
brings the split."

"That kind of thing is dead against the law," the sheriff said.  "But
it works right well--that backfire stuff.  And it's never been proved
on either Al Moody or old Con Ristine, so I hear."

"But of course I wouldn't have a hand in anything like that," Harris
stated.

"No.  Neither would I," said the sheriff.  "Nothing like that."

Alden was regarding old Rile Foster who had drawn apart from the rest
and was eating his meal in solitude.  The old man had taken a boot heel
from his pocket and was studying it as if fascinated by the somber
reflections it roused in him.  Alden shook his head as he rose and
moved toward the wagon.

"Horne was telling me about Bangs too," he said.  "Pretty tough for
Rile.  They was as close as father and son, those two."

Harris and the sheriff joined the rest at the wagon and held out plates
and cups to Waddles.  The girl was oddly excited, anxious for the
start, now that the decision had been made.

"How long will it take to get things moving after we get back?" she
asked.

"Not more than a week at the outside," Harris said.  "Probably less."

"You don't mean that," she stated.  "I want to know the truth."

"You have it," he assured her.  "I had the plans all laid.  Our crew is
already headed for the Three Bar.  Before they get there every man will
have filed on a quarter I designated for him.  Inside a week we'll have
covered the flat."

Long after the hands had turned in for the night she heard a faint
murmur of voices and looked from her teepee.  The brilliant moonlight
showed Harris and the sheriff sitting off by themselves.  For no
apparent reason she thought of Carlos Deane and, point by point, she
contrasted him with the man who sat talking to the sheriff.  Each was
almost super-efficient in his own chosen line and she caught herself
wondering what each one would do if suddenly transplanted to the
environment of the other.  Then her mind occupied itself with Harris
who would soon break out the first plow furrow that had ever scarred
the range within a radius of fifty miles and she pictured again a sign
she had seen that day: "Squatter let your wagon wheels keep turning."




VIII

Three heavy wagons, each drawn by four big mules, traveled north along
the Coldriver stage trail.  Every wagon was loaded to the brim of the
triple box.  Two men were mounted on each wagon seat, the man beside
the driver balancing a rifle across his knees.  The butt of another
protruded from a saddle scabbard that was lashed to each wagon within
easy reach of the man who handled the reins.

"Nice place to camp, Tiny," said the guard on the lead wagon.  He
pointed off across a flat beside the road toward a sign that loomed in
the center.  The black-browed giant designated as Tiny swung the mules
off the road and headed for the sign.  The three wagons were drawn up
some fifteen yards apart in the shape of a triangle, the mules
unhitched and given a feed of grain from nose-bags, tied to the wagons
and supplied with baled hay.  Tiny walked over and viewed the sign.

"Squatter don't let sunset find you here," he read.

"It's about that time now," he observed, squinting over his shoulder.
"It'd be a mistake to leave evidence like that around."  He tore down
the sign and worked it into firewood with an axe.  "Now they can't do
nothing to us for drifting in here by error," he remarked to his
companions.  "It wouldn't be fair."

While four of them slept the other two remained awake, rousing a second
pair after a three-hour period.  In the morning the three wagons
lumbered on.  Near sunset they passed another sign where the Three Bar
road branched off to the left.  Tiny pulled up the mules.

"Uproot that little beauty, Russet," he advised.  "We're getting close
to home."

The carrot-haired guard descended and threw his weight against the
sign, working it from side to side until the posts were loosened in the
ground, pried it up and loaded it on the wagon.

"Quick work, Russ," the big man complimented.  "For a little sawed-off
runt, you're real spry and active."  He clucked to the mules and they
settled steadily into the collars and moved on to the Three Bar.  As
they rolled up the lane the freighters could see the chuck wagon drawn
up before the house, the remuda milling round the big pasture lot and a
number of men moving among the buildings.  The calf round-up was over.

The Three Bar men viewed the freighters curiously as they swung the
mule teams in front of the blacksmith shop, noted the rifle in the
hands of each guard and the second one in easy reach of each driver.
They knew what this portended.

The freighters had stripped off the wagon-sheet lashed across the top
of each load and the Three Bar men moved casually toward the wagons,
curious to view the contents.

"You boys get to knowing each other," Harris said.  "These
mule-skinners will be hanging out at the Three Bar from now on."

The short man, known as Russet, removed his hat and scratched his head
reflectively as he studied the first move in unloading his wagon.
Moore promptly uncovered his own head and revealed his brilliant red
shock of hair, his freckled face breaking into a genial grin.

"Hello, you red-hot little devil," he greeted.  "I'm glad some one has
turned up with redder hair than mine.  Brother--shake!"

Russ looked him over carefully.

"Don't you claim no relationship with me, you sorrel hyena," he said.
"I won't stand it for a holy second.  Get a move on and help me snatch
off this load."

All down the line the Three Bar men were getting acquainted with the
freighters, introductions effected in much the same manner as that
between Russet and Moore.  A thousand pounds of oats were tossed from
the top of the first wagon and when the concealing sacks were cleared
away there were three heavy plows showing underneath, the spaces
between them filled with shining coils of fence wire.  The second load
consisted of a dismantled drill, a crate of long-handled shovels, and
more barbed wire; the third held a rake and a mowing machine, more
wire, kegs of fence staples and a dozen forks.

"The Three Bar will be the middle point of a cyclone," Moore prophesied
as he viewed the implements.  "Just as soon as this leaks out."

"We fetched our cyclone openers with us," Russ assured him.  "Let her
buck."

From the cook-shack door the girl viewed these preparations, then
turned her eyes to the flat and visioned it with a carpet of rippling
hay.

There was a clatter of hoofs and a rattling of gravel as five horsemen
put their sure-footed mounts down the steep slope two hundred yards
back of the house and followed along the fence of the corral.  The five
Brandons had cut across the shoulder of the mountain.  The girl
wondered at this visit as she heard Lafe Brandon, the father and head
of the tribe, ask Harris to put them up for the night.

An hour later Harris and Lafe came to her door and she let them in.

"The Brandons are riding down to file on a quarter apiece," Harris
said.  "Art quit the wagon below their place as we came in and told the
rest that we're going to farm the Three Bar."

"Then you're doing the same?" she asked Lafe with sudden hope that her
brand would have company in the move.

Old man Brandon shook his head.

"Not right off," he said.  "Until we see how you folks pan out.  We
can't fix to handle it the way you do.  We're filing to protect
ourselves before some nester outfit turns up at our front door."

The old man explained his views.  There was enough flow in the stream
that cut their home valley to water something over a section of land.
With that filed on they would control their home range.  They could
grade up their cows and increase a hundred per cent. with a section
under hay.  He hoped the Three Bar would win, but he feared to start in
the face of the wave of opposition he was sure would rise against the
move.

"We're not fixed for it," he explained again.

"But the other small outfits feel the same way," Harris said.  "If two
of us start the rest will join in."

"Maybe so," the old man said doubtfully.  "But noways likely.  They're
too set on the other side."  The thought was deep-rooted and he could
not be moved.

"We'll let it out it's only for protection that we all are filing," he
said.  "And that we don't aim to prove up.  The outfits that don't file
now will lose out.  This will always be open range, more than ninety
per cent. of it, and those who file on their water will control the
grass.  As soon as the squatters see one outfit starting, they'll take
out papers on every piece of dirt they can get water to.  They'll have
six months to move on, then a six months' stay.  They'll hang round
waiting for things to open up so they can rush in here.  The brand
owners who haven't hedged theirselves beforehand will run down to file
and find that nesters have had papers on all the good pieces right in
their dooryard for months.  They'll have only the plots left that their
home ranch sets on, and likely no water even for that."

The Brandons stayed for the night and rode off at daylight the next
morning, while the Three Bar men prepared for a trip to Brill's.  As
the rest were saddling for the start Harris saw old Rile Foster seated
by himself, gazing off across the hills.

"Better come and ride over with us, Rile," he urged.  "Bangs would want
you to try and forget."

The old man shook his head.

"I'm drifting to-day," he said.  "I'll likely be back before long.  I
back-tracked Blue to their camp and trailed them twenty miles to where
they joined another bunch.  It was some of Harper's devils--I don't
know which four.  One way or another, whether I get the right four or
not, I'm going to play even for Bangs."

When the rest of the men rode off the old man was still leaning against
the shop.

There were less than a dozen others in Brill's store when the Three Bar
men crowded through the door.  Five men sat at one of the tables in the
big room and indulged in a casual game of stud.  Harper and Lang were
among them.  Two of them Harris knew as men named Hopkins and Wade.
The fifth was unknown to him.

The albino's eyes met Harris's steadily as he entered at the head of
the Three Bar men.  Those among the hands who had formerly fraternized
as freely with Harper's men as with those who rode for legitimate
outfits now held way from them since their foreman had ordered Harper
from the Three Bar wagon.  They merely nodded as they filed past to the
bar.

"Who is the man dealing now?" Harris inquired of Moore.

The freckled youth turned to the card players.

"Magill," he said.  "Same breed as the rest."

The news that the Three Bar had turned into a squatter outfit had been
widely noised abroad.  Carpenter had stopped at Brill's late the night
before and announced the fact.  Others had seemed already aware of it.

From behind the bar Brill covertly studied the man who was responsible
for this change.  Four men from the Halfmoon D stood grouped at one end
of the room.  They split up and mingled among the others.  Brill moved
up and down behind the bar, polishing it with a towel.  One after
another he drew each of the men from the Halfmoon D into conversation
with the Three Bar foreman to determine whether or not they resented
his move.  There was no evidence of it in their speech.  They had all
been present when Harris rode the blue horse and had heard his
subsequent remark to Morrow.  There was but one reference to the state
of affairs at the Three Bar.

"Now you've gone and raised hell," one boy from the Halfmoon D remarked
to Harris.  "You'll have folks out looking for your scalp."  He lowered
his voice and Brill moved nearer to wipe away an imaginary spot on the
bar.  "It's Slade you'll have to buck," the boy warned.  "There's
likely to be some excitement over in your neighborhood.  I'd like right
well to ride for the Three Bar next year.  Hold a job for me in the
spring."

The men from the two outfits mingled as unrestrainedly as before and at
last Harris smiled across at Brill.

"Well, have you sized it all up?" he asked.

The storekeeper looked up quickly, knowing that Harris had read his
purpose in drawing him into conversation with the four men.  He
polished the bar thoughtfully, then nodded.

"A man in my business has to keep posted--both ways," he said.  "I just
wanted to make sure.  Five years ago every man would have quit the
Three Bar like a snake--feeling was that strong.  But the boys drift
from place to place and they've seen both ends of it.  They don't give
a damn one way or the other now.  Why should they?  They've got nothing
at stake.  Five years ago you couldn't have hired a man to ride for
you.  Now they'll be pouring in asking for jobs--just because they
figure there'll be some excitement on tap."

The men from the Halfmoon D were due back and inside of an hour they
rode off, leaving only Harris's men and the five card-players in the
place.  Harris walked over to the table and the Three Bar men shifted
positions, slouching sidewise at the bar or leaning with their backs to
it, alertly watching this unexpected move as the foreman spoke to the
albino.

"Let's you and I draw off and have a little talk," he said.  "If you
can spare the time."

Harper looked up at him in silence.  He carefully tilted up the corner
of his hole-card and peeked at it, then turned his other cards face
down on the table.

"Pass," he said, and rose to face Harris.  "Lead the way."

Harris moved over to another table and the two men sat down, facing
each other across it.  He motioned to Evans and Lanky joined them.
Harris plunged abruptly into what he had to say.

"First off, Harper, I want you to get it straight that I'm not fool
enough to threaten you--for I know you're not any more afraid of me
than I am of you.  This is just a little explaining, a business talk,
so we'll both know where we stand.  It's up to you whether we let each
other alone or fight."

"Good start," the albino commented.  "Go right on."

"All right--it's like this," Harris resumed.  "I'm going to have my
hands full without you hiring out to pester us.  I'm not out to reform
the country.  They set the fashion of dog eat dog and every man for
himself; so the Three Bar is all that interests me.  You keep out of my
affairs and I'll let you go your own gait.  If you mix in I'll have
your men hunted down like rats."

Harper glanced toward the group at the bar.

"You were prudent enough to pick a time when you're three to one to
tell me about that," he said.  "If I'd kill you in your chair I might
have some trouble getting out the door."

"Of course I'd take every chance to play safe," Harris admitted.  "But
that is beside the point.  I'd have told you the same thing if the odds
had been reversed."

"Would you?" the albino pondered.  "I wonder."

"You know I would," Harris stated.  "You've got brains, or you'd have
been dead for twenty years.  If I thought you were a haphazard homicide
I wouldn't be sitting here.  But you wouldn't kill a man without
looking a few weeks ahead and making sure it was safe."

"Go ahead--Let's hear the rest of it," Harper urged.  "You've got an
original line of talk."

"You're playing one game and I'm playing mine," Harris said.  "You're
in the saddle now--like you have been once or twice before.  But you
know that the sentiment of a community reverses almost overnight.
You've stepped out just ahead of a clean-up a time or two in the past.
You know how it goes--your friends drop off like you had the plague.
Every man's out after your scalp.  I've got a hard bunch of terriers
over at the Three Bar and you couldn't raid us without a battle big
enough to go down in history as the Three Bar war.  Either way you'd
lose for it would stir folks up--and when they're stirred you're
through.  Do you remember what Al Moody did up on the Gallatin and what
old Con Ristine sprung on the Nations Trail?  That will happen again
right here."

The two men were leaning toward each other, elbows resting on the
table.  Harper relaxed and leaned back comfortably in his chair as he
twisted a smoke.  Evans propped his feet on the table and Harris hung
one knee over the arm of his chair.  The men at the bar knew that some
crisis had been safely passed.

"You talk as if I was running an outfit of my own and had a bunch of
riders that could swarm down on you," Harper objected.  "I don't even
run a brand of my own or have one man riding for me."

"The wild bunch is riding for you," Harris stated.

"Suppose that was true," Harper said.  "Then what?"

"In one country after the next they've hit the toboggan whenever they
got to feeling too strong.  If you line up against me that time has
come again.  If I get potted from the brush I've hedged it so that
those boys that filed over there won't be left in the lurch.  There'll
be a reward of a thousand dollars hung up for the scalp of each of
fifteen men whose names I gathered while I was prowling round--reliable
men to carry on what I've begun; and marshals thicker than flies to
protect the homestead filings on the Three Bar."

"Then it might be bad policy to bushwhack you," Harper observed.

"You can go your own gait," Harris said.  "As long as you lay off Three
Bar cows.  You invited me one time to come down to your hangout in the
Breaks.  I won't ever make that visit unless you call on the Three Bar
first; then, just out of politeness, I'll ride over at the head of a
hundred men."

"Then it don't look as if we'd get anywhere, visiting back and forth,"
Harper said.

"Now don't think I'm throwing a bluff or threatening; I'm just telling
you.  You could recite a number of things that could happen to me in
return--all of 'em true.  I'm just counting that you've got brains and
can see it's not going to help either one of us to get lined up wrong.
What do you say--shall we call it hands off between the Three Bar and
you?"

The albino half-closed his eyes, the pale eyeballs glittering through
the slit of his lids as he reflected on this proposition, tapping a
careless finger on his knee.  He glanced absent-mindedly toward the
bar, his thoughts wholly occupied with the matter in hand.  A pair of
eyes that gazed back at him drew his own and he found himself looking
at Bentley, the man who repped with the Three Bar for Slade.  The
albino's suspicions were as fluid and easily roused as those of a beast
of prey in a dangerous neighborhood.  With one of those quick shifts of
which his mind was capable he concentrated every mental effort toward
linking Bentley with some unpleasant episode of the past.  The man had
turned away and Harper could only sense a vague feeling that he was
dangerous to him, without definite point upon which to base his
suspicions.  At the sound of Harris's voice his mind made another
lightning shift back to the present.

"Well?" Harris asked.

"Why, if I had anything to do with it, like you seem to think, I'd
advise against our bucking each other," Harper said.  "I'd try to get
along--and declare hands off."  He rose, nodded to the two men and
returned to the stud game.

"He'll do it too," Evans predicted.  "There's that much fixed
anyway--not a bad piece of work."

The two men returned to the bar and Brill moved close to Harris.  For
fifteen years he had stood behind that bar and observed the men of the
whole countryside at their worst--and best; and he knew men.  As well
as if he had heard the words of the three at the table he knew that
Harris and Harper had reached an agreement of some sort that was
satisfactory to both.

"Take the boys over a drink on me," Harris said, and Brill slid a
bottle and five whisky glasses on to a tray and moved over to the table.

"Here's a drink on the Three Bar boss," he announced.

Lang scowled, remembering the recent occasion when Harris had ordered
them off.

"To hell with----" he commenced, but the albino cut him short.

"Drink it," he said.

Ten minutes later the five men rose to go.  Harris looked at his watch.

"I'm off," he said to Evans.  "Try and get the boys home by to-morrow
morning if it's possible."

He went outside and mounted as the five rustlers swung to their saddles.

"I'm going your way as far as the forks," he said to Harper.

The Three Bar men were treated to the sight of their foreman riding
down the road beside Harper at the head of four of the worst ruffians
in the State.

And behind the bar Brill moved softly back and forth when not serving
drinks, pausing opposite first one group and then the next to dab at
the polished wood with his cloth, listening carefully to the
conversation and gauging it to determine whether the apparent sentiment
toward the squatter foreman was sincere or would prove different when
the men, flushed with undiluted rye, were unrestrained by his presence.
At one end of the bar Evans and Bentley conversed together in low tones
but whenever Brill strolled casually to their end the conference
lagged.  The few sentences which reached his ears were of trivial
concern.




IX

There was a new contentment in the eyes of the Three Bar girl as she
sat her horse beside Carlos Deane and looked off down the bottoms.  A
haze of smoke drifted above the little valley of the Crazy Loop.  Three
mule outfits were steadily ripping up the sage flats.  Men lifted the
uprooted brush on forks and piled it for the burning.  The two rode
down to the fields with the pungent sage smoke drifting in their faces.
Harris joined them, a smudge of fire-black across his forehead, and
swept his arm across the stretch of plowed ground.

"Can you picture that covered with a stand of alfalfa hay?" he asked.

The girl nodded.

"Yes--and cut and cured and in the stack yards," she said.  "And a
straight red run of Three Bar cows wintering under fence."

Harris wondered if her new contentment came wholly from the progress
the Three Bar was making or was derived partly from the presence of
Carlos Deane.  Each man had recognized the other as a contender for the
love of the Three Bar girl and during the two days of Deane's stay each
one had been covertly sizing and estimating the caliber of the other
man.

"The opposite faction hasn't succeeded in wrecking the Three Bar up to
date," Deane said.  "It's probable they see you're too strong for them."

"It's hard to wreck plowed ground," Harris pointed out.  "And that's
all they have to work on right now; not a fence to tear up, a stack to
fire or any growing crops to trample down.  All they can do right now
is to wait.  It must be wearing.  But sooner or later they'll show
their teeth."

For a month prior to Deane's arrival Harris had been occupied from dawn
till dark with the details of the new work.  The wagons had made a
week's trip to the railroad to freight in more implements and supplies.
A hundred acres of plowed ground lay mellowing under the sun.  Five
miles back up the slope of the hills two men worked in a valley of
lodgepole pine, felling, trimming and peeling sets of matched logs for
the cabins that must be erected on each filing.  The cowhands were out
working the range in pairs, branding late-dropped calves and moving
drifted stock back to the home range.  Forty white-face bulls had been
trail-herded from the railroad and thrown out along the foot of the
hills to replace the other bulls that had been rounded up and brought
in.  These old stags now grazed in the big pasture lot until such time
as the beef herd should be gathered and shipped.  In a few more days
the boys would come in from the range and gather at the home ranch,
preparatory to going out once more on the beef round-up.

"I'm about to take a vacation," Harris said.  "The ranger is coming
over to mark out some more trees for us and to run the U. S. brand on
the logs we've already cut.  I'm going back up in the hills with him to
sort out a valley or two for summer range."

"We don't need any extra range now," Billie said.  "Why pay grazing
fees before we need the room."

"Just to get our wedge in first," Harris explained.  "We can get
grazing permits on the Forest now--right in the best grass valleys.
Each year we'll throw some cows up there to hold our rights.  There'll
always be good grass on the Forest Reserves for they won't permit
overstocking.  The day will come when we'll be glad to have permits to
summer-feed a thousand or so head on the Forest.  I was thinking maybe
you and Deane would like to make the jaunt."

"We'll go," the girl decided.

"It's a question of time," Deane said.  "How long will we be gone?"

"We'll start in an hour or two," Harris said.  "Just as soon as Wilton
turns up.  We'll only be gone five days at the most."

