IRONHEART

IRONHEART

BY
WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE

AUTHOR OF
MAN-SIZE, TANGLED TRAILS,
THE FIGHTING EDGE, Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO
ARTHUR CHAPMAN

“But somehow when he’s gone, you think a heap

About his virtues—how he’s square and true;

If more come stringin’ in they’d make it cheap—

This friendship thing—and spoil it all for you.”

CONTENTS

IRONHEART

IRONHEART

CHAPTER I
TURFING IT

A thin wisp of smoke drifted up from the camp at the edge of the wash. It rose languidly, as though affected by the fact that the day was going to be a scorcher. Already, though the morning was young, a fiery sun beat down on the sand so that heat waves shimmered in the air. Occasionally a spark from the crackling cottonwood limbs was caught by a dust whirl and carried toward the field of ripe wheat bordering the creek.

Of the campers there were three, all of the genus tramp, but each a variant. They represented different types, these desert trekkers.

The gross man lying lazily under the shade of a clump of willows might have stepped straight out of a vaudeville sketch. He was dirty and unkempt, his face bloated and dissipated. From his lax mouth projected an English brier pipe, uncleansably soiled. His clothes hung on him like sacks, wrinkled and dusty, but not ragged. He was too good a hobo to wear anything torn or patched. It was his boast that he could get another suit for the asking any time he needed one.

“I’m a blowed-in-the-glass stiff,” he bragged now. “Drilled from Denver to ’Frisco fifteen times, an’ never was a stake man or a shovel bum. Not for a day, ’boes. Ask any o’ the push about old York. They’ll give it to youse straight that he knows the best flops from Cincie to Phillie, an’ that no horstile crew can ditch him when he’s goin’ good.”

York was a hobo pure and simple. It was his business in life. For “stew-bums” and “gay-cats,” to use his own phraseology, he had a supreme contempt. His companions were amateurs, from his point of view non-professionals. Neither of them had any pride in turfing it, which is the blanket stiff’s expression for taking to the road. They did not understand York’s vocabulary nor the ethics that were current in his craft.

Yet the thin, weasel-faced man with the cigarette drooping from his mouth was no amateur in his own line. He had a prison face, the peculiar distortion of one side of the mouth often seen in confirmed criminals. His light-blue eyes were cold and dead. A film veiled them and snuffed out all expression.

“Cig” he called himself, and the name sufficed. On the road surnames were neither asked for nor volunteered. York had sized him up three days before when they had met at Colorado Springs, and he had passed on his verdict to the third member of the party.

“A river rat on a vac—hittin’ the grit for a getaway,” he had whispered.

His guess had been a good one. Cig had been brought up on the East River. He had served time in the penitentiaries of three States and expected to test the hospitality of others. Just now he was moving westward because the East was too hot for him. He and a pal had done a job at Jersey City during which they had been forced to croak a guy. Hence his unwilling expedition to the Rockies. Never before had he been farther from the Atlantic than Buffalo, and the vast uninhabited stretches of the West bored and appalled him. He was homesick for the fetid dumps of New York.

The corner of his mouth lifted in a sneer. “Wot’ell would any one want to cross this Gawd-forsaken country fifteen times for unless he was bughouse?”

“If you read the papes you’d know that travel is a lib’ral ejucation. Difference between a man an’ a tree is that one’s got legs to move around with. You ginks on the East Side act like you’re anchored to the Batt’ry an’ the Bowery. Me, I was born there, but I been batterin’ on the road ever since I was knee-high to a duck. A fellow’s got to throw his feet if he wants to learn,” York announced dogmatically.

There was obvious insult in Cig’s half-closed eyes. “’S at what learned you all youse know?” he asked.

“Don’t get heavy, young feller,” advised the blanket stiff. “I’ve knew guys to stay healthy by layin’ off me.”

The young man cooking breakfast barked a summons. “Come an’ get it.”

The tramps moved forward to eat, forgetting for the moment their incipient quarrel. Into tin cups and plates the cook poured coffee and stew. In his light clean build, slender but well-packed, was the promise of the athlete. His movements disappointed this expectation. He slouched, dragging the worn shoes through the cracks of which the flesh was visible. Of the three, he was the only one that was ragged. The coat he wore, which did not match the trousers, was at the last extremity.

One might have guessed his age at twenty-three or four. If it had not been for the sullen expression in the eyes and the smoldering discontent of the face, he might have been good-looking. The reddish hair was short, crisp, and curly, the eyes blue as the Colorado summer sky above, the small head well-shaped and beautifully poised on the sloping column of the neck.