"Then I'll stretch my stay to cover it," Deane accepted.  "I'd
certainly hate to pass up a chance for a trip in the hills."

"We'll ride back and make up an extra bed roll," Harris said.  "Then
we'll be all set to start when Wilton shows up."

Calico had sidled off the plowing and was cropping the grass at the
edge of it.  As Harris moved toward him Evans rode down the right-hand
slope and the three waited for him.

"Moore and I were working in close and I thought I'd ride over to tell
you that the wild bunch has lost a veteran," he said.  "Some one put
Barton out over in the Breaks."

Barton, whose name was linked with that of Harper, had been found with
a rifle ball through his chest.  His own gun, found by his
out-stretched hand, had showed one blackened cylinder, the empty shell
sufficient proof that he had fired a single shot at his assailant.

"Anyway, he had a chance to see who got him," Lanky philosophized.  "He
was likely ordered to turn round--given a fighting chance maybe."

The girl could find no sorrow in her heart over the passing of Barton
but there was an uneasy feeling deep within her,--a vague suspicion
that she should be able to pronounce the killer's name.  This elusive
thought was crowded from her mind when the ranger rode up to the Three
Bar accompanied by Slade, each man leading a pack horse.

"Slade's going to look over a little territory up on the Forest,"
Wilton explained.  "So we can get it all done on one trip."

There was no way to avoid this unexpected addition to their party.
Harris and the ranger packed the three bed rolls and Billie's teepee
along with the necessary equipment and in half an hour the little
cavalcade filed up a gulch back of the Three Bar, the ranger in the
lead with his pack horse.  The other pack animals followed and the
three other men and the girl brought up the rear in single file.  By
noon they made the first rims and followed over into a rolling country,
heavily timbered in the main.  In the early evening they rode out on to
a low divide and Blind Valley showed below them, a broad expanse of
open grassland.  A little stream threaded the bottoms and its winding
course was marked by thickets of birch.  In places it disappeared under
the leafy tunnels of aspen groves, their pale silvery trunks and leaves
contrasting with the heavy blue-green of an occasional water-spruce.
In a narrowing of the valley it was choked from wall to wall by a
cottonwood jungle, opening out once more into wide meadows immediately
below the neck.  Long open parks extended their tongues well back up
the timbered sidehills.

"Feed!" Harris said.  "Feed.  Worlds of it."

They angled down the slope and struck the rank grass of the
bottoms,--mountain hay in which the horses stood knee-deep.  They made
camp at the mouth of a branching canyon, just within the timber.  The
ranger threw the horses up this side gulch while Harris felled a dead
pine and kindled a fire.  When the ranger returned he picketed one
horse in the heavy grass while Slade pitched Billie's teepee under a
spruce.  The meal was finished, dishes washed and the five sat round a
fire.

Harris sensed Deane's attitude toward it all for he knew something of
the other man's way of life.  Those with whom Deane was thrown most in
contact were careful of appearances.  It was unheard-of in his code
that a girl should jaunt for days accompanied by four men.  Here
appearances seemed entirely disregarded and no one gave the matter a
thought.

The moon swung over the ridges and shed its radiance over Blind Valley.
Deane motioned to Billie and the girl rose and followed him to the edge
of the timber where they sat on a blow-down.

"Billie, let me take you away from all this," he urged.  "All this hard
riding and rough man's work.  Let me give you the things that will shut
out all the hardships.  What's the use of going on like this?"

The girl was conscious of a vague sense of disappointment.  Deane was
an active figure in the business life of his own community and she had
felt some pride in the fact that when he should come to the Three Bar
he would find that she too was doing real work in the world.  She
reflected that his attitude was that of so many other men, his idea of
love synonymous with shelter for the object of it, and his main plea
was that of providing her with shelter against all the rough corners of
life.  Shelter!  And what she wanted was to be part of things--to have
a hand in running her own affairs.  It came to her that of all men
perhaps Slade understood her the best.

"I don't want shelter!" she said.  "And I can't think of anything else
till after the Three Bar is a going concern."

The voices of the three men round the fire drifted to them.

"Listen," she urged.

"Blind Valley ought to summer-feed three hundred head," the ranger was
saying.  "I'll recommend permits for that many cows."

"That'll suit me," Slade nodded.  "I'll put in application through you?"

"Not if I can help it you won't," Harris said.  "Why should you have
permits right in the back yard of the Three Bar with all the rest of
the hills open to you?  There's a natural lead right down to the
corrals; divides to form wings.  It's up to Wilton, of course, but I'm
going to make application to graze Blind Valley myself.  They'll allow
whichever one he recommends."

"Harris has first call," the ranger stated mildly.  "This is the
logical range for his stuff--this and one or two others right close.
We can fix you up in a dozen other good grass countries further on,
Slade, if it's all the same."

Slade nodded agreement.  The ranger had authority to recommend the
issuing of permits and his superiors would not go contrary to his
suggestions in any but exceptional cases--certainly not in this matter.
Slade's eyes turned frequently toward the two figures on the log,
silhouetted against the white of the moonlit meadow, and his slashed
mouth set in disapproval.  Harris noted this and smiled as it occurred
to him that Slade's views on the subject of Deane's appropriating the
girl for himself were about on a par with Deane's ideas relative to her
touring the hills with four men.

The two came back and sat with the others round the dying fire, then
all turned in for the night, Billie in her teepee and the men in their
bed rolls with no other overhead shelter than the trees.  In less than
an hour Harris raised on one elbow.  The ranger woke just as Harris
slipped from his bed roll and tugged on his chaps.  The steady thud of
hoofs had penetrated each man's consciousness and apprised him of the
fact that the horses were coming down.

Wilton closed his eyes as Harris departed to head them back.  Three
times during the night Deane was roused as one or the other of the
three men left his bed roll to frustrate an attempt of the horses to
make a break for home.  Near morning he was once more wakened by a
clammy dampness on his face.  A fine drizzle was falling.  Slade was on
his feet, shoving a few sticks of wood inside the flap of Billie's
teepee.

In the first gray light of morning Harris was up and slicing shavings
from the few dry sticks Slade had so thoughtfully tucked away.
Breakfast was cooked under the dripping trees.  The ranger was soaked
to the knees as he waded through the tall grass to the picketed horse.
He saddled him and went up-country after the other horses.  The outfit
was packed up and the little procession filed away toward the next
valley--and Carlos Deane proved his real caliber to Harris.

Throughout the day they rode in a fine drizzle; in the timber the wet
branches whipped them and sprayed water down the necks of their
slickers; in the boggy meadows of the bottoms the mosquitoes hovered
round them in humming swarms.  The horses stamped, shook their heads
angrily and switched their tortured flanks with dripping tails till at
last the men greased their noses, eyes and flanks to protect the
animals from the singing horde.  When they dismounted to lead their
horses up precipitous game trails leading to the crest of some divide
Deane's Angora chaps flapped like dead weights and seemed to drag him
back.  From the lofty ridges they gazed down upon white clouds floating
in the valleys; and at night they made camp and slept in damp bed rolls
with the clammy mist chilling them.  The next day was the same.

Harris knew that a man might evidence great courage in the face of
danger, risk his life in the heat of excitement, but that the true test
of iron control is to experience grinding discomfort and smile.
Deane's neck was raw and chafed from the wet neckband of his flannel
shirt and his hands and cheeks were puffed with the bites of the
buzzing pests.  But Deane had been cheerful throughout and had uttered
no complaint.

Toward evening of the second gloomy day Harris rode up beside him.

"You'll do," he said.

"How's that?" Deane asked.

"There's maybe one man out of every two hundred that can go along like
this and not get to blaming every one in sight for what's happening to
him.  I don't know as I'd have blamed you any if you'd been cussing us
all out for the past two days."

Deane laughed and shook his head.

"I've been rather enjoying it," he said.

"You're just a plain, old-fashioned liar, Deane," Harris returned.
"You haven't been enjoying it any more than the rest of us--which is
mighty little; but you've got insides enough to let on like it's
considerable sport--which is a whole lot."

"No one else has done any beefing," Deane said.  "So why should I?"

"This is everyday business with us," Harris pointed out.  "And right
unusual for you.  There's likely a number of things you do every day
back your way, but that doesn't signify that I could amble back there
and perform as well as you."

"I suspect you'd make out all right," Deane said.  "Anyway--I'm much
obliged for the endorsement."

They camped again in the drizzle but by noon of the following day the
sun peeped through.  In an hour every cloud and fog-bank had been
dispersed with a rapidity which is seen only in the hill country.  The
ranger pulled up his horse as they struck a game trail in the saddle of
a low divide.  A bunch of shod horses had been over it a few hours past.

"Some of the albino's layout," Wilton surmised.  "They cross through
here to that camp of theirs down in the Breaks.  I've run across their
trails up here before."

They rode out on to a spur and looked down on the low country.  Slade
and the ranger were going on, the others returning to the Three Bar.
Harris pointed to the country spread out below them.

"That's the Breaks," he told Deane.  "I'll point out the albino's
stronghold."

"While they're looking I want to talk to you," Slade said to Billie.

"Let's get together," he said, when the others had passed on.  "Why are
you so dead set on making a squatter outfit of the Three Bar?  Don't
you know the nesters will flock in here and cut the range all up as
soon as they see a chance?"

"Not my range," she said.  "Outside of the V L and the Halfmoon D
there's not another site they can get water for, except maybe a couple
of spring gulches where flood reservoirs will hold back enough to water
a forty.  So we'll still control our home range."

"But there's a dozen sites down in my range," he said.

"And a dozen small outfits wouldn't run any more cows than you do now,"
she said.  "At least not on my range; so what difference will it make
to me?  Why don't you have men file on all those sites?"

"You can't make a contract that will hold a man to turn over his
homestead after it's proved up," he said.  "Half of them would keep
their land."

"Of course," she agreed.  "But then you'd have half instead of nothing
at all.  Do you want the world?"

"I want you!" he said.  "Throw in with me, girl.  I'm going to fight
these nesters off--the Three Bar among the rest if you don't quit.
I'll smash the Three Bar into mincemeat unless you run this damned
Harris off and quit this game."

It was the first time Slade had ever threatened.  Her spirits had
soared over the prospects of the Three Bar and she was suddenly afraid
for her brand if Slade, who had whittled down a dozen outfits at once,
should suddenly turn his whole attention to the Three Bar.

"I've got it to do," Slade stated.  "Since you've started this deal
there's been nesters filed papers on every good site in my range,
waiting to rush in as soon as I lose my grip.  Do you think I'll let
them crowd me out?  Not in a thousand years!  I'm telling you--I'll
break the Three Bar if you keep it up."

"All right!" she said.  "And what about the homestead laws?"

"I'm the law out here," he asserted.

It came to her that Slade was fighting on the defensive, that he feared
to let the Three Bar succeed and set up a precedent in defiance of the
signs that dotted the range.

"Then it's war!" she said.  "And you'll go under yourself, from your
own size, if you haven't the judgment to hedge yourself now like the
rest.  The Three Bar is going ahead--and we're going to win."

She turned her horse but Slade caught her arm and whirled her around.
He jerked a thumb at the two men down the ridge.

"What can Deane, a half-baked boy, give you?" he demanded.  "Money--and
trinkets to hang all over you till you flash like a Mexican's bridle; a
flower garden and a soft front lawn to range in--and after a year or
two you'd give your soul to trade it off for an acre of raw sage.
You'd trade a castle full of glittering chandeliers for one hour at the
round-up fire--your box at the opera for a seat on the ground with your
back against the chuck-wagon wheel while the boys sang just one old
song.  I know!  You'd soon get fed up on too much of that.  You want an
outfit of your own.  I'll give you that--the biggest in the State."

She shook her head without answering.

"Then I'll break you," he predicted a second time.  He drew a folded
slip of paper from his pocket and held it out to her.  "That's the
exchange slip," he said.  "It calls for three hundred odd head of mixed
stuff.  You can send yours over any time."  He turned his horse and
followed after the ranger while the girl joined Harris and Deane.

Harris had slipped the strap of his glasses and handed them to Deane
who had dismounted and was peering off at the spot Harris had pointed
out.  A few scattered shacks, showing as toy houses from the distance,
stood in the center of a broad open basin, sheltered on all sides by
the choppy mass of the Breaks.  A solid corral, almost a stockade,
stood near the buildings and a few white points indicated that a teepee
or two had been pitched along its edge.

"That's Arnold's stockade," Harris explained to Deane.  "Arnold was an
old-time rustler that finished at the end of a rope fifteen years ago.
Now all the drifters in the country stop over here if they want a place
to hole up."

Deane had been striving to fathom the attitude of a community where the
thieves were known as such, their headquarters a matter of common
knowledge, and yet allowed to carry on their trade.

"Can't the sheriff clean them out of there?" he asked.

"He could," Harris said.  "But no man will make a complaint.  They can
rustle every steer in the country and the losers are afraid to make a
report.  Every outfit is supposed to protect its own.  If Alden should
ride up to almost any ranch within a hundred miles and ask them if
they'd missed any stock in the last three years they'd shake their
heads and swear that they hadn't lost a hoof.  But the Three Bar has a
clean page; we're not afraid he'll get a line on us while we're having
him round up some one else.  The first time we get a scrap of real
evidence on any man we'll call Alden in."

"You told me the Three Bar herds have been cut in half," Deane said.
"How much evidence do you need?"

"It's like this:" Harris explained.  "We'd have to make a specific
charge against a few men--name them in connection with some raid.  That
nest down there is only a sort of stopping place.  There's twenty or so
that use it on and off.  Maybe the very men we'd name would be in
Coldriver or some other place and could prove it.  Even if they
couldn't we couldn't get a man to testify.  Then too, rustling is about
the hardest thing in the world to prove.  There's a dozen ways they can
work it.  I could catch some of them driving a bunch of Three Bar cows
toward the Idaho line.  They'd look up and see me and calmly ride on
past the cows.  They could say the bunch was just drifting ahead of
their horses--that they weren't driving them at all.  Who can prove a
case of rustling even if you see it, unless you actually catch one
altering a brand--which they wouldn't do anywhere within a hundred
miles of that brand's range."

"Then how will you ever convict one?" Deane asked.

"The only way to convict a rustler right now is to kill him and swear
that you run up on him changing a brand," Harris said.  "I expect
that's what we'll have to do."

Deane looked at the girl to determine how she met this suggestion.
Instead of the shiver of distaste which he rather expected her lips
were pressed tight.

"A little of that would help Slade too," she said.  "He told me just
now that he'd smash the Three Bar."

The man reflected that this sort of a life could not help but wear off
some of her natural fineness and harden her.

They followed the rims till they had cleared the Breaks, then angled
down to the foothills and headed for the Three Bar.  They held a steady
gait until a half hour after sunset and camped in the open near a tiny
spring.  Again Deane was impressed with the impropriety of the girl's
being out with two men who loved her and the thought was an ache that
remained with him.  It was a natural reaction,--the lifelong training
to guard against appearances which were open to criticism as
religiously as against the accomplished fact.

As they sat round the little fire the girl handed Harris the paper
Slade had given her.  It was a scrawled bill of sale calling for three
hundred odd head of Circle P cows, listed in the exact numbers of all
ages and sexes.  In return she would send him an exchange slip for the
same number of Three Bar stock.  This exchange system was one of
Slade's own devising, intended to eliminate the time and expense of
sending riders to scour adjacent ranges in search of drifted stock.
Each outfit exchanged slips based on the round-up tally with every
other brand and so could show bill of sale for off-brand stuff in their
beef shipments or for any rebrands on the range.

"This labor-saving device is Slade's trump card," Harris said.  "It
works all his way.  We couldn't turn in a false report.  But he has
three crews covering his range, each under a different wagon foreman
and no one of them wise to what the rest are doing.  It's only the
foremen that jot down the daily tallies and keep the final score.  Even
if they talked among themselves, why, they're all riding for Slade's
brand--and there you are."

Deane was regarding the penciled memorandum signed by Slade.

"Not a very impressive document," he observed.

Harris laughed at the other's evident disapproval of such a slipshod
method of property transfer.

"Not very," he agreed.  "But it's absolutely good.  You could borrow
money against that at the bank.  He doesn't get us that way but here's
how he does: He's mapped out a rebrand system.  His rebrand is Triangle
on the hip.  When he gets our exchange slip all he has to do is go on
his range and run the Triangle on the hip of the number of Three Bar
stock it calls for.  There are Three Bar cows ranging a hundred miles
from here, just as there's brands a hundred miles off whose stock turns
up here--with a Triangle on the hip.  Who's going to check Slade up?
It would take three crews to cover his range and tally the fresh Three
Bar rebrands of this one season--a few here and a few there.  He ships
trainloads of cows in a year.  There's some old rebrands in each lot,
say; maybe more than last year's exchange.  Well he simply has been
holding them over.  He can easy explain that.  It would break a small
outfit to hire enough hands to cover his range and check him up--and
he'd buy part of those.  The albino's men are petty-larceny bandits
compared with Slade."

Deane turned to the girl.

"Billie, why don't you get out of a game where everything is crooked--a
game of who can steal the most and every man for himself?" he asked.

"Why don't you fold your hands and give up your business the first
thing that goes wrong?" she countered.  "Instead of trying to remedy
it?"

"But you don't have to do it," he urged.

"Neither do you," she said.  "I've the same pride in the Three Bar that
you have in anything you've helped build up.  You'd fight all the
harder for one of your schemes that was hard-pressed--and so would I."

She turned to her teepee and ended the discussion, her pride a little
hurt that Deane should so little appreciate her work--and the spirit
that made her hold on instead of giving up.

That evening they rode up to the Three Bar just as Waddles announced
the evening meal.

"She's hot!" the big voice wailed.  "She's re-e-ed hot!"

The hands were gathering at the ranch, coming in from the range for a
frolic before the beef round-up should keep out for another month.
Deane's time was up and he had planned to leave on the following day.

"You can't do that," Harris said.  "Two more days for you.  I've given
orders not to let you off the place till after the dance at Brill's.
This is Tuesday and the big frolic will be staged Thursday night.  Then
you're free to go."

Deane shook his head and prepared to offer an excuse but Harris
smilingly refused to consider it.

"No use to try," he said.  "The boys won't let you go.  We've had you
out in the rain and now we'll try to make amends for it.  Billie, don't
let him leave the place.  I'll detail you as guard."

"You hear the orders," she said.  "You're stuck for two more days at
the Three Bar whether you like it or not."

"That settles it," Deane said.  "I do want to see that dance."

Horne strolled up to them as they reached the corral.

"Another of the wild bunch down," he said.  "Magill this time.  Got it
just the same as Barton did last week.  Shot from in front; one empty
shell in his gun.  The Breaks is getting to be a hard place to reside
in."

Again the girl felt that queer sensation of having expected this to
transpire, as if possibly she had helped plan the deed herself and had
forgotten it.  That night as she lay in bed her mind was concerned with
it and at times the solution seemed almost to reach the surface of her
consciousness.  Two belated riders came up the lane.  As they rode past
her open window she heard the name of Magill.

"That's two for Bangs," said a voice she knew for Moore's.

The evasive sense of familiarity, of being in some way identified with
the killings, was suddenly clear to her,--so clear that she marveled at
not having known at once.

Old Rile Foster was haunting the Breaks near Arnold's, imposing grim
and merciless justice on all those whom he suspected of having had a
hand in the finish of Bangs.




X

Harris had left the ranch an hour before daylight, his ride occasioned
by the reports of several of the men.  In the last three days each
couple that worked the range had found one or more of the new
white-face bulls shot down in their territory.  The evidence, as Harris
pieced the scraps together, indicated that a lone rider had made a
swift raid, riding for forty miles along the foot of the hills in a
single day, shooting down every Three Bar bull that crossed his trail.
A dozen dead animals marked his course.  A few more such raids and the
Three Bar calf crop would be extremely short the following spring.  The
near end of the foray had extended to within ten miles of the home
ranch and Harris had gone out to have a look at some of the nearer
victims.  He located two by the flights of meat-eating birds but range
stock had blotted out all possible signs.  He rode back to the corrals
in the early afternoon and joined Billie and Deane.

"Not a track," he said.  "We must expect more or less of that.  They'll
cut in on us wherever there's a chance."

As Harris left them the girl pointed out a horseman riding up the lane.

"The sheriff," she volunteered, and Deane noted an odd tightening of
her lips.

Alden dismounted and accosted Moore and Horne.  From their grinning
faces she knew that they were deliberately evading whatever questions
the sheriff might be asking.  Horne's voice reached them.

"Whoever it is seems to be doing a right neat job," he said.  "Why not
let him keep it up?"

The sheriff came over to Deane and the girl.