Yet the impression he made on observers was not a pleasant one. His good points were marred by the spirit that found outlet in a sullen manner that habitually grudged the world a smile. He had the skin pigment of the blond, and in the untempered sun of the Rockies should have been tanned to a rich red-brown. Instead, the skin was clammily unhealthy. The eyes were dulled and expressionless.

York ate wolfishly, occasionally using the sleeve of his coat for a napkin. He talked, blatantly and continuously. Cig spoke only at rare intervals, the cook not at all. Within the silent man there simmered a nausea of disgust that included himself and all the universe in which he moved.

In the underworld caste rules more rigidly than in upper strata of society. The sense of superiority is everywhere an admission of weakness. It is the defense of one who lives in a glass house. Since all of these men were failures, each despised the others and cherished his feeling that they were inferior.

“You ’boes turf it with York an’ you’ll always have plenty o’ punk and plaster,” the old tramp swaggered. “Comes to batterin’ I’m there with bells on.”

Translated into English, he meant that if they traveled with him they would have bread and butter enough because he was a first-class beggar.

“To hear youse chew the rag you’re a wiz, ain’t you?” Cig jeered. “I ain’t noticed you diggin’ up any Ritz-Carlton lunches a guy can write home about. How about it, Tug?”

The cook grunted.

“Me, I can tell a mark far as I can see him—know whether he’s good for a flop or a feed,” York continued. “Onct I was ridin’ the rods into Omaha—been punchin’ the wind till I was froze stiff, me ’n’ a pal called Seattle. Shacks an’ the con tried to ditch us. Nothin’ doing. We was right there again when the wheels began to move. In the yards at Omaha we bumps into a gay-cat—like Tug here. He spills the dope that the bulls are layin’ for us. Some mission stiff had beefed on me. No guy with or without brass buttons can throw a scare into old York. No can do. So I says to Seattle, says I—”

York’s story died in his throat. He stood staring, mouth open and chin fallen.

Two men were standing on the edge of the bluff above the bed of the creek. He did not need a second look to tell him that they had come to make trouble.

CHAPTER II
“DE KING O’ PROOSHIA ON DE JOB”

To Reed came his foreman Lon Forbes with a story of three tramps camping down by Willow Creek close to the lower meadow wheatfield.

The ranchman made no comment, unless it was one to say, “Get out the car.” He was a tight-lipped man of few words, sometimes grim. His manner gave an effect of quiet strength.

Presently the two were following the winding road through the pasture. A field of golden wheat lay below them undulating with the roll of the land. Through it swept the faintest ripple of quivering grain. The crop was a heavy one, ripe for the reaper. Dry as tinder, a spark might set a blaze running across the meadow like wildfire.

Forbes pointed the finger of a gnarled hand toward a veil of smoke drifting lazily from the wash. “Down there, looks like.”

His employer nodded. They descended from the car and walked along the edge of the bank above the creek bed. Three men sat near a camp-fire. One glance was enough to show that they were hoboes. Coffee in an old tomato can was bubbling over some live coals set between two flat stones.

The big man with the bloated face was talking. The others were sulkily silent, not so much listening as offering an annoyed refusal to be impressed. The boaster looked up, and the vaporings died within him.

“What you doing here?” demanded Reed. His voice was curt and hostile.

York, true to type, became at once obsequious. “No offense, boss. If these here are private grounds—”

“They are,” the owner cut in sharply.

“Well, we’ll hit the grit right away. No harm done, mister.” The voice of the blanket stiff had become a whine, sullen and yet fawning.

His manner irritated both of his companions. Cig spoke first, out of the corner of his mouth, slanting an insolent look up at the ranchman.

“Youse de traffic cop on dis block, mister?”

Lon Forbes answered. “We know your sort an’ don’t want ’em here. Shack! Hit the trail pronto! No back talk about it either.”

Cig looked at the big foreman. “Gawd!” he jeered. “Wotcha know about that? De king o’ Prooshia on de job again.”

The bluff tanned Westerner took a step or two toward the ferret-faced man from the slums. Hurriedly York spoke up. He did not want anything “started.” There were stories current on the road of what ranchmen had done to hoboes who had made trouble. He knew of one who had insulted a woman and had been roped and dragged at a horse’s heels till half dead.

“We ain’t doin’ no harm, boss. But we’ll beat it ’f you say so. Gotta roll up our war bags.”

Reed did not discuss the question of the harm they were doing. He knew that a spark might ignite the wheat, but he did not care to plant the suggestion in their minds. “Put out the fire and move on,” he said harshly.