"Billie, I expect you can tell me who's doing this killing over in the
Breaks," he said.

She was unaccustomed to the easy dissimulation that was second nature
to the men of the whole countryside and her eyes fell under the
sheriff's steady gaze.  Deane was looking into her face and with a
shock he realized that she could pronounce the name of the assassin but
was deliberately withholding it.  She raised her head with a trace of
defiance.

"No.  I can't tell you," she said.

Deane expected to hear the sheriff's curt demand that she divulge the
name of the man he sought.  It must be easily apparent to him, as it
was to Deane, that she knew.  But Alden only dropped a hand on her
shoulder and stood looking down at her.

"All right, girl," he said mildly.  "I reckon you can't tell.  He can't
be such a rotten sort; if you refuse to turn him up."  He pushed back
his hat and smiled at Deane.  "We have to humor the womenfolks out
here," he explained, as he turned toward the bunk house.

Deane, already at a loss to grasp the mental attitude of the range
dwellers, was further mystified by a sheriff who spoke of humoring the
ladies in a matter pertaining to a double killing.

"Billie, you know!" he accused; "why wouldn't you tell?"

"Because there's a good chance that he's a friend of mine," she stated
simply.  "Those men had it coming to them and some way I can't feel any
regret."

"But if it was justified he should give himself up and stand trial," he
said.

"Then let him do it of his own accord," she said.  "I certainly won't."
The memory of little Bangs, his adoring gaze fastened on her face, was
uppermost in her mind and brought a lump to her throat.  "I hope he
gets them all."

"Billie, let me take you away from all this," Deane urged again.  "Let
me give you the things every girl should have--shut all the rough spots
out of your path.  I want to give you the things every girl needs to
round out her life--a home and love and shelter."

Shelter!  Slade's words recurred to her: "A soft front lawn to range
in."

"This is what I need," she said and waved an arm in a comprehensive
sweep.  Two hands, recently arrived, were unpacking before the bunk
house.  A third was shoeing a horse near the blacksmith shop.  The mule
teams were plowing in the flats.  A line of chap-clad men roosted as so
many crows on the top bar of the corral, mildly interested in the
performance of another who twirled a rope in a series of amazing
tricks.  "That's what I need; all that," she said.  "And you're asking
me to give it up."

"But it's not the life for a girl," he insisted.

"You've told me a hundred times that I was different from other girls.
But now you're wanting me to be like all the rest.  Where would the
difference be then?" she asked a little wistfully.  "Why can't you go
on liking me the way I am, instead of making me over?"

But Carlos Deane could not see.  It was his last evening alone with her
and after the meal they rode across the hills through the moonlight.
In that hour she was very near to doing as he wished.  If only he had
suggested that she come to him as soon as the Three Bar was once more a
prosperous brand; had only pointed out how she could spend months of
each year on the old home ranch,--then he might have won his point
without waiting.  But that is not the way of man toward woman.  His
plea was that she leave all this behind--for him.  And his hold was not
quite strong enough to induce her to give up every link of the life she
had loved for long years before Carlos Deane had been even a part of it.

"I can't tell you now," she said as they rode back to the corrals.
"Not now.  It would take something out of me--the vital part--if I had
to leave the old Three Bar in the shape it's in today.  It's sort of
like deserting a crippled child."

The next day her stand was unaltered and in the evening, when the whole
Three Bar personnel swung to their saddles and headed for the frolic at
Brill's, Deane had been unable to gain her promise.  His luggage had
been sent ahead in a buckboard, for the dance was to be an all-night
affair and he would leave on the morning stage.

There were but few horses at the hitch rails when they reached the post
but a dozen voices raised in song drifted faintly to their ears and
apprised them of the fact that other arrivals were not far behind.  As
the Three Bar girl entered at the head of her men she saw Bentley and
Carpenter leaning against the bar, well toward the rear of the room.

Within the last week she had heard that Carp, after being let off by
Harris, had started up a brand of his own down in Slade's range.
Harris's remarks about Slade's mode of acquiring new brands recurred to
her,--that he fostered some small outfit for a few seasons, then bought
it out.  As the men scattered she commented on this to Harris.  The
Three Bar foreman nodded.

"Likely the same old move," he said.  "I've been trying to get a line
on Carp.  He started off with a bill of sale from Slade for a hundred
head of Three Bar rebrands.  But it didn't come direct from Slade at
that.  Morrow engineered the deal.  Said he came into the paper for two
years' back pay from Slade; last year and the one before--had figured
to start up for himself and was to draw his pay in cows.  The paper is
dated at the time Morrow quit Slade last year.  What can we prove wrong
with that?  Morrow simply sells the paper to Carp.  Of course it's a
plant.  All Carp has to do is to run Slade's Triangle on the hips of
any number of Three Bar she-stock.  Like I told you, there's no way to
check Slade up on the number of our rebrands.  If Carp gets caught it's
his own hard luck."

A dozen men from the Halfmoon D swarmed in the door.  Mrs. McVey, the
owner's wife, stationed herself in one corner with the Three Bar girl
while the men gravitated to the bar.

"I'll take Deane in tow for a while," Harris said.  "And get him
acquainted with folks."  He led Deane to the bar and gave him scraps of
the history of various neighbors as they arrived.

Harper's men came in, the albino standing half a head taller than any
other on the floor, and they mingled with the rest as if their records
were the most immaculate of the lot.  Two of Slade's foremen arrived
with their families.  The wife of one was lean and bent, worn from
years of drudgery.  The other was an ample, red-cheeked woman of great
self-confidence, her favorite pose that of planting both hands on her
hips, elbows outspread, and nodding vigorously to emphasize her speech.

Bart Epperson, a trapper from far back in the hills, had brought his
family to the frolic.  Mrs. Epperson was a tiny, meek woman who had but
little to say.  Her two daughters, in their late teens, had glossy
black hair, high cheek bones and faint olive tinge of skin which
betrayed a trace of Indian ancestry.

Lafe Brandon came at the head of his tribe.  Ma Brandon, white-haired
and motherly and respected by all, was possessed of a queer past known
to the whole community.  Forty years before Lafe Brandon had stopped at
a sod hut on the Republican and found a girl wife with both eyes
discolored from blows of her heavy-handed spouse.  Lafe had left the
bearded ruffian unconscious, with a broken nose and three fractured
ribs, and had ridden off with the girl.  Five sons and a daughter had
been born to them.  Two years before, Kit Brandon, the daughter, had
been wed to a merchant in Coldriver.  The traveling parson who married
them heard of the parents' queer case, learned that Ma Brandon's former
mate was long since dead, and spoke earnestly to the pair.  Both were
willing to do anything which might prove of future benefit to Kit.  The
conference resulted in the old couple's standing before the parson and
having the marriage service performed for them an hour before a like
rite was rendered for the daughter.

Harris laughed as he informed Deane of this bit of history.

"They both considered it rather an unnecessary fuss," he said.  "And
it's rumored that they had their first quarrel of a lifetime on the way
home from the service."

Two of the sons were married and living at the home ranch.  They came
to the dance with the rest of the family.  Lou Brandon's wife, Dolly,
was a former dance-hall girl of Coldriver, and Al Brandon's better
half, Belle, was the daughter of a Utah cowman.

An extra stage-load rolled in from Coldriver and four couples joined
the throng.

"Ex-school-teachers," Harris informed.  "They marry them so fast that
it's hard to keep one on the job instructing the rising generation in
the Coldriver school."

Deane shrank from the thought of the Three Bar girl in such a mixture.
Someway she seemed many shades finer than the rest.

"It couldn't be otherwise," Harris said, when Deane expressed this
thought.  "She was raised at the knee of one of the finest women in the
world.  I remember her mother myself--a little; and I've heard my own
mother sing the praises of Elizabeth Warren a thousand times."

The albino interrupted them.

"Cal--how come?" he greeted.  The three men conversed in the most
casual, friendly fashion, as if there had never been a hint of friction
between Harris and Harper in the past.

A great voice rose above the buzz of conversation, filling the big room
to the very rafters.

"Choose your pardners for the dance!" Waddles bellowed from the
makeshift platform at one end of the room.  "Go get your ga-a-als!"

Deane moved across to the Three Bar girl.  There was a general rush for
the side opposite the bar where the ladies had gathered.  Couples
squared off for the Virginia reel, the shortage of ladies rectified by
a handkerchief tied on the arm of many a chap-clad youth to signify
that he was, for the moment, a girl.  Waddles picked his guitar; two
fiddles broke into "Turkey in the Straw" and the dance was on with
Waddles calling the turns.

All through the room they shuffled and bowed, whirled partners, locked
elbows and swung, the shriek of fiddles and scrape of feet punctuated
by the caller's boom.

"Grab your gals for the grand right an' left!" the big voice wailed.
"Swing, rattle and roar!"  "Clutch all partners for a once and a half!"
"Swing your gals and swing 'em high!"  "Prance, scuffle and scrape!"

Slade came in alone as the first dance was ended.

A croupier and lookout, imported from Coldriver for the event, opened
Brill's roulette layout in one corner, a game he usually operated
himself on the occasions when his patrons chose to try their fortune
against the bank.  The rattle of chips, the whir of the ivory ball and
the professional chant of lookout and croupier sounded between dances.

"Single ought in the green," the croupier droned.

"Single ought in the green," the lookout echoed.  "The pea-green shade
is the bank's per cent.  The house wins and the gamblers lose.  Place
your bets for another turn."

"She's off," the croupier chanted.  "Off again on the giddy whirl.  The
little ivory ball--she spins!"

"Ten in the black," the croupier called.  "Ten in the black," the
lookout seconded.  "The black pays and the red falls off; the even
beats the odd."

The full enjoyment of a novel scene was spoiled for Deane by the
sickening realization that the Three Bar girl was part of it, rubbing
elbows with the nondescript throng.  He looked again at Harper, the
rustler chief; at Slade, with his peculiar turtle-like face, Slade the
cattle king--the killer.  Billie Warren stood between the two Epperson
girls whose faces betrayed the taint of Indian blood, an arm about the
shoulders of each of them.  The sheriff who had said that men must
humor womenfolks was leaning against the bar.  Deane turned to Harris
but found him looking off across the room.  He turned his own eyes that
way and glimpsed a dark man with an overlong, thin face and a set bleak
stare.  Morrow had just come in.

Five minutes later Harris stepped out the back door and Deane followed
him.  At the sound of a footfall behind him Harris whirled on his heel
and when he confronted Deane the dim light from the door glinted on
something in his hand.

"Sho," Harris deprecated.  "I'm getting spooky.  I thought it was some
one else."  He slipped the gun back in its holster.  "There's one or
two that would like right well to run across me from behind."

"I followed you out to tell you it was decent of you to insist that I
stay over a few days," Deane said.  "It was a white thing to do,
considering that we both want the same thing."

"We both want her to have what's best for her," Harris said.  "And I
don't know as she could do any better than to take up with you."

"It may sound rather trite--coming after that," Deane said.  "But
anyway, I'll have to say that I feel the same way about you."

"Then, if we're both right in our estimates, why she can't go very far
wrong, either way she turns," Harris said.  "So I reckon we're both
content."

Harris moved on and motioned Deane to accompany him.

"I thought I glimpsed a man I knew a few minutes back," Harris said.
"I'd like right well to have a talk with him."

They wandered completely round the post and looked in the shadows of
the outbuildings but could find no trace of life.

"Likely I was mistaken," Harris said at last.  "I saw a face just
outside the door.  He was more or less on my mind--the party I thought
it was.  Some one else I expect, and he's gone inside."

They returned to the hall.  Morrow stood with two Halfmoon D men at the
end of the bar.  Harris motioned him aside and Morrow withdrew from the
others.

"This is pretty far north for you, Morrow," Harris suggested.

"Is there any one restricting my range?" Morrow demanded.  "If there is
I'd like to know."

"Then I'll tell you," Harris answered.  "The road is open--as long as
you keep on the road.  Any time you stray a foot off the beaten trail
you're on the Three Bar range.  I don't figure to get gunned up from
the brush more than once by the same man.  Every Three Bar boy has
orders to shoot you down on sight any time you heave in view anywhere
within twenty miles of the Three Bar; so I wouldn't stray off the
main-traveled road any time you're going through."

Lanky Evans had detached himself from a group and Morrow looked up to
find the tall man standing at his shoulder.

"So you hunt in pairs," Morrow remarked.

"And later in packs," Lanky returned.  "Why don't you ever come up and
visit us?  Every time I'm riding north I keep looking back, expecting
to see you come cantering up from the south.  Harris been commenting
about the little dead-line we've drawn on you?"

"What's the object of all this conversation?" Morrow flared.  "If
you've got anything to say to me why get it over with."

"Nothing special," Evans said.  "I just thought maybe I could goad you
into being imprudent enough to come up our way--which I'm sure hoping
to observe you north of the line and somewhere within a thousand yards."

Evans turned away and Morrow rejoined the two men he had left at the
bar.  Deane looked about him.  Apparently no one had noticed the little
by-play.

"Evans didn't exactly mean quite all of that," Harris explained.  "Of
course if Morrow does come up our way Lanky would prefer to see him
first--but he would rather he'd keep away.  He staged that little talk
as a safeguard for me.  If Morrow acquires the idea that several folks
are anxious to see him up there, he's apt to be real cautious how he
prowls round the Three Bar neighborhood looking for me."

Deane looked again at Morrow and saw that Moore and Horne had drawn him
aside from the rest.  The two Three Bar men were grinning and Morrow's
face was set and scowling.

"The boys must have framed it up among themselves," Harris said.
"That's the third pair I've seen conversing with him.  It's doubtful
whether Morrow is deriving much pleasure out of the dance."

Deane crossed over to Billie.  The music started but she shook her head
as he would have led her to the floor.

"Sit down.  I want to talk with you.  Long time no see 'um after
to-night," she said.  "It'll be daylight soon and I've a long tale to
tell."

As the others danced she gave him a dozen messages to impart to various
friends.

"Tell Judge Colton that Three Bar stock is rising," she said.  "And
that as soon as things are all smoothed out, he can expect me for a
boarder.  I'm going to make him one nice long visit."

Practically all of her time away from the Three Bar had been spent with
Judge Colton's family and she was accepted as part of the household.
It was there she had met Deane and those others to whom her messages
were sent.

Through an opening in the dancing throng Deane suddenly had a clear
view of the open rear door--one brief glimpse before the crowd closed
once more and shut off his view.  He had an idea that he had seen a
face, hazy and indistinct, a few feet outside the door.  He wondered if
it could be the friend for whom Harris had searched.

"Make the visit soon, Billie," he urged.  "It's been a long month since
we've had you with us.  We thought maybe you'd deserted us back there.
How soon will this visit start--and how long will it last?"

"It will start as soon as the Three Bar doesn't need me," she said.
"And last a long time."

Again a lane opened through the crowd, affording a view of the door.
Deane saw the face outside in the night, and a foot or more below if
some bright object glinted in the dim light which filtered through.
The music ceased and the chant of the roulette croupier began, mingling
with the smooth purr of the ivory ball.  There came a sudden hush from
the vicinity of the rear door, a hush that spread rapidly throughout
the room, so swift are the perceptions of a frontier gathering.

Old Rile Foster stood just inside, his gun half-raised before him.
Canfield and Lang stood together in the center of the floor, apart from
the rest and with no others in line beyond them.  Rile tossed a boot
heel on to the floor and as it rolled toward the two men he shot
Canfield through the chest.  Lang's gun crashed almost with his own.
Rile's knees sagged under him and he pitched face down on the floor,
his arms sprawled out before him.

The surge of the crowd, pressing back out of line, threw the albino on
the edge of it, his big form towering alone.

The old man raised his head from the floor and crooked his wrist with
the last of his ebbing strength.

"Four for Bangs," he said, and shot Harper between the eyes.




XI

The two loggers had finished cutting their quota of timber for the
homestead cabins and the white peeled logs lay piled and ready to be
snaked down to the Three Bar on the first heavy snows of fall.  The
choppers had transferred their operations to the lower broken slopes
which they scoured for the scattered cedars of the foothills, cutting
them for fence posts and piling them in spots accessible to the wagons
to be hauled whenever the mule teams could be spared.

The acreage of plowed ground increased day by day and would continue
till frost claimed the ground.  As soon as the brush was burnt the mule
teams pulled heavy log drags across the field, pulverizing the lumps
and leveling inequalities of the surface.

Evans had been sent out as foreman of the beef round-up while Harris
remained behind to direct the operations at the ranch.  The details of
the new work were unfamiliar ones for the girl and she was entirely
absorbed in learning the reasons for every move; so much engrossed, in
fact, that she had not left the Three Bar during the month which had
elapsed since the dance at Brill's.  A few days before Evans was due
with the beef herd she rode Papoose away from the ranch, intending to
make a long-deferred visit to the Brandons.

After covering two-thirds of the distance along the foot of the hills
to the V L she saw a rider dip over a ridge two miles away.  She
unslung Harris's glasses and dismounted to watch for his reappearance.
When he came again into her field of view another man was with him and
they were driving a few head of cows before them.  They angled into a
valley that led off to the south, dropping into it some three miles
from her.

She mounted Papoose and headed him on a parallel course, keeping well
out of sight behind the intervening waves of ground.  After holding her
direction at a stiff lope till satisfied that she had passed the men
she angled across to intersect their course.

As Papoose topped a low hogback that flanked the valley she saw the men
riding toward her down the bottoms, driving twenty or more head of
cows.  One of the horses threw up his head, his ears pricked sharply
toward her, and the swift upward tilt of the rider's hat, as swiftly
lowered, informed her that she had been sighted.  The other man did not
look up.  They lifted their horses from a walk to a stiff trot and
veered past the cows, then looked up as if just aware of her approach,
and waited for her.  The men were Bentley and Carp.

Bentley greeted her cheerily.  Carp nodded without a word.

"What are you two doing up here?" she demanded without parley.

"I repped with the Three Bar wagon and Carp worked with you for a spell
so we sort of know the range," Bentley explained.  "Slade sent us up to
drift any strays back south."

"Those you were driving are Three Bar stuff--every hoof," she said.
"All two-year-old she-stock."

Bentley turned and regarded the little herd they had just passed.

"Them?  Sho--we wasn't driving them," Bentley denied easily.  "They
just drifted ahead of us as we rode down the bottoms.  A cow critter
will always move on ahead of a man.  We rode on past 'em as soon as we
decided to amble along."

She knew that they were on safe ground.  Any cow would drift on before
a horseman.

"The only way to convict a man on a case like this is to shoot him out
of the saddle before he has a chance to pass the cows," she said.
"That's what will happen to the next Slade rider that gets noticed with
any Three Bar cows moving out in front of him and headed south.  You
can carry that word to Slade."

She whirled Papoose and headed back for the ranch, the intended visit
to the Brandons postponed.  Harris was piling brush in the lower field
when she arrived and she informed him of the act of the two men.

"I wouldn't put it past Carp," he said.  "But I hadn't sized Bentley up
just that way.  It's hard to tell.  If Carp shows up here again we'll
make him a visit in the middle of the night--and he won't trouble us
much after that."

"We'd better pay Slade a night visit too," she said.  Her feelings
toward Slade had undergone a complete revulsion.  She knew beyond a
doubt that he had been responsible for the raid on Three Bar bulls.
The wild bunch would have had no object in such a foray.  Figuring it
from any angle Slade was the only one man who could possibly derive any
benefit from that.  She had come to see that Slade was fighting with
his back to the wall,--that he had run his course and come to the end
of it if squatters secured a start in his range, and he considered the
act of the Three Bar the opening wedge which would throw open the way
for the nesters to crowd him out.

The evening of the following day the beef herd trailed into the lower
end of the Three Bar valley and bedded for the night.  In the morning
the trail herd was headed for the railroad under a full crew, for
Harris had kept all hands on the job.

There was none of the fast and varied work of the round-up; the
trail-herding of beef to market seeming a slow and monotonous procedure
in comparison.  The cows were drifted slowly south, well spread out and
grazing as they moved.  Harris detailed two men to ride the "points,"
the two forward extremities of the herd; two others rode the "drags,"
holding to either flank of the rear end of the drive.  In choppy
country he detailed a third pair to skirt the middle flanks and prevent
leakage up any feathering coulees.

The chuck wagon followed a mile behind and the horse wrangler brought
up the rear, bringing the remuda, much depleted in numbers from full
round-up strength, for it now carried but three extra horses for each
man.

Three hours out from the Three Bar some of the cows showed a
disposition to rest and calmly bedded down; the forward drift of the
herd was arrested.  After a prolonged rest they rose in scattering
groups to feed and once more they were moved slowly to the south.  The
men not on active duty with the herd rode in knots and whiled away the
time as best they could.  It was the habit to cover less than twenty
miles a day with the beef herd as any strenuous exertion would reduce
the weight of the grass-fattened steers.

The drove was a nondescript lot.  In addition to the steers and older
cows that comprised every trail herd, the off-color she-stock had been
carefully culled from the range.

Harris pointed to the bunch.

"Look that assortment over well, Billie," he advised.  "A few seasons
more, with fair luck, and you won't see one of these rainbow droves
with every color from brindle to strawberry roan; none of those
humpbacked runts; they'll all be gone.  That's almost the last mongrel
herd that will ever wear your brand.  They'll run better every year
until we have all big flat-backed beef stock--a straight white-face
run."

The third morning out from the home ranch broke stormy.  Gray, leaden
skies and low scudding, drab clouds drifted over the foothills and
obscured the view of the peaks.  A nasty drizzle dampened the face of
the world and laid its clammy touch on all living things.  This
condition prevailed all through the day and shortly after the cows had
been milled and bedded for the night the drizzle turned to rain, now
falling straight and soft, again in fierce squalls whipped by varying
shifts of wind.  A saddled night horse was picketed for every man.  The
wagon stood close under a hill while the herd was bedded on a broad
flat at the mouth of a valley.

The men lay in the open, their bed-tarps folded to shed as much
moisture as possible.  The soggy patter of the rain on her teepee
lulled the girl to sleep but she was frequently roused.  A dull
muttering materialized suddenly into a sharp thunderstorm and the
canvas walls of her teepee were almost continuously illuminated by
successive flashes.  The picketed horses fretted and stamped.  Between
peals she heard the voices of the night guards singing to soothe their
restless charges on the bed ground.  One of the men shifted his bed
roll from a gathering puddle to some higher point of ground.

She dropped to sleep again but was roused by voices outside as the
guards changed shifts and she estimated that it must be near morning,
the fourth change of guards.

The sounds ceased as the men who had just been relieved turned in for
their sleep.  A horse neighed shrilly within a few yards of her teepee.
Another took it up and an answer sounded from the flats.  There was a
crash of pistol shots, a rumble of hoofs and the instant command of
Harris.

"Roll out!  Roll out!" he called.  "Saddles!  On your horses."

Even as he shouted there came the swish of wet canvas as the men
tumbled from their bed rolls, the imprecations of the suddenly
awakened.  Billie thrust her head from the teepee flap, the water
cascading down her neck.  The successive flashes showed the men tugging
desperately at boots and chaps, their grotesque, froglike leaps for
their tethered mounts.  She saw Harris, buckling his belt as he ran,
and the next flash showed him vaulting to Calico's back.

The thunder of hoofs drew her eyes to the bed ground where a black mass
surged, then bore off up the valley.  A scattered line of riders bore
down on the herd, two ghostly apparitions among them throwing the cows
into a panic of fear.  She knew these for riders flapping yellow
slickers in the wind.  As the light faded she saw three horizontal red
streaks cut the obscurity and knew that one of her guards was in the
midst of the rustlers, doing his single-handed best.  The red splashes
of answering shots showed on all sides of him.  She tugged on her chaps
and boots, slipped Papoose's picket rope and vaulted to his back.

The scene was once more illuminated as she rode from the wagon.  A big
pinto horse was strung out and running his best, the other Three Bar
men pounding after him.  A riderless horse circled in the flat, a dark
shape sprawled near him, and she wondered which one of her men had gone
down.  A knot of horsemen were turning up an opening gulch on the far
side of the valley.  A half-dozen Three Bar riders veered their horses
for the spot.  Harris turned in his saddle and his voice reached her
above the tumult.

"Let 'em go!" he shouted.  "Let 'em go!  Hold the herd!"

Far off on the opposite side she made out a lone horseman riding at a
full run along the sidehill above the cows as he made a supreme effort
to reach the head of the run.  The Three Bar men split and streamed up
both sides of the bottoms.  The flashes had ceased except for brief,
quivering plays of less than a second's duration.  She hung her spurs
into Papoose and trusted to his footwork.  The swift little horse
passed one rider, then another.  There were only the rumble of hoofs
and the crazed bawling of cows to guide her as she drew near the rear
of the herd.  A half-flare showed the pinto a bare twenty yards ahead,
with Harris putting him at the slope to pass the cows.  She swung her
own horse after him and she felt the frequent skid of his feet on the
treacherous sidehill.  Papoose braced on his haunches and slid down a
precipitous bank, buckled up the far side and down again, then swooped
across a long flat bench.  Three times she felt the heaving plunge and
jar as the little horse skimmed over cut-bank coulees and washes which
her own eyes could not see in the dripping velvet black.

From the sounds below she knew they were well up on the flanks of the
run and nearing the peak.  The stampede seemed slowing.  A long,
wavering flash revealed Harris a dozen jumps ahead.  Papoose followed
the paint-horse as Harris put Calico down the slippery sidehill and
lifted him round the point of the herd.  In the same flash Billie had
seen two slickers out before the peaks of the run, flapping weirdly in
the faces of the foremost cows.  This accounted for the slowing-up she
had sensed.  Two of her men were before them and she wondered how this
had come to pass.

The lightning-play broke forth once more.  She saw two riders swinging
round the opposite point.  The two slickers were working in the center.
Harris's gun flashed six times.  She jerked her own and rolled it.  The
two riders who had just rounded the far point joined in.  Cows in the
front ranks held back from this fearsome commotion out in front.
Others, driven by the pressure behind, forged past them, only to hold
back in their turn as the guns flashed before their eyes.

The storm ceased as suddenly as it had begun and for two miles she rode
in inky darkness.  The last mile was slower.  It was showing gray in
the east and the night run had spent its force.  The herd stopped and
the cows gazed stupidly about, standing with drooping heads and heaving
sides.  Three Bar men showed on both flanks and in the rear.  They had
held the drove intact and prevented its splitting up in detachments and
scattering through the night.

Horne and Moore rode over to them and for the first time the girl
noticed that the two men who had wielded slickers out in front of the
run were nowhere to be seen.

"Who was the pair out ahead?" Moore asked.  "And what swallowed 'em up?"

Harris shook his head.

"Billie and I were the first to make the front," he said.

"Not any," Moore stated positively.  "I saw 'em five minutes before you
two swung round the point.  I was wondering who had outrode the
paint-horse and Billie's little nag."

Moore's left side was plastered with mud, as was the left side of his
mount.

"I was on guard and halfway up the far side," he said.  "Split Ear took
a header with me and delayed me some."

He pointed to the mud crusted on his clothes.  Billie knew that he was
the lone rider she had seen on the flanks of the herd as she rode away
from the wagon.  The fall accounted for their Founding the point ahead
of him.  Moore was looking off across the country.

"Do you mean to tell me you didn't see those two slickers flapping out
in front?" he demanded.

"I confess I didn't observe any," Harris said.  "You're getting spooky,
Moore.  A couple of white cows, likely, out ahead of the rest."

Moore regarded him curiously.

"Maybe that's so," he said.  "Waving their tails in the air, sort of."
He grinned and turned his horse to head back a bunch that had drifted
out of the herd.

"The boys made a nice ride," Harris said to Horne.  "You float round
from one to the next and tell 'em we'll soon have a feed.  I'll ride
back and send the wagon up."

Billie rode with him as he skirted the herd and started on the return
trip.  Her mind was occupied with the two riders who had slowed the run
and disappeared.  There had been something familiar about them, for
every man has his individual way of sitting a saddle as he has an
individuality of gait when on foot.  As she had viewed them in the
lightning's flash they had closely resembled Bentley and Carp.  But she
decided that this resemblance had been but a fancied one, suggested by
the fact that the two men had been much on her mind of late.

"We're not hurt bad," Harris said.  "The boys held them bunched in good
shape.  Maybe forty or so head down with broken legs--and ten pounds of
fat apiece run off the rest."

A hatred of Slade was growing within her.  Here, too, was a case where
no other would benefit by the senseless stampede.  If the beef herd
could be broken up it would cause a delay to round it up in a strange
range with the certainty of many cows being missed,--a case of
weakening the Three Bar.

She had been so absorbed in learning the details of the new work, so
elated at its progress, that she had come to believe in its ultimate
success.  And they had been unmolested for so long a time.  Then had
come the wanton slaughter of Three Bar bulls and now the stampede of
the trail herd.  It was conclusive proof that Slade had abandoned his
former wearing-down process as too slow and was out to crush the Three
Bar in the speediest possible way and through any available means.

There rose in her a flare of resentment against her neighbors, the
Brandons of the V L and the McVeys of the Halfmoon D.  Both had taken
out papers on the best land in their respective localities as soon as
forewarned of her intended move.  Ostensibly this was done merely as a
protection against outsiders but in reality they were hoping that she
would win out, in which case they would go through with their filings
and prove up.  But neither outfit would come out in the open and give
her their support, preferring to hold aloof and benefit by her success
if it so transpired and lose nothing themselves if she should
fail--part of the policy of every man for himself--in the meantime
letting her brand bear the brunt of the fight.

Harris, too, was pondering over Slade's change of tactics.  He felt
assured that Slade's own men had not participated in starting the run.
Slade would not let any considerable number of his boys know that much
about him.  Some of Lang's men had undoubtedly been hired to stampede
the Three Bar herd.

"The very fact that Slade is so bald with it is proof that he sees the
necessity of crowding us fast," Harris said.  "If we get too big a
start he's blown up--and he hasn't had anything to work on but plowed
ground.  He's out now to worry us at odd ends.  We can expect a steady
run of mishaps now, for he'll work fast--but we'll win out in the end."

She nodded a little wearily for she knew that with Slade throwing all
his forces against her the Three Bar would be hard pressed.  In
addition to this worry her mind was concerned with the riderless horse
she had seen as she rode away from the wagon, the huddled figure
sprawled in the flat.  Every Three Bar rider was a friend and she
hesitated to hear which one of her men had gone down in the raid.

"Who was it?" she asked at last, and Harris divined that she was
harking back to the fallen night guard who had tried to head the
raiders alone.

"I've been trying not to think about that," he said.  "Lanky was a good
pal of mine.  I saw him go down, but I couldn't stop right then."

Evans occupied a place in her regard that was perhaps a notch higher
than that of any other of the crew.

"Can't we prove anything on Slade--do anything to stop him?" she
demanded.  "If they've killed Lanky, I'll perjure myself if it's the
only way.  I'll have Alden pick him up and I'll swear I saw him do the
thing himself.  He's as guilty as if he actually had."

"I've a bait or two out for Slade," Harris said.  "But that way may
prove too slow.  If Lanky's gone under, I expect I'll have to pick a
quarrel with Slade and hurry things along."

"Don't you!" she objected.  For all of her confidence in Harris's
efficiency in most respects, her implicit belief in his courage, she
could not forget the awkward swing of his gun and she had a swift
vision of him facing Slade without a chance.

A crash of wagon wheels and the voice of Waddles admonishing the horses
interrupted her.  The chuck wagon rolled round a bend as the big cook
followed the trail of the night run.  Every bed had been rolled and
loaded to eliminate the necessity of a return.  The remuda trailed
behind the wagon under the combined supervision of the nighthawk and
the wrangler.

"How is Lanky?" was Harris's first query.

Waddles jerked a thumb over his shoulder.  Evans, shot once through the
arm and a second time through the shoulder, reclined on the
triple-thickness bed roll the cook had spread for him on the floor of
the wagon.

"Only nicked--clean holes and no bones," Lanky said.  "I'll be all
right as soon as Waddles will let me out of this chariot and I get to
riding comfortable on a horse."

"He'll come round fine in a few days if we can keep him offen a horse
and riding comfortable in the wagon," Waddles countered.  "I've give
him orders to that effect."

Evans groaned.

"He drives over places I wouldn't cross afoot," he complained.  "Did
you hold the run?"

Reassured on this point he flattened out on his pallet and the wagon
held on toward the herd.

The weary cows were held over for a day of rest.  The night guards were
doubled and this precaution was maintained during the succeeding two
stops before reaching the shipping point.

Harris and Billie sat on the top rail of the loading chute while the
last few Three Bar steers were being prodded on board the cars.

Harris slipped from his perch and motioned to Moore and Horne.

"You can go up town now and take on a few drinks.  Hunt up an old
friend or two and wag your chins.  Make it right secretive and
confidential and make each one promise faithful not to breathe a
syllable to another living soul.  That way the news is sure to travel
rapid."

He returned to the girl as the stock train pulled out.  Two hands waved
a joyous farewell from the top of the cars, delighted at the prospect
of a trip to market with the steers.

"I don't pretend to regret that old Rile played even for Bang's,"
Harris said.  "But I wish he'd sorted out some one else in the albino's
place.  It was bad business for the Three Bar when Harper went down."

"He was the head of the gang," she said.  "The worst of the lot."

"And for that reason he was able to hold them down," Harris explained.
"It was some of the outfit from over in the Breaks that stampeded us.
Slade wouldn't let his own boys know that much about him so he'd hire
Lang.  Harper had brains.  He wouldn't have gone in for that.  Lang has
thrown in against us.  He's all bulk and no brains and as savage as an
Apache buck.  He'll hang himself in the end but in the interim he may
hand us considerable grief."




XII

The wild riders of the Breaks no longer mingled with other men with the
same freedom as of old.  Some fifteen men throughout the country felt
themselves marked and set apart from others.  Friends no longer
fraternized with them at the bars when they rode into the towns.  Doors
which had always been open in the past were now opened furtively if at
all.  Lukewarm adherents fell away from them and avoided them even more
studiously than the rest.  This swift transition had sprung apparently
from no more than a whisper, a murderous rumor which persisted in the
face of flat denials issued from its supposititious source.

All through the range and as far south as the railroad it was current
gossip that the Three Bar would pay a thousand dollars reward for each
of fifteen men, a fast saddle horse thrown in and no questions asked.
The men were named, and if the rumor was based on truth it was
virtually placing a bounty on the scalps of certain men the same as the
State paid bounty on the scalps of wolves,--except that it was without
the sanction of the law.

This backfire rumor had established a definite line with fifteen men
outside, conspicuous and alone, and those who had once followed the
hazy middle ground of semi-lawlessness with perfect security now
hastened to become solid citizens whose every act would stand the
light; for the whispers seemed all-embracing and it was intimated that
new names would be added to the original list to include those who
fraternized with the ones outside the pale.

Those not branded by this alleged bounty system were quick to grasp the
beautiful simplicity of it all.  Some recalled that a similar rumor,
supposed to have originated with old Con Ristine, had wiped out the
wild bunch that preyed on the Nations Cow-trail--that the Gallatin
clean-up had resulted from a like report which Al Moody was reported to
have launched.

It had the effect of causing the men so branded to view all others with
suspicion, as possible aspirants out to collect the bounty on their
heads.  It sowed distrust among their own ranks for there was always
the chance that one, in seeking safety for himself, might collect the
blood-money posted for another.  The reference to the fast saddle horse
was guarantee that no questions would be asked before the price was
paid and no questions answered after the recipient had ridden away from
the Three Bar with his spoils.

Yet, if the thing were true, it was the most flagrant violation of the
law ever launched, even in the Coldriver Strip where transgression was
the rule.  For the branded men were not wanted on any charge.  It was
merely the wholesale posting of rewards for the lives of some fifteen
citizens whose standing in the community was legally the same as the
rest,--prize money offered by an individual concern for its enemies
without reference to the law.  On every possible occasion Harris flatly
denied that there was a shred of truth in the report.  Al Moody, years
before, had also denied his responsibility for the rumors on the
Gallatin range; and Con Ristine had repudiated all knowledge of the
whispers that traveled the Nations Trail.  But in each case these very
natural denials had served only to strengthen men's belief in the truth
of the reports; and inevitably they had established a hard line that
cut off the men so named from the rest of the countryside.

Harris knew that his own life was forfeit any time he chanced to ride
alone.  He had not a doubt but that Slade had put a price on his head
and that perhaps a dozen men were patiently waiting for a chance at
him.  Any man whose name appeared on the black list which he was
supposed to have sponsored would overlook no opportunity to retaliate
in kind.  In addition to this there was always the chance of a swift
raid on the men who had filed their homestead rights in the valley.

As a consequence Harris had taken every possible precaution.  Winter
had claimed the range and hardened the ground with frost.  The full
force of Three Bar hands had been kept on the pay roll instead of being
let off immediately after the beef was shipped.  These riders were
stationed in line camps out on the range, their ostensible purpose
being to hold all Three Bar cows close to the home ranch but in reality
they served two ends, acting as a cordon of guards as well.  The two
woodcutters were camped in the edge of the hills behind the ranch and
daily patrolled the drifts that now lay deep in the timber for signs of
skulkers who might have slipped down from behind and stationed
themselves on some point overlooking the corrals.

Three times in as many weeks strangers drifting in from other
localities stopped in Coldriver and profanely reported the fact that
for no reason whatever, while passing through the Three Bar range, they
had been held up and forced to state their business in that
neighborhood.

Hostilities had ceased.  The Three Bar girl had anticipated a series of
raids against the cows wearing her brand, swift forays in isolated
points of her range, but no stock losses were reported.  On the surface
it appeared that Slade had given up all thought of harassing the Three
Bar.  But the girl had come to know Slade.  He would never recede from
his former stand.  She noted that Harris's vigilance was never for an
instant relaxed and it was gradually impressed upon her that the
cessation of petty annoyances held more of menace than of assurance.
Slade had seen that the Three Bar was not to be discouraged in its
course and he now waited for an opportunity to launch a blow that would
cripple, striking simultaneously at every exposed point and delaying
only for a propitious time.  In the face of continued immunity she was
filled with a growing conviction of impending trouble.

Christmas had found the range covered with a fresh tracking snow which
precluded possibility of a raid and all hands had been summoned to the
home ranch for a two-day rest.  Harris knew that cowhands, no matter
how loyal to the brand that pays them, are a restless lot and must have
their periodical fling to break the monotony of lonely days; so he had
provided food and drink in abundance.  The frolic was over and the
hands back on the range.  Harris sat with Billie before her fire.

"They'll be satisfied for another two months," he said.  "Then we'll
have to call them in for another spree."

This evening conference before the fire had come to be a nightly
occurrence.  Together they went over the details of the work
accomplished during the day and mapped out those for the next.  From
outside came the crunch of hoofs and the screech of logs on the frozen
trail as the last mule team came down with its load.

Most of the logs had been skidded down and the men now worked in pairs,
erecting the cabins on each filing.  The cedar posts had been hauled
and strung out along the prospective fence lines.  The wagons, under
heavy guard, had made two trips to the railroad to freight in more
implements and supplies.  Thousands of pounds of seed oats and alfalfa
seed were stored at the Three Bar along with sixty hundred of cement.

"Another two months and the cabins will be roofed and finished," Harris
said.  "Then we'll be through till the frost is out of the ground.
We'll start building fence as soon as you can sink a post hole; and
we'll have time to break out another two hundred acres of ground before
time to seed it down."

The girl nodded without comment, content to leave him to his thoughts,
her mind pleasantly occupied with her own.  For long her evenings had
been lonely but now she had come to look forward to the conferences
before the blazing logs.  She had made no attempt to analyze the
reasons for the new contentment which had transformed her evenings,
formerly periods of drab reflections, into the most pleasant portion of
each day.

Harris gazed about the familiar room and wondered what the future held
out to him if he should be forced to spend his evenings alone after
having shared them for six months with the Three Bar girl.  The weekly
letters still came from Deane.  The girl valued Harris as a friend and
partner without apparent trace of more intimate regard.  He wondered
which would prevail, the ties which bound her to the life she had
always known or the lure of the new life which beckoned.

Suddenly, without having sought it, the explanation of her recent
contentment bubbled to the surface of the girl's consciousness, and she
turned and gazed at Harris.  Night after night she had sat here with
old Cal Warren and discussed the details of their work and after his
passing her evenings had been hours of restlessness.  Now Harris, the
partner, had crept into the father's place,--had in a measure filled
the void.

Harris rose and flicked the ash from his cigarette, suppressing the
desire to take her in his arms, for he knew that time had not yet come.
As he opened the door to leave an eddy of steam curled in at the
opening as the warm air of the room battled on the threshold with the
thirty-below temperature of the outside world.  She heard the hissing
crunch of his boots on the frozen crust--and reached for Deane's
Christmas letter to reread it for perhaps the fifth time.

During the night a chinook poured its warm breath over the hills and
morning found the snow crumpling before it.  The surface was a pulpy
mass intersected by rivulets.  Water trickled from the eaves of the
buildings and there was a breath of spring in the air; false assurance
for those who knew, for it was inevitable that, once the chinook had
passed, bitter frost would clamp down once more.

Such days, however, inspire plans for spring and Billie rode with
Harris through the lower field as he pointed out the various fence
lines and the lay of the ditches and laterals which would carry water
to irrigate the meadow, all these to be installed as soon as winter
should lose its grip.

As Harris outlined his plans his words were tinged with optimism and he
allowed no hint of possible disaster to creep into his speech.  But the
girl was conscious of that hovering uncertainty, the feeling that the
months of peace were but to lure her into a false sense of security and
that Slade would pounce on the Three Bar from all angles at once
whenever the time was right.

She found some consolation in the fact that Lang's men no longer rode
through her range at will, but skirted it in their trips to and from
the Breaks.  She attributed this solely to Harris's precautions in the
matter of outguards, for of all those within a hundred miles she was
perhaps the single one who had not heard of the sinister rumor that was
cutting Lang and his men off from the rest of the world.

Men were discussing it wherever they met; in Coldriver they were
speculating on the possible results, the same in the railroad towns;
across the Idaho line and south into Utah it was the topic of the day.
And the single patron of Brill's store found the same question
uppermost in his mind.

Carson was one of the many who were neither wholly good nor hopelessly
bad, one who had drifted with the easy current of the middle course.
And he was wondering if that middle course would continue to prove
safe.  He played solitaire to pass the time.  His horse and saddle had
been lost in a stud-poker game just prior to his catching the stage to
Brill's, where his credit had always been good.  He rose, stretched and
accosted Brill.

"Put me down for a quart," he said.

"Whenever you put down the cash," Brill returned.

"What's the matter with my credit?" Carson demanded.  "I've always
paid."

Brill reached for a book, opened it and slid it on to the bar.  He
flipped the pages and indicated a number of accounts ruled off with red
ink.

"So did Harper," he said.  "He always paid; and Canfield--and Magill;
these others too.  Their credit was good but they've all gone
somewheres I can't follow to collect.  And they was owing me."  He
tapped a double account.

"Bangs was into me a little.  Old Rile paid up for him and then got it
in his turn--with his name down for a hundred on my books.  Harris and
Billie Warren paid up for Rile.  Now just whoever do you surmise will
pay up for you?"

"Me?" Carson inquired.  "Why, I ain't dead.  I'm clear alive."

"So was they when I charged those accounts," Brill said.  "But it looks
like stormy days ahead.  I sell for cash."

"I'm not on this death list, if that's what you're referring to,"
Carson announced.

"But it's easy to get enrolled," Brill said.  "Your name's liable to
show up on it any time.  Seen Lang in the last few days?"

"Not in the last few months," Carson stated.  "Nor yet in the next few
years.  He's no friend of mine."

"I sort of remember you used to be right comradely," Brill remarked.

"That's before I really knowed Lang intimate," Carson said.  "He didn't
strike me as such a bad sort at first; but now he's going too strong.
Folks are getting plum down on him."

"What you mean is that folks who used to be friendly are growing spooky
about getting their own names on that list," Brill said.  "That's what
has opened their eyes."

"Maybe so," the thirsty man confessed.  "But anyway, I'm through."

"They're all through!" Brill said.  "A hundred others just like you,
scattered here and there.  It's come to them recent just what a bad lot
Lang is.  It's hell what a whisper can do."

"It is when that whisper is backed by a thousand-dollar reward," Carson
agreed.  "If he really pays up it'll wreck Lang's little snap for sure."

Brill dabbed his cloth at an imaginary spot on the polished slab and
nodded without comment.

"I reckon he launched that scheme because Slade put a price on him
first," Carson said.

"I didn't know Slade was into this," Brill stated softly.  "There's no
proof of that.  Not a shred."

"No more than there's any proof that Harris is behind these rewards,"
Carson said.  "But you know that Slade is out to wreck the Three Bar
since they've planted squatters there."

The storekeeper failed to respond.

"There's likely a dozen men looking for Harris right now," Carson
prophesied.

"But it's hard for one of 'em to get within ten miles of the ranch,"
Brill observed.  "So while they're maybe looking for him it's right
difficult to see him that far off."

"I don't mind admitting that I'm for Harris--as against Slade," Carson
said.

"Just between us two I don't mind confessing that I'm neutral--as
against everything else," Brill returned.

"Now you know how I'm lined up.  Do I get that quart?" Carson urged.

"I knew how you was lined up months back."  Brill turned on a dry smile.

"I ain't told a soul till right now," Carson objected.  "So how could
you know?"

"You didn't need to tell.  As soon as that rumor leaked out it was a
cinch where you'd stand.  And a hundred others are crowding on to the
same foothold along with you."

"And why not?" Carson demanded.  "Who wants to get a thousand plastered
on his scalp?  It would tempt a man's best friends."

"Or scare 'em off," the storekeeper commented.  "Which is all the same
in the end."

A half dozen men clattered up in front and surged through the door.
More arrivals followed as the regular afternoon crowd gathered before
the bar.  There were many jobless hands drifting from one ranch to the
next, "grublining" on each brand for a week or more at a time during
the slack winter months.

Carpenter rode up alone.  Brill lowered one lid and jerked his head
toward Carson.

"Broke--and reformed," he said.  "Maybe."

Some minutes later Carp bought the thirsty man a drink.

"You looking for a job?" he asked.  "I can use you down my way."

Carson was well versed in the bends of the devious trail and Carp's
ways smacked of irregularities.  Carson had ideas of his own why the
other man was allowed to start up an outfit down in Slade's range.  One
day Carp's name would be cited on the black list.  As diplomatically as
possible he refused the offer of a job.

The storekeeper smiled as he noted this.  Carson had turned into a
solid citizen almost overnight.  As Carp left him and joined another
group Brill poured Carson a drink.

"You're a fair risk at that--as long as you stay cautious," he
remarked.  "I'll stake you to a horse and saddle.  You can ride the
grubline with the rest of the boys till spring and get a job when work
opens up."  He slid a bottle across the bar.  "Here's your quart."

He stood looking after him as Carson moved to a table and motioned
several others to join him over the bottle.

"That's about the tenth reformation that's transpired under my eyes in
as many days," Brill mused.  "Give us time and this community will turn
pure and spotless.  I don't mind any man's owing me if he stands a fair
show to go on living."

The sheriff dropped in for one of his infrequent visits to Brill's.  He
waved all hands to a drink.

"I've just been out to the Three Bar to see Harris," he announced.
"And asked him about this news that's been floating about.  He came
right out flat and says he's not offering a reward.  That's all a
mistake."

Every man in the room grinned at this statement.  There was no other
possible reply that Harris could make.

"Of course," the sheriff said reflectively.  "Of course there's just a
chance that Cal lied to me."

"He lied all right," Carp prophesied.  "I'd bet my shirt he'll stand to
pay the price for every man that's cited on that list."

"Shaw," the sheriff deprecated.  "That's dead against the law, that is.
He can't do that."

"He will do it," Carp predicted.  "If I was on that list I'd be moving
for somewheres a long ways remote from here."

"Then you'd better be starting," Alden counseled mildly.  "For Harris
was just telling me that your name had got mixed up with it.  Morrow's
name has sprung up too.  Cal seemed mystified as to how it had come
about for he says you and Morrow never rode with the others on the
list.  He couldn't figure how this thing come to start."

"Figure!" Carp snapped.  "He figured it out himself, who else?  Are you
going to stand for his putting a price on every man he happens to
dislike?"

"But he says he don't know anything about it," the sheriff
expostulated.  "So how can I prove he does?  I'd like to know for sure.
If I thought he was actually set to pay those rewards I'd have to ride
over and remonstrate with Cal.  That would be in defiance of the law."

One or two who had been drinking with Carp moved over to speak with
others and failed to return.  He was left standing alone at the bar.
He shrugged his shoulders and went out.

"Folks are considerable like sheep," Brill observed.  It occurred to
him that in every saloon and in every bunk house within a hundred miles
the topic of conversation was the same.

He lowered one lid as he looked at the sheriff and jerked his head
toward Carson.

"He's broke--and reformed," he said.  "Absolutely."

The sheriff drew Carson aside.

"If you're wanting a job I'll stake you to an outfit and feed you
through till spring.  Forty a month from then on.  I'll need a parcel
of deputies, likely, after that."

"You've got one," Carson stated.  "I'll sign now."

The storekeeper, the sheriff and the new deputy stood at one end of the
bar.

"It's queer that folks don't see the real object of this rumor," Brill
observed.

"Its object is to clean out the hardest citizens in the country,"
Carson said.  "That's why they're named.  Why else?"

"The object is to clean up the rest of the country first," Brill said.

Carson grunted his disbelief.

"If Harris only wanted to wipe out those on the list he wouldn't go to
all this fuss," Brill explained.  "He'd just put on an extra bunch of
hands and raid the Breaks himself.  Swear he caught them running off a
bunch of Three Bar cows.  Simpler and considerable less expense."

"Then what's the object of this bounty?" Carson insisted.

"That's aimed at the doubtful folks," Brill stated.  "Folks that was on
the fence--like you.  This death list makes them spooky and they turn
into good little citizens in one round of the clock.  It leaves the
worst ones outside without a friend.  Every one lined up solid behind
the law.  Public sentiment will start running strong against those
outside.  Then it'll be easy for the sheriff and a bunch of
deputies--like you--to clean the country up from end to end, with the
whole community backing your play."

Carson considered this for some time.

"Well, I can furnish the deputies," he said at last.  "Boys that are
strong for law and order from first to last."

"I've got about all I need," the sheriff said.  "A dozen or so.  Mostly
old friends of yours.  I've picked 'em up on and off in the last two
weeks.  They're strong for upholding the last letter of the law--just
like you said."

"A dozen?" Carson asked.  "How'll you raise the money to pay that many
at once?"

"I'm sort of expecting maybe the Three Bar will make up the deficit,"
Alden said.  "It's cheaper than paying rewards.  That's another reason
I don't think Cal had a hand in this blacklist report."

The storekeeper grinned.

"Surely not.  Surely not.  I'd never suspect him of that," he said.
"But all the same it's working just as well as if he really had."




XIII

The first warm days of spring had drawn the frost from the ground.
Billie rode beside Harris down the lane to the lower field.  A tiny
cabin stood completed on every filing.  Two men were digging post holes
across the valley below the edge of the last fall's plowing and the
mule teams were steadily breaking out another strip.

"Almost a year," she said, referring to the commencement of the new
work.

"Just a year to-day," Harris corrected, and he was thinking of the day
he had first met the Three Bar girl.  "This is our anniversary, sort
of."

She nodded as she caught his meaning.

"The anniversary of our partnership," she said.  "You're good on dates.
We've pulled together pretty well, considering our start."

"It was a rocky trail for the first few days," he confessed.  "But all
the time I was hoping it would get smoothed out."

"You told me there were millions of miles of sage just outside," she
recollected.  "And millions of cows--and girls."

"Later I told you something else," he said.  "And I've been meaning it
ever since.  The road to the outside is closed.  If I was to start now
I'd lose the way."

She pointed down the valley as a drove of horses moved toward them
under the guidance of a dozen men.  The hands would start breaking out
the remuda the following day.  The spring work was on.

"Off to a running start on another year," he said.  "And sure to hold
our lead."  They drew aside as the remuda thundered past and on toward
the corrals.  "From to-day on out, you and I'll be a busy pair," he
prophesied.

His prediction proved true.  The Three Bar was a beehive of activity
and it seemed that the hours between dawn and dark were all too short
for the amount of work Harris wished to crowd into them.

The cowhands were breaking out the horses in the corrals while the
acreage of plowed land in the lower fields steadily increased.

The heaviest cedar posts were tamped in place for the outer fence and a
six-wire barrier held range cows back from the bottoms which would soon
be in growing crops.  It crossed the flats below the lower filings and
followed the road that held to one side of the valley clear to the
Three Bar lane.  On the far side it mounted the bench that flanked the
bottoms and followed the crest of it, tying into the home corrals.
Lighter three-wire fences marked the homestead lines within.

The day that Evans led the men out on the calf round-up, the mule teams
made their first trip across the plowed land with the drill.

Harris and the girl sat their horses and watched the initial trip.  The
fields were being seeded to alfalfa and oats so that the faster growing
grain might shade and protect the tender shoots of hay.  Before the
grain ripened it would be cut green for hay, cured and stacked.

When the seeding was completed Billie worked with Harris and together
they ran a level over the seeded ground, marking out the laterals on
grade across the fields from points where they would tap the main feed
ditches and carry water to the crops.

Russ and Tiny followed the lines of stakes which marked their readings
of the level, throwing a plow furrow each way.  A second pair of
homesteaders followed behind them, their mules dragging a pointed
steel-shod ditcher which forced out the loosened earth.

A concrete head gate was installed at a feasible take-out point on the
Crazy Loop.  Then all hands worked on a main feed ditch which would
carry sufficient volume of water to cover every filing.  Lead ditches
tapped the main artery at frequent intervals, each one of capacity to
carry a head of water to irrigate one forty.  These in turn feathered
out into the tiny laterals across the meadow.

Early rains had moistened the fields and they were faintly green with
tiny shoots of oats.  These thickened into a rank velvety carpet while
the homesteaders were hauling a hundred loads of rocks to form a crude
dam across the stream below the take-out.  The water was gradually
raised till it ran almost flush with the top of the head gate.  The
gates were lifted and the diverted waters sped smoothly down the new
channel to carry life to a portion of the sagebrush desert.

A few days would find the cowhands back from the round-up.  The
homesteaders must make one more trip to the railroad to freight in the
stacker and the two buck-sweeps to be used in putting up the hay.  This
trip was delayed only till the round-up crew was back from the range
for a week of leisure and could act as guards while the others were
away.

As the tangible results of the work became more apparent Harris's
vigilance increased.  There was now more than plowed ground to work on;
crops to be trampled at a time when they would not lift again to permit
of mowing; fences to be wrecked so that range stock might have free
access to the fields.  A single night could upset the work of many
months.  But as he stood with Billie at the mouth of the lane he
allowed none of his thoughts to be reflected in his speech.

It was two hours before dark and the perspective toward the east was
already foreshortened.  Two jackrabbits hopped into the lane and moved
down toward the meadow.  The homesteaders had turned their hands to
another job.  Tiny and Russ, shod with rubber boots, were leaning on
their long-handled shovels in the forty nearest the house.  Beyond them
the other irrigators were spreading the water over the growing crops.

Billie Warren half-closed her eyes and viewed the broad expanse of
rippling green in the bottoms.  How many times she had stood here in
the past with old Cal Warren while he visioned this very picture which
now unrolled before her eyes in reality; the transformation of the
Three Bar flat from a desert waste to a scene of abundant fertility
under the reclaiming touch of water.

It was a quiet picture of farm life if one looked only upon the
blooming fields and took no account of the raw, barren foothills that
flanked them,--the gaunt, towering range behind.  She found it
difficult to link the scene before her with the deviltry of a few
months past.  The killing of Bangs and Rile Foster's consequent grim
retaliation; the raid on Three Bar bulls and the stampede of her trail
herd; all those seemed part of some life so long in the past as to form
no part of her present.

The continued immunity had had its effect, regardless of her earlier
suspicions.  She still realized the possibility of further raids but
they had been so long delayed that the prospect had ceased to impress
her as imminent.  Tiny and Russ changed their head of water.  As they
shifted positions she noted that each carried some tool beside his
irrigator's shovel.  No man in the field ever strayed far from the
rifle which was part of his equipment.  But even this was an evidence
of vigilance which had met her eye every day for months and had ceased
to impress.

They walked to the near edge of the field and Harris stooped to part
the knee-deep grain, pointing to the slender stems of alfalfa with
their delicate leaves.

"We have a record stand of young hay," he said.  "It's thick all
through--every place I've looked."  He straightened up and laughed.
"And I expect I've looked at every acre.  I've been right interested in
those little shoots.  It's deep-rooted now.  The worst is past.  I
don't see that anything that could happen now would kill it out.  Next
year we'll put up a thousand tons of hay."

He dropped a hand on her shoulder and stood looking down at her.

"Billie, don't you think it's about time you were finding out what
Judge Colton wants?" he asked.  "He's been right insistent on your
going back to confer with him."

The girl shook her head positively.  Two months before Judge Colton had
written that he must advise with her on matters of importance and
suggested that she come on at once.  Harris had urged her to go and
almost daily referred to it.

"I can't go now," she said.  "Not till I've seen one whole season
through.  When the first Three Bar crop is cut and in the stack I'll
go.  All other business must wait till then.  You two can't drive me
away till after I see that first crop in the stack."

"If you'd go now you'd likely get back before we're through cutting,"
he urged.  "And the Judge has written twice in the last two weeks."

Before she could answer this a horseman appeared on the valley road.
The furthest irrigator, merely a speck in the distance, exchanged
shovel for rifle and crossed to the fence.  The rider, as if expecting
some such move, pulled up his horse and approached at a walk.

Harris saw the two confer.  The horseman handed some object to the
other and urged his horse on toward the house.  He was one of the
sheriff's deputies.  He grinned as he tapped his empty holster.

"One of your watchdogs lifted my gun," he said.  He handed Harris a
note.

After reading it Harris looked at his watch and snapped it shut,
glanced at the sinking sun and turned to the girl.

"I have to make a little jaunt," he explained.

"Alden wants to see me.  I'll take Waddles along.  As we go down I'll
send Russ or Tiny up to cook for the rest."

The deputy turned his horse into the corral and five minutes later
Harris and Waddles rode away.  Waddles was mounted on Creamer, the big
buckskin.

"We'll have to step right along," Harris said.  "It's forty miles."

They held the horses to a stiff swinging trot that devoured the miles
without seeming to tire their mounts.  For four hours they headed south
and a little east, never slackening their pace except to breathe the
horses on some steep ascent.  The buckskin and the paint-horse had lost
the first snap of their trot and it was evident that they would soon
begin to lag.  Another hour and they had slowed down perceptibly.

The two men dismounted and tied the horses to the brush in a sheltered
coulee, then started across a broad flat on foot.  Out in the center a
spot showed darker than the rest,--the old cabin where Carpenter had
elected to start up for himself after being discharged from the Three
Bar.

When within a hundred yards of the cabin a horse, tied to a hitch post
in front, neighed shrilly and Harris laid a restraining hand on
Waddles's arm.  They knelt in the brush as the door opened and a man
stood silhouetted against the light.  After a space of two minutes
Carp's voice reached them.

"Not a sound anywheres," he said.  "Likely some horses drifting past."
He went inside and closed the door.  The two men circled the cabin and
came up from the rear.  A window stood opened some eight inches from
the bottom.  Through the holes in the ragged flour sack that served as
a curtain Harris secured a view of the inside.  Carp and Slade sat
facing across a little table in the center of the room.

"I want to clean up and go," Carp was saying.  "This damn Harris put me
on the black list."

"You've been on it for three months," Slade said.  "Nothing has
happened yet.  But don't let me keep you from pulling out any time you
like."

"But I've got a settlement to make," Carp insisted.  "Let's get that
fixed up."

"Settlement?" Slade asked.  "Settlement with who?"

Carpenter leaned across the table and tapped it to emphasize his
remarks.

"Listen.  Morrow gave me a bill of sale from you calling for a hundred
head of Three Bar she-stock, rebranded Triangle on the hip."

Slade nodded shortly.

"I gave Morrow that for two years' back pay when he quit.  He could
sell out to you if he liked."

"And now I want to sell out," Carp said.  "And be gone from here."

"How many head have you got?" Slade asked.

"Three hundred head," Carp stated.

"You've increased right fast," Slade remarked.  "I'd think you'd want
to stay where you was doing so well.  How much do you want?"

"Five dollars straight through," Carp said.

"Cheap enough," Slade answered.  "If only a man was in the market."  He
looked straight at Carp and the man's eyes slipped away from Slade's
steady gaze.  "But I'm not buying.  Likely Morrow will buy you out."

"Morrow ought to be here now," Carp stated.  "He's coming to-night."

"Then I'd better go," Slade said.  "I don't like Morrow's ways."

The thud of horse's hoofs sounded from close at hand.  The two men
outside lay flat in the shadow of the house.  A shrill whistle, twice
repeated, called Carp to his feet and he crossed to the door to answer
it.  Morrow dismounted and came to the door.  He nodded briefly to
Slade, hesitating on the sill as if surprised to find him there.  Carp
lost no time in stating his proposition.  He spoke jerkily.

"I want to get out," he said.  "I'll sell for five dollars a head."

Morrow held up a hand to silence him.

"I'll likely buy--but I never talk business in a crowd."  He crossed
the room and sat with his back to the window.  "There's plenty of time."

"I take it I'm the crowd," Slade remarked.  "So I'll step out."

Morrow stiffened suddenly in his chair as a cold ring was pressed
against the back of his neck through the crack of the window.  At the
same instant Carp had tilted back and raised one knee.  The gun that
rested on his leg was peeping over the table at Slade.

"Steady!" he ordered.  "Sit tight!"

The window was thrown up to its full height by Waddles and the curtain
snatched away from the gun which Harris held against Morrow's neck.
Carp's apparent nervousness had vanished.  He flipped back his vest and
revealed a marshal's badge.

"I'd as soon take you along feet first as any way," he said.  "So if
you feel like acting up you can start any time now."

Slade's eyes came back from the two men at the window and rested on the
badge.

"So that's it," he said with evident relief.  "A real arrest--when I
figured it was an old-fashioned murder you had planned.  What do you
want with me?"

Waddles had reached down and removed Morrow's gun.

"A number of things," Carpenter said.  "Obstructing the homestead laws
for one."

Slade shook his head and smiled.

"You've got the wrong party," he said.  "You can't prove anything on
me."

"I don't count on that," Carp said.  "You've covered up right well.  We
know you work through Morrow but can't prove a word.  We've got enough
to hang him; but I expect maybe you'll get off."

There was a scrape of feet outside the door and the sheriff entered and
took possession of Slade's gun as Harris and Waddles moved round from
the window and went inside.

"I'm a few minutes late," Alden said.  "I wasn't right sure how close I
was to the house so I left my horse too far back."

"Here's your prisoners," Carp said.  "Captured and delivered as agreed.
I haven't anything on Slade myself but if you want him he's yours."

"What do you want with me?" Slade demanded a second time.

"I'm picking you up on complaint make by the Three Bar," Alden said.
"I'll have to take you along."

Slade turned on Harris.

"What charge?" he asked.

"Killing twelve Three Bar bulls on the last day of August," Harris
stated.

"I was out with the ranger," Slade said.  "Back in the hills.  You know
that yourself.  That charge won't stick."

"Then maybe it was the second of May," Harris returned.  "I sort of
forget."

Slade suddenly grasped the significance of this arrest.

"How many of you fellows are pussy-footing round out here?" he inquired
of Carp.

"I don't mind confessing that several of the boys are riding for you,"
Carp informed.  "But while we've cinched Morrow we haven't been able to
trace it back to you.  I even got put on the black list, thinking you
might do business with me direct after that--knowing my word wouldn't
stand against yours.  But not you!  You've covered your tracks."

Carp spoke softly, as if to himself, detailing his failure to gather
conclusive evidence against Slade.

"I even run your rebrand on fifty or so Three Bar cows.  You knew there
wasn't a dollar changed hands when Morrow gave me that paper which
licensed me to rustle my own she-stock.  We can't even prove that you
didn't owe him two years' back pay and square up by giving him that
bill of sale.  There's never a check of yours made out to Morrow that's
gone through the bank.  The boys who staged the stampede drew down a
lump sum from Morrow for the job.  We know who was financing the
raid--can't be proved.  The idea in my starting up was to run your
rebrand on any number of Three Bar cows.  Later Morrow would buy me
out--acting for you; can't be proved.  Oh, you're in the clear, all
right."

Slade broke in upon the monologue.  This recitation of his probable
immunity from conviction on every count, far from reassuring him,
served to confirm his original suspicion as to the reason for this
arrest without witnesses.  If the sheriff had wanted him he had but to
send word for Slade to come in.  He threw out one last line and the
answer convinced him beyond all doubt.

"Then a lawyer will have me out in an hour," he predicted.

"A lawyer could," Alden said.  "If you saw one.  But we've decided not
to let you have access to legal advice for the first few days."

Slade turned on Carpenter.

"This sort of thing is against the law," he said.  "You're a United
States marshal.  How can you go in on a kidnapping deal?"

"I'm not in on it," Carp shrugged.  "The sheriff asked me to arrest you
at the first opportunity.  I've turned you over to him.  The rest is
his affair.  Besides, like I was mentioning, they can't prove a thing
on you.  As soon as they're convinced of that they'll turn you loose."

The sheriff nodded gravely.

"The very day I'm satisfied Harris can't prove his charges I'll throw
open the doors.  You'll be a free man that minute."

A vision of the near future swept across Slade's mind.  If he should be
locked up for three months and discharged for lack of evidence it would
wreck him as surely as the rumors of the last few months had cut Lang's
men off from the rest of the world.  Squatters had filed on every
available site throughout his range and now waited to see if the Three
Bar would win its fight.  If the news should be spread that he was
locked up these nesters would rush in.  On his release he would find
them everywhere.  With marshals scattered through the ranks of his own
men, intent on upholding the homestead laws, he would be helpless to
drive them out.  The pictures of the different valleys suitable for
ranch sites, scattered here and there over his extensive range,
traveled through his mind in kaleidoscopic procession--and he visioned
a squatter outfit established on every one.  If they locked him up at
this time he was lost.

He nodded slowly.

"Well, I guess you've got me," he said.  "I don't see that it will
amount to much, anyway.  Sooner or later you'll let me out."  He raised
his arms high above his head and stretched.  Under cover of this casual
move he swiftly raised one foot.

Slade planted his boot on the edge of the light table and gave a
tremendous shove.  The far edge caught the sheriff across the legs and
overthrew him.  The lantern crashed to the floor and at the same
instant Morrow aimed a sidewise, sweeping kick at Carpenter's ankles.
As the marshal went down his head struck the corner post of a bunk and
he did not rise.

With a single sweep Morrow caught the back of his chair and swung it
above his head for the spot which Waddles had occupied at the instant
the light went out.  The weapon splintered in his hands as it found its
mark, and as the big man struck the dirt floor Morrow leaped for the
dim light which indicated the open door.

A huge paw clamped on one ankle and a back-handed wrench sent him
flying across the room to the far wall.  With a sweep of the other hand
Waddles slammed the door with a bang that jarred the cabin.

"We've got 'em trapped," the big voice exulted.  "We've got 'em sewed
in a sack."

Harris made one long reach and swung the butt of his gun for Slade's
head as the table went down but Slade, with the same motion, vaulted
the prostrate sheriff.  The force of the blow threw Harris off his
balance and as he tripped and reeled to his knees Slade's boot heel
scored a glancing blow on his skull and floored him.  He regained his
feet, gripping a fragment of the chair Morrow had smashed over
Waddles's head, and struck at a dim form which loomed against the vague
light of the window.

The shape closed with him and he went down in a corner with Slade.
Slade struck him twice in the face, writhed away and gained his feet,
back-slashing at Harris's head with his spurs.  Harris caught a
hand-hold in the long fur of the other's chaps, wrapped both arms round
Slade above the knees and dragged him back.  His hand found Slade's
throat and he squeezed down on it as the man raised both knees and
thrust them against his stomach to break the hold.  Slade's arm swept a
circle on the floor in search of the gun Harris had dropped but he was
jerked a foot from the floor and Harris jammed his head against the log
wall,--jammed again and Slade crumpled into a limp heap.  Harris held
him there, unwilling to take a chance lest the other might be feigning
unconsciousness.  But Slade was out of the fight.

The sheriff struggled to his feet as Waddles tossed Morrow back from
the door and slammed it shut.  He closed with Morrow but the man eluded
him.  He dared not shoot with friends and enemies struggling all about
the black pit of the little room.

Morrow leaped one way, then the opposite, as the sheriff groped for
him.  Alden turned toward a rattle at the stove as he heard Slade's
head crunch against the wall under Harris's savage thrust.

"Down him!" Waddles roared.  "Tear him down!  Tear him down!  I'm
holding the door."

From the corner by the stove an iron pot hurtled across the room for
the sound of the voice and crashed against the wall a foot from his
head.  A second kettle struck Alden in the chest and he went down.
Waddles saw the light vanish from the window, then reappear.  Morrow
had made a headlong dive through the little opening.

Waddles swung back the door and sprang outside as Morrow vaulted to the
saddle.  The big man lunged and tackled both horse and man as a grizzly
would seek to batter down his prey.

The frightened horse struck at him, numbing one leg with the blow of an
iron-shod forefoot, then reared and wheeled away from the thing which
sprang at him, but Waddles retained his grip in the animal's mane, his
other hand clamped on Morrow's ankle.

The rider leaned and struck him in the head.  The crazed horse shook
Waddles off but as he fell the other man fell with him, dragged from
the saddle by the jerk of one mighty hand.  They rolled apart and
Morrow leaped to his feet but Waddles had wrenched the leg already
numbed by the striking horse and it buckled under him and let him back
to the ground as he put his weight on it.  He reached for his gun.  A
form loomed above him, a heavy rock upraised in both hands.  The gun
barked just as a downward sweep of the arms started the rock for his
head.  Morrow pitched down across him and Waddles swept him aside with
a single thrust.

He rose and stirred the limp shape with his toe as the sheriff reached
his side.

"Dead bird!" Waddles announced and turned to limp back to the cabin.

A match flared inside as Harris lighted the lantern.  Carpenter stirred
and sat up, moving one hand along the gash in his scalp.  The sheriff
stooped and snapped a pair of handcuffs on Slade's wrists.  They
splashed water on his face and he opened his eyes.  He regarded the
steel bracelets at his wrists as he was helped to his feet and turned
to Harris.

"Don't forget that I'll kill you for this," he said.  It was a simple
statement, made without heat or bluster, and aside from this one remark
he failed to speak a syllable until the sheriff rode away with him.

The sheriff waved the lantern outside the door and before he lowered it
two deputies rode up, leading his horse.

"We started at that shot," one of them announced in explanation of
their prompt arrival.

Alden motioned Slade to his horse and helped him up.

"Shoot him out of the saddle if he makes a break," he ordered briefly.

"Now you can move against those men I've sworn out complaints for,"
Harris said to Alden.  "Public sentiment has turned against them to
such an extent that they won't get any help--and there won't be any to
fill their places, once we've cleaned them up.  Deputize the whole
Three Bar crew when you're ready to start."

The sheriff nodded and led the way with the two deputies riding close
behind, one riding on either side of Slade.




XIV

The freight wagons rattled away from the Three Bar as the first light
showed in the east, and the grind of wheels on gravel died out in the
distance as Harris and Billie finished their breakfast.

They walked to the mouth of the lane and watched the light driving the
shadows from the valleys.  A score of times they had stood so, never
tiring of the view afforded from this spot, a view which spoke of Three
Bar progress and future prosperity.  The hands had come in from the
round-up the night before, prior to the return of Harris and Waddles
from their mysterious two-day trip in response to the sheriff's
message, and Evans had led them to Brill's for a night of play.  They
were due back at the ranch in the early forenoon and Harris had allowed
the freighters to depart before the others arrived.

"We'll be short of guards for the next hour or two," he said.  "Till
the boys get back from Brill's--but they'll be rocking in most any time
now."

"What did Alden want?" she asked, referring to the trip from which he
and Waddles had returned late the night before.

"We made a call on Carp," he said.  "He had some good news we've been
waiting for."

"Then Carp is a Three Bar plant," she said.

"He's a U. S. plant," Harris corrected.  "But he's been working in with
us to get something on Slade--to gather proof that he's behind these
squatter raids of the last few years and the ones they've aimed at us
up to date.  He couldn't get a shred that would hold in court.  But
Slade is almost through.  His claws are clipped."

The girl started to question him as to Carp's activities but after the
first sentence she became aware that his attention was riveted on
something other than her words.  He had thrown up his head like a
startled buck and was peering down the valley.

Her range-bred ears caught and correctly interpreted the sound which
had roused him.  A distant rumble reached her and the surface of the
earth seemed to vibrate faintly beneath her feet.  She knew the jar for
the pounding of thousands of hoofs, the drone for the far-off bawling
of frightened cows.  A low black line filled the valley from side to
side, rushing straight on up the gently-sloping bottoms for the Three
Bar flat.

"They're on us," Harris said.  "I might have known.  Get back to the
house--quick!"

As they ran she noticed that his eyes were not upon the surging mass of
cows in the valley but were trained on the broken slopes back of the
house.

"Anyway, they don't want you," he said.  "We'll do the best we can."

Waddles stood in the door of the cookhouse, his big face flushed with
wrath as he gazed at the oncoming sea of cows.  He reached up and took
the shotgun which reposed on two pegs above the door.

He slammed the heavy door and dropped the bar as they sprang inside.

"I made that prediction about clipping Slade's claws too soon," Harris
said.  "What with Slade locked up and Morrow six feet underground, I
was overconfident.  I might have known it was planned ahead."

His face was lined with anxiety, an expression she had never before
seen him wear even in the face of emergency.  She had no time to
question him about the assertions relative to Morrow and Slade.

The front rank of the stampede was bearing down on the lower fence.
The barrier went down as so much spider web before the drive; posts
were broken short, wire was snapped and dragged, and three thousand
head of cows pounded on across the meadows.

The girl had a sickening realization that the work of a year would be
blotted out in a space of seconds under those churning hoofs.  It
seemed that she must die of sheer grief as she witnessed the complete
devastation of the fields she had watched day by day with such loving
care.  The stampede swept the full length of the meadow and held on for
the house.  The acute stab of her grief was dulled and replaced by a
mental lethargy.  The worst had happened and she viewed the rest of the
scene with something akin to indifference.

The foremost cows struck the corrals and they went down with a
splintering crash under the pressure from behind.  She looked out on a
sea of tossing horns and heaving backs as the herd rushed through, the
heavy log buildings shaking from the mass of animals jammed against
them and squeezing past.

The force of the run was spent on the steep slope back of the house and
the herd split into detachments and moved off through the hills.

The west side of the house was windowless, a blank wall built against
the standing winds.  Waddles was busily engaged in knocking out a patch
of chinking and endeavoring to work a loophole between the logs.
Harris was similarly engaged between two windows which overlooked the
blacksmith shop, storerooms and saddle room that formed a solid line of
buildings a hundred yards to the east.  She reflected hazily that there
was little cause for such petty activity when the worst had happened
and the Three Bar had suffered an irreparable loss.

Harris pointed down the valley to the south and she turned mechanically
and crossed to that window.  A few riders showed on the ridges on
either flank of the valley.

"They were cached up there to pick us off if we rode down to try and
turn the run," he said.  "If it had been light they might have opened
on the wagons.  But they knew the rest hadn't started the cows."

She nodded without apparent interest.  What might transpire now seemed
a matter to be viewed with indifference.

"It's time for me to go," Harris said.  "I'll hold the bunk house.
Good luck, Billie--we'll hold 'em off."

He turned to Waddles who still worked to make a loophole through the
blank wall.

"If it gets too hot put her outside and tell her to give herself up.
Even Lang would know that the whole country would be hunting them
to-morrow if they touched her.  They won't if they can help it.  But
this is their last hope--to trust in one final raid.  They'll go
through with it.  Make her go outside if it comes to that."

He opened the door and leaped across the twenty yards of open space
which separated the main building from the bunk house.  The fact that
no rifle balls searched for him as he sprang inside was sufficient
testimony that the raiders who might be posted in the hills back of the
house were not yet within easy range.  He barred the door and looked
from the south window.  The riders along the valley rims had descended
to the bottoms.  Smoke was already rising from one homestead cabin and
they were riding toward the rest.  Two men had dismounted by the head
gate.

Harris cursed himself for not having anticipated this very thing.  The
whole plan was clear to him.  Slade would have known of the implements
at the railroad waiting to be freighted in.  He would have known, too,
that when the cowhands came in from the round-up there would follow the
inevitable night at Brill's.  Morrow had mapped out the raid long in
advance, engaging Lang to gather the cows throughout the first night
the round-up crew was in from the range and hold them a few miles from
the ranch.  In case the freighters failed to leave before the others
came back from Brill's the raid would have been staged just the same;
men cached along the lip of the valley to pick off all those who should
attempt to ride down and turn the run; others ready to slip down from
behind and torch the buildings while the fight was going on in the
flat.  Lang could not know that Slade was locked up and that Morrow was
dead so the raid had gone through as planned.

Smoke was rising from two more cabins in the flats and Harris
reproached himself for another oversight in allowing the wagons to pull
out before the others arrived.  The crop would have been ruined in any
event but with the hands at home they could have prevented the
destruction of the cabins.

He turned to the opposite side and scanned the face of the hills for
signs of life.  Not a sage quivered to show the position of bodies
crawling through the brush; no rattle of gravel indicated the presence
of men working down through any of the sheltered coulees behind; yet he
knew they were near.  The silence was in sharp contrast to the rumble
and roar of the stampede just past.  The only sounds which shattered
the quiet were the muffled thuds of Waddles's hand-axe as the cook
worked on a single idea and endeavored to gouge a loophole through the
cracks of the twelve-inch logs.  Harris transferred his attention to
the long line of log buildings a hundred yards to the east.  The row
afforded perfect cover for any who chose that route of approach.  They
could walk up to them in absolute safety, screened both from himself
and those in the main house.

As he watched the doors and windows for sign of movement within a voice
hailed them from the shop.

"You might as well come out," it called.  "We're going to fire the
plant."

Harris stretched prone on the floor and rested the muzzle of his rifle
on a crack between the logs.  It was hard shooting.  He was forced to
shift the butt end of the gun, moving with it himself to line the
sights instead of swinging the free end of the barrel.  He trained it
on a crack some two feet from the door of the shop.  Behind the
aperture the light of a window on the far side showed faintly.

"Come out!" the voice ordered.  "Or we'll cook you inside.  We've no
time to lose.  Rush it!"

The light disappeared from the crack and Harris pressed the trigger.
With the roar of his gun a shape pitched down across the door of the
shop.  Some unseen hands caught the man by the feet and as he was
dragged back from sight Harris saw the red handkerchief which had
served as a mask.

From all along the row of buildings a fire was opened on the bunk
house.  Apparently one man was detailed to search out a certain crevice
between the logs.  Harris threw himself flat against the lower log
which barely shielded him.  One rifleman covered a crack breast-high,
another the one next below, drilling it at six-inch intervals.  Shreds
of 'dobe chinking littered the room.  The balls which found an entrance
splintered through the bunks and buried themselves in the logs of the
far wall.  A third marksman worked on the lower crack.  Puffs of 'dobe
pulverized before Harris's eyes as the systematic fire crept toward him
down the crack in six-inch steps.

A flash of dust a few inches before his nose half blinded him.  The
next shot drilled through an inch above his head, flattened sidewise on
the floor, and a fragment of shell-jacket, stripped in passing through,
scored his cheek and nicked his ear.  The next fanned his shirt across
the shoulders and the biting scraps of 'dobe stung his back.

The shooting suddenly ceased.  Billie Warren, dazedly indifferent as to
what should happen to the Three Bar since the wreck of the lower field,
had roused to action the instant she saw the spurts of chinking fly
from the cracks of the bunk house before the fusillade sent after
Harris.  She threw open the door and stepped out, holding up one hand.

"Don't kill him!" she commanded.  "If you fire another shot at him I'll
put up every dollar I own to hang every man that ever rode a foot with
Lang!  Do you hear that, Lang?"

"Lang's in Idaho," a voice growled surlily from the shop.  "None of us
ever rode with Lang.  We're from every brand on the range--and we're
going to burn you squatters out."

"Draw off and let us ride away," she said.  "You can have the Three
Bar."

"All but Harris," the voice called back.  "He stays!"

She threw up the rifle she carried and touched it off at a crack near
the shop door.  As the splinters flew from the edge of the log a figure
sprang past the door for the safety of the opposite side and she shot
again, then emptied the magazine at a crevice on the side where he had
taken refuge.

"Get back inside, damn you!" a voice shouted.  "We're going to wreck
the Three Bar--and you with it if you stand in the way.  Get back out
of line!"

Harris knew that the men would not be deterred in their purpose--would
sacrifice her along with the rest if necessary to accomplish their end.

"Get back, Billie," he called from the bunk house.  "You can't do us
any good out there.  Take the little cabin and sit tight.  We'll beat
them off."

A haze of smoke showed through the storeroom door, a bright tongue of
flame leaping back of it.

She turned to the door but Waddles had barred it behind her.

"Take the little house, Pet," he urged.  "Like Cal said.  You'll be
safe enough.  We'll give 'em hell."

She walked to the little cabin that stood isolated and alone, the first
building ever erected on the Three Bar and which had sheltered the
Harrises before her father had taken over the brand.

The smoke had spread all along the row of buildings and hung in an oily
black cloud above them, the hungry flames licking up the sides of the
dry logs.  The men had withdrawn after putting the torch to the row in
a dozen spots.

From her point of vantage she saw two masked men rise from the brush
and run swiftly down toward the main house, each carrying a can.  She
divined their purpose instantly.

"Watch the west side!" she called.  "The west side--quick."

The sound of Waddles's hand-axe ceased and an instant later the roar of
the shotgun sounded twice from within the house, followed by the cook's
lament.

"Missed!" the big voice wailed.  "Two minutes more and I'd have made a
real hole."

The muffled crash of a rifle rolled steadily from the house as Waddles
fired at the chinking in an effort to reach the two men outside.  But
they had accomplished their purpose and retreated, the house shielding
them from Harris's field of view; and they kept on the same line, out
of sight of the bunk house, till they reached a deep coulee which
afforded a safe route of retreat.

The row of buildings was a seething mass of flames rolling up into the
black smoke.  Flames hissed and licked up the blank wall of the main
House, traveling along the logs on which the two masked raiders had
thrown their cans of oil.  The men outside had only to wait until the
occupants were roasted out.  A stiff wind held from the west and once
the house was in flames they would be driven down upon the bunk house
and fire it in turn.  She knew Waddles would come out when it grew too
hot.  The raiders might let him go.  It was Harris they waited for.

The girl ran across and pounded on the bunkhouse door.

"Run for it," she begged.  "Make a run for the brush!  I'll keep
between you and them.  They won't shoot me.  You can get to the brush.
There's a chance that way."

"All right, old girl," Harris said.  "In a minute now.  But you go
back, Billie.  Get back to the little house.  As soon as it gets hot
I'll run for it.  I've got ten minutes yet before I'm roasted out.
I'll start as soon as you're inside the house."

"No.  Start now!" she implored.  The flames were sliding along one side
of the house and even now she could feel the heat of them fanned down
upon the bunk house by the wind.  "Run, Cal," she entreated.  "Run
while you've got a chance."  She leaned upon the door and beat on it
with her fists.

"All right, Billie," he said.  "I'll go.  You stay right where you are
as if you're talking to me."

She heard him cross the floor.  He dropped from the window on the far
side from the men.  When he came in sight of them he was running in
long leaps for the brush, zigzagging in his flight.  Their gaze had
been riveted on the girl and he gained a flying start of thirty yards
before a shot was fired.  Then half a dozen rifles spurted from two
hundred yards up the slope, the balls passing him with nasty snaps.  He
reached the edge of the sage and plunged headlong between two rocks.
Bullets reached for him, ripping through the tips of the sage above
him, tossing up spurts of gravel on all sides and singing in ricochets
from the rocks.

One raider, in his eagerness to secure a better view, incautiously
exposed his head.  He went down with a hole through his mask as a shot
sounded from the main house.  From the window, his big face red and
dripping from the heat, Waddles pumped a rifle and covered Harris's
flight as best he could, drilling the center of every sage that shook
or quivered back of the house.

Two men turned their attention to the one who handicapped their chances
of locating the crawling man and poured their fire through the window.
A soft-nose splintered the butt of the cook's rifle and tore a strip of
meat from his arm as another fanned his cheek.  He dropped to the floor
and peered from a crack.  The firing had suddenly ceased.  He saw a hat
moving up a coulee, a mere flash here and there above the sage as the
owner of it ran.  As he watched for the man to reappear, the roof of
the whole string of buildings to the east caved with a hissing roar and
belched sparks and debris high in the air.

The fire was filtering through the cracks and circling its hungry
tongues inside.  The smoke hurt his eyes and the heat seemed to crack
his skin.  He crossed over to see if Harris was down; that would
account for the sudden cessation of shooting from the hills back of the
house.

The raiders in the lower field were riding swiftly for the far side of
the valley.  One man knelt near the head gate, then mounted and jumped
his horse off after the rest.  Waddles put the whole force of his lungs
behind one mighty cheer.

Fifty yards back in the brush Harris cautiously raised his head to
determine the cause of this triumphant peal.

Far down along the rim of the valley, outlined against the sky, four
mules were running as so many startled deer under the bite of the lash
and six men swayed and clung in the wagon that lurched behind.  High
above the crackle of the flames sounded Tiny's yelps, keen and clear,
as he urged on the flying mules.  Three men unloaded from the wagon as
it came opposite the cluster of men riding far out across the flats.
They opened a long-range fire at a thousand yards while the others
stayed with the wagon as it rocked on toward the burning ranch.

Billie was running to the brush at the spot where Harris had
disappeared.  He rose to meet her.

"Cal, you're not hurt?" she asked.

"Not a scratch," he said.  "Thanks to you."

In her relief she grasped his arm and gave it a fierce little squeeze.

"Then it's all right," she said.

Waddles burst from the door of the burning house, his arms piled high
with salvage.

"We'll save what we can," Harris said and started for the house.  As he
ran the valley rocked with a concussion which nearly threw him flat and
a column of fragments and trash rose a hundred feet above the spot
where the head gate had been but a second past.

A dozen running horses flipped over the edge of the hill and plunged
down toward the ranch.  The men were back from Brill's.  Tiny halted
the mules on the lip of the valley and the three men came down the
slope on foot.

Harris held up his hand to halt the riders as they would have kept on
past the house.  He knew that the raiders stationed behind the ranch
had long since reached their horses and were lost in the choppy hills.
He waved all hands toward the buildings and they swarmed inside,
carrying out load after load of such articles as could be moved and
piling them out of reach of the flames.

The girl sat apart and watched them work.  Her lethargy had returned.
It seemed a small matter to rescue these trinkets when the Three Bar
was a total wreck.  The wind fanned the flames down on the bunk house
and one side was charred and smoking.  The men drew back from the heat.
Tiny spurts of fire flickered along the charred side.  Then it burst
into a sheet of flame.

Harris spoke briefly to Evans and the tall man nodded as he itemized
the orders in his mind.

"Now I'll get her away from here," Harris said.  "It's hell for her to
just sit there and watch it burn."

He caught two of the saddled horses that had carried the men from
Brill's and crossed over to where she sat.

"Let's ride down to the field," he said.  "And see what's got to be
done.  I expect a week's work will repair that part of it all right."

She gazed at him in amazement.  He spoke of repairing the damage while
the Three Bar burned before his eyes.  But she rose and mounted the
horse.  He shortened her stirrup straps and they rode off down what had
once been the lane, the fence flattened by the rushing horde of cattle
that had swept through.

The homestead cabins smoked but still stood intact.

"Look!" he urged cheerfully.  "Those logs were too green to burn.  We
won't even have to rebuild.  They'll look a little charred round the
edges maybe, but otherwise as good as new."

Behind her sounded a gurgling roar as the roof of the main house fell
but Harris did not even look back.

"We can restring that fence in a right short while," he asserted.
"We've lost one crop of oat-hay--which we didn't much need, anyhow.
That young alfalfa is too deep rooted to be much hurt.  Next spring
it'll come out thick, a heavy stand of hay; and we'll cut a thousand
tons."

They rode across fields trampled flat by thousands of churning hoofs
and reached the spot where the head gate had been, a yawning hole at
which the water sucked and tore.  A section of the bank caved and was
washed away.  And through it all he planned the work of reconstruction
and the transformation which would be effected inside a year,--while
behind them the home ranch was ablaze.

"We're not bad hurt," he said.  "They can't hurt our land.  I'd rather
have this flat right now--the way it stands--than three thousand head
of cows on the range and no land at all.  We can rebuild the place this
winter while work is slack.  Build better than before.  Those buildings
were pretty old, at best.  There'll be enough hungry cowhands riding
grub-line at the Three Bar to rebuild it in two months.  Every man that
feeds on us this winter will have to work."

His enthusiasm failed to touch her.  For her the Three Bar was wrecked,
the old home gone, and her gaze kept straying back to the eddying black
smoke-cloud at the foot of the hills.




XV

They rode from the devastated fields and angled southwest across the
range.  Harris pointed out the calves along their course.

"Look at those chunky little youngsters," he said.  "Nearly every one
is good red stock.  Only a scattering few that threw back to off-color
shades.  This grading-up process doesn't take long to show."

When some ten miles from the Three Bar he dismounted on a ridge and she
joined him, listening with entire indifference to his optimistic plans.

"We're only scratched," he said.  "It won't matter in the end."

"This is the end," she dissented.  "The Three Bar is done."

"It's just the start," he returned.  "It's the end for them!  Don't you
see?  They staked everything on one big raid that would smash the Three
Bar and discourage the rest from duplicating our move.  That would give
Slade a new lease of life--delay the inevitable for a few more years.
They made one final attempt and lost."

"Did they lose?" she inquired.  "I thought they'd won."

"They're through!" he asserted positively.  "Slade is locked up.
Inside of a week the sheriff would have cleaned out the Breaks.  It was
my fault this happened.  With Slade locked up and Morrow dead it didn't
occur to me that anything was planned ahead.  If the albino had lived
he'd never have run his neck into a noose by a raid like this.  But
Lang was born without brains.  Slade could hire him for anything."

"Can you prove this on Slade?" she demanded.  It was the first sign of
interest she had shown.  Deep under her numbed indifference a thought
persisted,--a hope that Slade, the man who had brought about the raid,
should be made to pay.  Harris shook his head.

"As usual, Slade's in the clear," he said.  "There's been a rumor
afloat which would be considered sufficient cause for Lang's men to
raid the Three Bar without other incentive."

He resumed his glowing plans for reconstruction.

"That's their last shot," he said.  "We're only delayed--that's all.
We lost a few fences.  Posts are free for the cutting and most of the
wire can be restrung.  New wire is cheap.  The corral poles are
scattered right on the spot; only the posts broken off.  We can set
more posts and throw up the new corrals in two days.  The homestead
cabins are only charred.  The old buildings at the ranch are gone.
I'll put a crew in the hills getting out new logs and there'll be
enough out-of-job peelers riding grub-line to rebuild the whole place.
We can put up a few tents for the hands till the new bunk house is
built.  We've got our land.  The hay is tramped flat right now but the
roots aren't hurt.  Next spring will show the whole flat coming up with
a heavy stand of hay."

"You're a good partner, Cal," she said.  "You've done your best.  But
the whole thing would only happen over again.  Slade's too strong for
us."

"Slade's through!" he asserted again.  "He's locked up and when he gets
out his hands will be tied.  Inside of a month the law will be in the
saddle for the first time in years.  Public sentiment is running that
way.  All it ever needed was a start.  Once Alden gets a grip on
things, with folks behind him, he'll never lose it again.  From now on
you'll see every wild one cut short in his career.  Folks will be busy
pointing them out instead of helping them cover it up."

He painted the future of the Three Bar as the foremost outfit within a
hundred miles, but her mind was busy with a future so entirely
different from the one he portrayed that she scarcely grasped his
words.  She felt a vague sense of relief that there was no decision for
her to make.  It had been made for her and against her will, but it was
done.  Always she had heard her parents speak of the day when they
should go back home; and she had always felt that the day would come
when she too would live in the place from which they had come,--with
frequent trips back to the range.  The love for the ranch had delayed
her departure from year to year.  But now the old familiar buildings
were gone and there were no ties to hold her here, or even to call her
back once she was gone.

Harris rose and pointed, rousing her from her abstraction.  Down in the
valley below them filed a long line of dusty horsemen.  Behind them
came two men wrangling a pack string carrying equipment for a long
campaign.

"There is the law!" he said.  "That's what I brought you here to see.
It's what we've been waiting for.  That is the first outfit of its sort
ever to ride these hills.  There have been gangs organized by one brand
or another that rode out and imposed justice of their own, according to
their own ideas--and the next day perpetrated some injustice against
men whose ideas were opposed to theirs.  But that little procession
stands for organized law!"

She turned and looked behind her as her ear caught the thud of hoofs
and jangle of equipment.  The Three Bar men were just topping the ridge.

They had caught up a number of the horses released from the pasture lot
by the stampede.  Calico and her own little horse, Papoose, were among
them.  Waddles and Moore brought up the rear with a pack train loaded
with the bed rolls saved from the bunk-house fire.

Harris knew that action, not inaction was the best outlet for her
energies, temporarily smothered by the shock of the raid.  It was not
in her nature to sit with folded hands among the ruins of the ranch and
patiently wait for news.

"I thought maybe you'd like to go," he said.  "The jaunt will do you
good."

She showed the first sign of interest she had evidenced.

"And we're going to the Breaks," she stated.

"That's where," he said.  "We'll order them to give up and stand trial.
They won't.  Then we'll clean them out.  Hunt them down like rats!
We've only been waiting for folks to wake up to the fact that they were
sick of having the country run by men like Slade and harassed by the
wild bunch--and till after we'd picked up Slade.  The way it's
transpired we'd maybe have done better to ride over a week ago."

The little band in the valley was drawing near.  She recognized Carp,
Bentley and another Slade man riding with the sheriff at their head.

"What's Bentley doing there?" she asked.

"One of Carp's men," Harris said.  "If any of them get away from us
Carp will hound them down.  He wears the U. S. badge and won't be
stopped by any feeling about crossing the Utah or Idaho lines.
Rustling is of no interest to him.  That's the sheriff's job.  But Carp
will round them up for obstructing the homestead laws."

The Three Bar men came up and halted.  Harris and the girl changed
mounts and led their men down to join the file of riders below.  As she
rode she speculated as to Carlos Deane's sensations if he could but
know that she rode at the head of thirty men to raid the stronghold
Harris had once pointed out to him from the rims.

For hours they rode at a shuffling trot that covered the miles.  It was
well after sundown when they halted in a sheltered valley.  Waddles
cooked a meal over an open fire.  Bed rolls were spread and the men
were instantly asleep.  Three hours before sunup the cook was once more
busy round a fire.  The men slept on, undisturbed by the sounds, but
when he issued the summons to rise they rolled out.  In a space of five
minutes every man was eating his meal; for they were possessed of that
characteristic which marks only the men who live strenuously and much
in the open,--the ability to fall instantly asleep after a hard day and
to wake as abruptly, every faculty alert with the opening of their eyes.

The meal was bolted.  The men detailed to guard the horses hazed them
into a rope corral.  Saddles were hastily cinched on and the men rode
off through the gloom, leaving Waddles and three others to pack and
follow later in the day.  Each man lashed a generous lunch on his
saddle before riding off.

They held a stiff trot and in an hour out from camp they struck rough
going, the choppy nature of the country announcing that they were in
the edge of the Breaks.  The horses slid down into cut-bank washes and
bad-land cracks, following the bottoms to some feasible point of ascent
in the opposite wall.  Daylight found them twenty miles from camp and
the horses were breathing hard.  They turned into a coulee threaded by
a well-worn trail.  Three miles along this Bentley turned to the right
up a branching gulch with eight men.  Another mile and Carp led a
similar detachment off to the left.  Billie rode with the sheriff and
Harris at the head of the rest, holding to the beaten trail.

"They had hours the start of us," Harris said.  "They'd catch up fresh
horses on the range and keep on till they got in sometime in the night."

He motioned to Billie.

"You fall back," he said.  The men had drawn their rifles from the
scabbards.  "They never did post a guard.  It wouldn't occur to Lang
that such a force could be mustered and start out short of a month.  If
he thought so they'd be out of here and scattered instead of having a
lookout along the trail.  But there's just a chance.  So for a little
piece you'd better bring up the rear."

She started to dissent but the sheriff seconded Harris's advice.

"You move along back, Billie," he said.  He patted her shoulder and
smiled.  "I'm a-running this layout and if you don't mind the old
sheriff he'll have to picket you."

She nodded and pulled Papoose out of the trail till the others filed
by, riding with Horne in rear of the rest.

The party halted while Harris dismounted to examine the trail.  It was
hard-packed but the scant signs showed that shod horses had come in
since any had gone out.

"At least, there's some of them back," he said.  "Likely all."

"Lang is busy gloating over the fact that the Three Bar is sacked,"
Alden said.  "Figuring that the whole country will be afraid of him now
and that his friends will stand by--without a thought that his neck
will maybe get stretched a foot long before night."

Harris turned up a side pocket and the men waited while he and the
sheriff climbed a ridge on foot to investigate.  Harris motioned to the
girl.

"Come along up where you can see," he said and she followed them up the
ridge.  Two hundred yards from the horses they came out on a crest
which afforded a view of the basin that sheltered Lang's stockade.

From behind a sage-clump Harris trained his glasses on the group a mile
out across the shallow basin.  Smoke rose from the chimney of the main
building.  Two men stood before a teepee near the stockade.  There were
two other tents inside the structure, with a number of men moving about
them.  Three sat on the ground with their backs against the log walls
of the main house.  Thirty or more horses fed in a pasture lot and a
little band of eight or ten stood huddled together inside the stockade
at the far end from the tents.

He handed his glasses to the girl.

"We'll be starting," he said.  "By the time we get fixed the rest will
be closing in.  You stay here and watch the whole thing."

"I'm going along," she said.

The sheriff demurred.

"It will be dirty business down there--once we start," he said.
"Business for men; and you're a better man than most of us, girl; but
you surely didn't reckon that Cal and me would let you go careening
down in gunshot of that hornet's nest."

"I'm as good a shot as there is in the hills," she said.  "And it was
my ranch they burned."

The sheriff shoved back his hat and pushed his fingers through his mop
of gray hair.

"Fact," he confessed.  "Every word.  But there's swarms of men in this
country--and such a damn scattering few of girls that we just can't
take the risk.  That's how it is.  If you don't promise to stay out of
it we'll have to detail a couple of the boys to ride guard on you till
it's over with."

She knew that the other men would back Harris and Alden in their
verdict.  She nodded and watched them turn back toward the horses.  She
wanted to lead her men down in a wild charge on the stockade, shooting
into it as she rode, avenging the sack of the Three Bar in a smashing
fight.

But there was nothing spectacular in the attack of Harris and the
sheriff.  They went about it as if hunting vermin, cautiously and
systematically, taking every possible advantage of the enemy with the
least possible risk to their men.

An hour after the two men had left her she saw a figure off to the
right.  She trained the glasses on it and saw that it was Alden moving
toward the buildings.  She swept the glasses round the edge of the
circular basin.  From all sides, from the mouth of every coulee that
opened into it, dark specks were converging upon the stockade.  Some of
them stood erect, others crouched, while a few sprawled flat and
crawled for short distances before rising and moving on.

From her point of vantage it seemed that those round the buildings must
see them as clearly as she did herself; but she knew they were keeping
well out of sight, taking advantage of every concealing wave of ground
and all inequalities of surface.  The advance was slower as they closed
in on the stockade.  There was a sudden commotion among the men at the
buildings.  They were moving swiftly under cover.  Some of the
attacking force had been seen.  The majority of the rustlers took to
the stockade.  Four ran into the main cabin.

It was as if she gazed upon the activities of battling ants, the whole
game spread out in the field of her glasses.  There came a lull in the
action and she knew that the sheriff had raised his voice to summon
them to come out without their guns and go back as prisoners to stand
trial for every crime under the sun.

Not a shot had been fired.  One after another she picked up the men
with her glasses.  Occasionally one moved, hitching himself forward to
some point which afforded a better view.  One or two knelt in the
bottom of shallow draws, peering from behind some sheltering bush.
Inside the stockade she could see Lang's men kneeling or flattened on
the ground as they gazed through cracks in the walls.

She made out Harris, crouching in a draw.  A thin haze of smoke spurted
from his position.  Three similar puffs showed along the face of the
stockade.  Then the sounds of the shots drifted to her,--faint, snappy
reports.  Harris had dropped flat and shifted his position the instant
he fired.  A dozen shots answered the smoke-puffs along the stockade.

Throughout the next half-hour there was not a shot fired in the flat;
no general bombardment, no wild shooting, but guerilla warfare where
every man held his fire for a definite human target.  A man shifted his
position in the stockade, raised to peer from a hole breast high, and
she saw him pitch down on the ground before the sound of the shot
reached her.  One of her men had noted the darkening of the crack and
had searched him out with a rifle shot.  Three shots answered it from
the main cabin.

The thud of hoofs on the trail below drew her eyes that way.  Waddles
was riding out into the basin.  He had brought the pack string up to
some point near at hand and deserted it to the care of the others while
he rode on ahead to join in the fight.  He was almost within gunshot of
the place before he dismounted and allowed the horse to graze.  She
watched his progress as he covered the last half-mile on foot.  He had
discarded his heavy chaps, his blue and white shirt and overalls giving
him the appearance of some great striped beetle as he crawled up a
shallow ravine.  The figures were small from distance, even when viewed
through the glasses, thus lending her a feeling of detachment and
lessening the personal element and the grim reality of the scene.
Rather it was as if she gazed into some instrument which portrayed the
moves of mannikins; yet the scene wholly absorbed her interest.

Waddles cautiously raised his head for a view of the stockade and she
could see his convulsive duck as a rifle ball tossed up a spurt of
gravel round it.  The man who had fired the shot went down as the
sheriff drilled the spot where a faint haze of smoke had shown.

She presently noted one of her men sitting under a sheltering bank and
eating his lunch.  She looked at her watch; it was after three,--the
day more than half gone and less than a hundred shots had been fired.
Five men were down in the stockade.

The sun was sinking and the higher points along the west edge of the
basin were sending long shadows out across the flats before there was
further action except for an occasional shifting of positions.  Those
remaining alive in the stockade were saddling the bunch of horses kept
inside.  These were led close under the fence on her side where she
could no longer see them.

The shadows lengthened rapidly and her view through the glasses was
beginning to blur when the gates of the stockade swung back and five
horses dashed out, running at top speed under the urge of the spurs.  A
rider leaned low upon the neck of each horse and they scattered wide as
they fanned out across the basin, a wild stampede for safety, every man
for himself.

She saw one man lurch sidewise and slip to the ground; another
straightened in the saddle, swung for two jumps, and slid off backwards
across the rump of his mount.  She saw the great striped bug which was
Waddles rise to his knees in the path of a third.  The rider veered his
mount and swung from the saddle, clinging along the far side of the
running horse.  Then man and horse went down together and neither rose.
Waddles had shot straight through the horse and reached the mark on the
other side.  The shooting ceased when six shots had been fired.  Four
riderless horses were careening round the basin.  Five hits out of six,
she reflected; perhaps six straight hits.

The stockade was empty, leaving only the four in the house to be
accounted for.  The dark specks in the brush were working closer to the
house, effectually blocking escape.  Then she could no longer make them
out.  The building showed only as a darker blot in the obscurity.  A
tiny point of light attracted her eye.  It grew and spread.  She knew
that one of her men had crawled up under cover of night and fired the
house.  It was now but a question of minutes, but the sight oppressed
her.  She thought of the burning buildings on the Three Bar and rose to
make her way back to the pocket where the horses had been left in the
care of a deputy.

"It will be over in an hour," she told the horse guard.

All through the day she had scarcely moved and she was tired.  The
hours of inactivity had proved more wearing than a day in the saddle.
Harris and the sheriff came in with their detail.

There were no prisoners.

"So they wouldn't give up even when they was burnt out," the horse
guard commented.  "I thought maybe a few would march out and surrender."

"I'd sort of hoped we'd have one or two left over so we could put on a
trial," the sheriff said.  "There was three come out.  But the light
was poor and all.  Maybe they did aim to surrender.  It's hard to say.
But if they did--why, some of the Three Bar boys read the signs wrong.
Anyway, there won't be any trial."

They rode to the sheltered box canyon where Waddles had left the pack
train.  A little later Bentley's men rode up and five minutes behind
them came Carp with the rest.  The bed rolls were spread among the
stunted cedars on the floor of the canyon and all hands turned in.  At
daylight the long return journey to the Three Bar was commenced.  The
horses were tired and the back trip was slow.  They camped for the
night twenty miles out from the ranch and before noon of the next day
the sheriff and the marshals had split off with their men, leaving the
Three Bar crew to ride the short intervening space to the ranch alone.

As she neared the edge of the Crazy Loop valley the girl dreaded the
first glimpse of the pillaged ranch.  For the first time it occurred to
her to wonder at the speed with which Harris had planned and executed
the return raid while the Three Bar still burned.

"How did you get word to them all?" she asked.  "Did you have it all
planned before?"

"It was Carp," he said.  "One of Lang's men rode down to inquire for
Morrow and told Carp the cows were gathered for the run and held near
the Three Bar.  They figured Carp was a pal of Morrow's and all right.
It was near morning then.  Carp sent Bentley fanning for Coldriver to
see if the sheriff was back and to bring out the posse if he hadn't
turned up.  He started out for the Three Bar himself.  The run was
under way when he came in sight so he cut over and headed the mule
teams at the forks and turned them back, then kept on after the boys at
Brill's.  Sent word to me by Evans to meet them where we did."

She did not hear the latter part of his explanation for they had
reached the edge of the valley and she looked down upon the ruins of
her ranch.

"Now I'm ready to go," she said.  "I'll go and see what Judge Colton
wants."

"He wanted you to get away before anything like this occurred," Harris
said.  "I knew that maybe we'd have tough going for a while at some
critical time and wanted you to miss all of that--to come back and find
the Three Bar booming along without having been through all the grief.
So I wrote him to urge you to come."

"Well, I'm going now," she said.  "I don't need to be urged."

Three of the homesteaders had been detailed to stay at the ranch.  They
were putting up a temporary fence across the lower end to hold range
stock back from the trampled crops until a permanent one could be built
and linked up with the side fences which still stood intact.  She
showed no interest in this.  The sight below turned her weak and sick.
She wanted but to get away from it all.

Harris pointed as they rode down the slope.  The little cabin that old
Bill Harris had first erected on the Three Bar, and which had later
sheltered the Warrens when they came into possession of the brand,
stood solid and unharmed among the blackened ruins which hemmed it in
on all sides.

"Look, girl!" he exclaimed triumphantly.

"Look at that little house.  The Three Bar was started with that!  We
have as much as our folks started with--and more.  They even had to
build that.  We'll start where our folks did and grow."




XVI

Harris sat on a baggage truck and regarded the heap of luggage
somberly.  Way off in the distance a dark blot of smoke marked the
location of the onrushing train which would take the Three Bar girl
away.

"Some day you'll be wanting to come back, old partner," he predicted
hopefully.

Billie shook her head.  There is a certain relief which floods the
heart when the worst has passed.  Looking forward and anticipating the
possible ruin of the Three Bar, she had thought such a contingency
would end her interest in life and she had resolutely refused to look
beyond it into the future.  Now that it was wrecked in reality she
found that she looked forward with a faint interest to what the future
held in store for her,--that it was the past in which her interest was
dead.

"Not dead, girl; only dormant," Harris said, when she remarked upon
this fact.  "Like a seed in frozen ground.  In the spring it will come
to life and sprout.  The Three Bar isn't hurt.  We're in better shape
than ever before and a clear field out in front; for the country is
cleaned up and the law is clamped on top."

She honestly tried to rouse a spark of interest deep within her, some
ray of enthusiasm for the future of the Three Bar.  But there was no
response.  She assured herself again that the old brand which had meant
so much to her meant less than nothing now.  That part of her was dead.

The trail of smoke was drawing near and there was a rhythmic clicking
along the rails.  Harris leaned and kissed her.

"Just once for luck," he said, and slipped from his seat on the truck
as the train roared in.  It halted with a screech of brakes and he
handed her up the steps.

"Good-by, little fellow," he said.  "I'll see you next round-up time."

As the train slid away from the station she looked from her window and
saw him riding up the single street on the big paint-horse.  The train
cleared the edge of the little town and passed the cattle chute.  A
long white line through the sage marked the course of the Coldriver
Trail.  Three wagons, each drawn by four big mules, moved toward the
cluster of buildings which comprised the town, the freighters on their
way to haul out materials for the rebuilding of the ranch.

The work was going on but she no longer had a share in it.  She was
looking ahead and planning a future in which the Three Bar played no
part.

Deane was with Judge Colton, her father's old friend, to meet her at
the station.  The news of the Three Bar fight had preceded her and the
press had given it to the world, including her part of it.  As they
rode toward the Colton home she told the Judge she had come to stay and
Deane was content.  After the strenuous days she had just passed
through she needed a long period of rest, he reflected; but the older
man smiled when he suggested this.

"What she needs now is action," he said.  "And no rest at all.  If it
was me I'd try to wear her down instead of resting her up--keep her
busy from first to last.  Cal Warren's girl isn't the sit-around type."

Deane acted on this and no day passed without his having planned a part
of it to help fill her time.  Her interest in the new life was genuine
and she was conscious of no active regret at parting from the old.  It
was so different as to seem part of another world.  The people she met,
their mode of life, their manner of speech; all were foreign to the
customs of the range.  And this very dissimilarity kept her interest
alive until she grew to feel that she belonged.

All through the fall and early winter she had scarcely an idle hour.
Her days here were almost as fully occupied as they had been before.
And in the late winter, after having visited other school friends who
lived farther east, she found herself anticipating the return to the
Colton home as eagerly as always in the past she had looked forward to
seeing the Three Bar after a long period away from it.

The grip of winter was receding and a few of the hardier trees were
putting out buds when she returned.  Every evening Deane was with her
and together they planned the next, as once she and Harris had planned
before her fireplace in the old ranch house.  For the first time in her
life she was glad to be sheltered and pampered as were other girls.
Gliding servants anticipated her wishes and carried them out.  But with
it all there was a growing restlessness within her,--a vague
dissatisfaction for which she could not account.  She groped for an
answer but the analysis could not be expressed or definitely cleared in
her mind.

She sat in the Colton library waiting for Deane to come and take her to
a lakeside clubhouse for the evening.  Tiny leaves showed on the trees
and the lawn was a smooth velvet green.

Slade's words of the long ago recurred to her.

"A soft front lawn to range in," she quoted aloud.  The reason for her
restlessness came with the words.

Deane planned with her of evenings but the planning was all of play.
No word of work crept into it.  If only he would accept her as wholly
into that part of his life as he did into the rest.  She suddenly felt
that he was excluding her from something it was her right to share.
Their planning together was not constructive but something which led
nowhere, a restless, hectic rush for amusements which she enjoyed but
which could not make up the whole of her life.  Always she had said
that men went to extremes and made of their wives either drudges or
little tinsel queens.  They never followed the middle course and made
them full partners through thick and thin.

And suddenly she longed to sit for just one evening before the fire and
plan real work with Cal Harris.  He had been the one man she had known
who had asked that she work with him, instead of insisting that she
work for him,--or that he should work for her.  She had drifted along,
expecting that that same state of affairs would go on indefinitely,
believing that he filled the void left by old Cal Warren.  But now she
knew he held that place he had created for himself.  They had worked
together and she had deserted the sinking ship to play the part of the
tinsel queen.

The men would be just in from the horse round-up and breaking out the
remuda, preparatory to starting after the calves.  She pictured Waddles
bawling the summons to feed from the cook-house door.  She was
conscious of a flare--half of resentment, half of apprehension--toward
Harris for not having sent a word of affairs at the ranch.

"There's millions of miles of sage just outside," she quoted.  "And
millions of cows--and girls."  Perhaps he had gone in search of them.
Perhaps, after all, he had found that the road to the outside was not
really closed as he had once told her it was.

Judge Colton entered the room and interrupted her reverie by handing
her a paper.  In the first black headline she saw Slade's name and
Harris's; an announcement of the last chapter of the Three Bar war.

The first line of the article stated that Slade, the cattle king, had
been released.  There was insufficient proof to convict on any count.
She felt a curious little shiver of fear for Harris with Slade once
more at large.  The article retold the old tale of the fight and
portrayed Slade, on his release, viewing the range which he had once
controlled and finding a squatter family on every available ranch site.

She had a flash of sympathy for Slade as she thought his sensations
must have been similar to her own when she had looked upon the ruins of
the Three Bar.  But this was blotted out by the knowledge that he had
only met the same treatment he had handed to so many others; that he
had dropped into the trap he had built for her.  She found no real
sympathy for Slade,--only fear for Harris since Slade was freed.  The
old sense of responsibility for her brand had been worn too long to be
shed at will.  She knew that now.

"I suppose you'll be surprised to hear that I'm going back," she said.

Her father's old friend smiled across at her and puffed his pipe.

"Surprised!" he said.  "Why, I've known all along you'd be going back
before long.  I could have told you that when you stepped off the
train."

He left her alone with Deane when the younger man arrived.  She plunged
into her subject at once.

"I'm sorry," she said.  "But I'm going home.  I'm not cut out for
this--not for long at one time.  In ten days they'll be rounding up the
calves and I'll have to be there.  I want to smell the round-up fire
and slip my twine on a Three Bar calf; to throw my leg across a horse
and ride, and feel the wind tearing past.  I'm longing to watch the
boys topping off bad ones in the big corral and jerking Three Bar
steers.  It will always be like that with me.  So this is good-by."

Four days later, in the early evening, the stage pulled into Coldriver
with a single passenger.  The boys were in from a hundred miles around
for one last spree before round-up time.  As the stage rolled down the
single street the festivities were in full swing.  From one lighted
doorway came the blare of a mechanical piano accompanied by the scrape
of feet; the sound of drunken voices raised in song issued from the
next; the shrill laughter of a dance-hall girl, the purr of the ivory
ball and the soft clatter of chips, the ponies drowsing at the hitch
rails the full length of the street, the pealing yelp of some
over-enthusiastic citizen whose night it was to howl; all these were
evidences of the wide difference between her present surroundings and
those of the last eight months.  She gazed eagerly out of the stage
window.  It was good to get back.

Both the driver and the shotgun guard who rode beside him were new men
on the job since she had left and neither of them knew the identity of
their passenger.  As the stage neared the rambling log hotel where she
would put up for the night a compact group of riders swung down the
street.  Her heart seemed to stop as she recognized the big paint-horse
at their head.  She had not fully realized how much she longed to see
Cal Harris.  As they swept past she recognized man after man in the
light that streamed from the doorways and dimly illuminated the wide
street.

Instead of dismounting in a group they suddenly split up, as if at a
given signal, scattering the length of the block and dismounting
singly.  There was something purposeful in this act and a vague
apprehension superseded the rush of gladness she had experienced with
the first unexpected view of the Three Bar crew.  Men who stood on the
board sidewalks turned hastily inside the open doors as they glimpsed
the riders, spreading the news that the Three Bar had come to town.
The driver pulled up in front of the one hotel.

"It'll come off right now," he said.  "Slade's in town."

"Sure," the guard replied.  "Why else would Harris ride in at night
like this unless in answer to Slade's threat to shoot him down on
sight?  Get the girl inside."

The reason for the scattering was now clear to her.  Slade, on his
release, had announced that he would kill Harris on sight whenever he
appeared in town.  Slade had many friends.  The Three Bar men were
scattered the length of the street to enforce fair play.

The guard opened the door and motioned her out but she shook her head.

"I'm going to stay here," she asserted.

Her answer informed him of the fact that she was no casual visitor but
one who knew the signs and would insist on seeing it through.  He
nodded and shut the door.

Harris had dismounted at the far end of the block and was strolling
slowly down the board sidewalk on the opposite side.  Groups of men
packed the doorways, each one striving to appear unconcerned, as if his
presence there was an accident instead of being occasioned by knowledge
that something of interest would soon transpire.  A man she knew for a
Slade rider moved out to the edge of the sidewalk across the street
from Harris.  She saw the lumbering form of Waddles edging up beside
him.  Other Three Bar boys were watching every man who showed a
disposition to detach himself from the groups in the doors.  The blare
of the piano and all sounds of revelry had hushed.

The girl felt the clutch of stark fear at her heart.  She had come too
late.  Harris was to meet Slade.  It seemed that she must die with him
if he should pass out before she could speak to him again and tell him
she was back.  She had a wild desire to run to him,--at least to lean
from the window and call out to him to mount Calico and ride away.  But
she knew he would not.  She was frontier bred.  Even the knowledge that
she was in town might unsteady him now.  She sat without a move and the
driver and guard outside supposed her merely a curious on-looker
interested in the scene.

"A hundred on Harris," the driver offered.

The guard grunted a refusal.

"I'd bet that way myself," he said.

From this she knew that the two men were hoping Harris would be the one
to survive; but the fact that their proffered bets backed their
sentiments was no proof that they felt the conviction of their desire.
She knew the men of their breed.  No matter how small the chance, their
money would inevitably be laid on the side of their wishes, never
against them, as if the wagering of a long shot was proof of their
confidence and might in some way exercise a favorable influence on the
outcome.  No man had ever stood against Slade.  She noted Harris's gun.
He carried it with the same awkward sling as of old, on the left side
in front with the butt to the right.

"Fifty on Slade," a voice offered from the doorway of the hotel.  The
guard started for the spot but the bet was snapped up by another.  Wild
fighting rage swept through her at the thought that to all these men it
was but a sporting event.

Her eyes never once left Harris as he came down the street.  When
almost abreast of the stage Slade stepped from a doorway twenty feet in
before him and stopped in his tracks.  Harris turned on one heel and
stood with his left side quartering toward Slade,--the old pose she
remembered so well.  There was a tense quiet the length of the street.

"Those you hire do poor work from behind," Harris said.  "Maybe you
sometimes take a chance yourself and work from in front."  His thumb
was hooked in the opening of his shirt just above the butt of his gun.

Slade held a cigarette in his right hand and raised it slowly to his
lips.  He removed it and flicked the ash from the end, then inspected
the results and snapped it again,--and the downward move of his wrist
was carried through in a smooth sweep for his gun.  It flashed into his
hand but his knees sagged under him as a forty-five slug struck him an
inch above the buckle of his belt.  Even as he toppled forward he
fired, and Harris's gun barked again.  Then the Three Bar men were
vaulting to their saddles.  Evans careened down the street, leading the
paint-horse, and within thirty seconds after Slade's first move for his
gun a dozen riders were turning the corner on the run.  Before the
spectators had time to realize that it was over, the Three Bar men were
gone.  Slade had many friends in town.

The girl had seen Harris's draw, merely a single pull from left to
right and by his quartering pose the gun had been trained on Slade at
the instant it cleared the holster; not one superfluous move, even to
the straightening of his wrist.  The driver's voice reached her.

"Fastest draw in the world for the few that can use it," he said.

The guard opened the door.  The girl was sitting with her head bowed in
her hands.

"Don't take it that way, Ma'am," he counseled.  "He was a hard
one--Slade."

But he had misread his signs.  She felt no regret for Slade, only a
wave of thankfulness, so powerful as almost to unnerve her, over
Harris's escape, untouched.  She accused herself of callousness but the
spring of her sympathy, usually so ready, seemed dry as dust when she
would have wasted a few drops on Slade.

The next day, in the late afternoon, Harris looked up and saw a
chap-clad rider on the edge of the valley.  She had ridden over
unannounced on a horse she had borrowed from Brill.  She answered the
wave of his hat and urged the horse down the slope.  He met her at the
mouth of the lane and together they walked back to the new buildings of
the ranch.  The men breaking horses in the new corrals were the same
old hands.  The same old Waddles presided over the new cook shack.  Her
old things, rescued from the fire, were arranged in the living room of
the new house.  A row of new storerooms and the shop stood on the site
of the old.  And in the midst of all the improvements the old cabin
first erected on the Three Bar stood protected by a picket fence on
which a few vines were already beginning to climb.

"It didn't take long to throw them up, with all hands working, along in
the winter when there wasn't much else to do," he said.

After the men had quit work to greet the returning Three Bar boss she
went over every detail of the new house.  The big living room and
fireplace were modeled closely along the lines of her old quarters;
heads and furs were on the walls, pelts and Indian rugs on the floors.
Running water had been piped down from a sidehill spring.  The new
house was modernized.  Then Harris saddled Calico and Papoose and they
rode down to the fields.

As they turned into the lane they heard the twang of Waddles's guitar
from the cook shack, the booming voice raised in song in mid-afternoon,
a thing heretofore unheard of in the annals of Three Bar life.

"There'll be one real feast to-night," Harris prophesied.  "Waddles
will spread himself."

They rode past the meadow, covered with a knee-deep stand of alfalfa
hay.

"It was only tramped down," he said.  "She came up in fine shape this
spring.  We'll put up a thousand tons of hay."

He held straight on past the meadow, turned off below the lower fence
and angled southwest across the range.  The calves and yearlings along
their route gave proof that the grading-up of the Three Bar herds was
already having its effect.  Ninety per cent. were straight red stock
with only a few throwbacks to off-color strains.  The two spoke but
little and near sunset they rode out and dismounted on the ridge from
which, almost a year before, they had viewed the first move of
organized law in the Coldriver strip.

A white-topped wagon came toward them up the valley along the same
route followed by the file of dusty riders on that other day.  A woman
held the reins over the team and a curly-haired youngster jostled about
on the seat by her side.  A man wrangled a nondescript drove of horses
and cows in the rear.

"That's the way we both came into this country first, you and I,"
Harris said.  "Just like that little shaver on the seat."

"Will they find a place to settle?" she asked, with a sudden hope that
the newcomers would find a suitable site for a home.

"Maybe not close around here," he said.  "Most of the good sites you
can get water on are picked up.  But they'll find a place either here
or somewhere else a little further on."

He slipped an arm about her shoulders.

"It's been right lonesome planning without a little partner to talk it
all over with at night," he said.  "Have you come back for keeps to
help me make the Three Bar the best outfit in three States?  I can't
hold down that job alone."

She nodded and leaned against him.

"That's what they wanted--old Bill and Cal," she said.  "But it's nice
that we want it too.  I've come for keeps; and the road to the outside
is closed."

They stood and watched the sun pitch over the far edge of the world;
and down in the valley below them the hopeful squatters were looking
for a place to camp.











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