“De king o’ Prooshia an’ de clown prince,” Cig retorted with a lift of his lip.

But he shuffled forward and began to kick dirt over the fire with the toe of his shoe.

Reed turned to the youngest tramp. “Get water in that can,” he ordered.

“I don’ know about that.” Up till now the tramp called Tug had not said a word. “I’m not your slave. Get water yourself if you want to. Able-bodied, ain’t you?”

The rancher looked steadily at him, and the longer he looked, the less he liked what he saw. A stiff beard bristled on the sullen face of the tramp. He was ragged and disreputable from head to heel. In the dogged eyes, in straddling legs, in the half-clenched fist resting on one hip, Reed read defiance. The gorge of the Westerner rose. The country was calling for men to get in its harvests. His own crops were ripe and he was short of hands. Yet this husky young fellow was a loafer. He probably would not do a day’s work if it were offered him. He was a parasite, the kind of ne’er-do-well who declines to saw wood for a breakfast, metaphorically speaking.

“Don’t talk back to me. Do as I say. Then get out of here.”

Reed did not lift his voice. It was not necessary. As he stood on the bank above the sand bed he conveyed an impression of strength in every line of his solid body. Even the corduroy trousers he wore folded into the short laced boots seemed to have fallen into wrinkles that expressed power. Close to fifty, the sap of virile energy still flowed in his veins.

The fist on Tug’s hip clenched. He flushed angrily. “Kind of a local God Almighty on tin wheels,” he said with a sneer.

York was rolling up his pack. Cig, grumbling, had begun to gather his belongings. But the youngest tramp gave no evidence of an intention to leave. Nor did he make a move to get water to put out the still smoldering fire.

The rancher came down from the bank. Forbes was at his elbow. The foreman knew the signs of old. Reed was angry. Naturally imperious, he did not allow any discussion when clearly within his rights. He would not waste his force on such a spineless creature as York, but the youngest tramp was of a different sort. He needed a lesson, and Lon judged he was about to get one.

“Hear me? Get water and douse that fire,” the ranchman said.

His steel-gray eyes were fastened to those of Tug. The tramp faced him steadily. Forbes had a momentary surprise. This young fellow with the pallid dead skin looked as though he would not ask for anything better than a fight.

“Get it yourself,” the hobo flung back.

The right fist of the ranchman lifted swiftly. It did not move far, but it carried great power back of it. The tramp’s head snapped backward. His shoulders hit the sand. He had been caught on the point of the jaw by a knock-out punch.

Tug came back to consciousness under the impression that he was drowning in deep waters. Cig was dipping a can in the creek and sousing its contents over his head. He sat up dizzily. His uncertain gaze fell on some one who had arrived since his exit from activity.

She was a young woman on horseback. He noticed that she was slender and had a good seat. Her dark eyes watched him.

Who was she? What the dickens was she doing here? Where was he anyhow?

His glance swept the scene. York was stamping out the last embers of the fire. There was a bruise on Cig’s cheek and one of his eyes was rapidly closing. From the fact that Forbes was examining abraded knuckles it was an easy guess that he had been in action.

The rancher, hands in coat pockets, relieved his mind in regard to the youth he had knocked out. “You’re a good-for-nothing loafer, not fit to live in a country that treats you too well. If I had charge of wastrels like you, I’d put you on the rock-pile and work you to a frazzle. What use are you, to yourself or any one else? When you were needed to fill a uniform, I’ll bet a dollar you were a slacker. You still are. A worthless, rotten-to-the-core hobo. Now get up and get off my land or I’ll give you that thrashing you need.”

Tug got up, swayed unsteadily on his feet, and lurched forward. In his eyes, still dull and glazed from the shock his nervous system had endured, a gleam of anger came to life. He was a slacker, was he? All right. He would show this arrogant slave-driver that he could stand up and take all he had to give.

His rush was a poor leaden-footed shuffle, for he was shaky at the knees and weights dragged at his feet. The blow he aimed at Reed missed the brown face half a foot. It was badly timed and placed. The ranchman’s counter caught him flush on the cheekbone and flung him back.

Again he gathered himself and plunged forward. Clinton Reed belonged to the old fighting West. He had passed through the rip-roaring days of Leadville’s prime and later had been a part of Cripple Creek’s turbid life. Always he had been a man of his hands. He punished his dazed opponent with clean hard blows, most of them started at short range to save his own fists from the chance of broken or dislocated bones.

The tramp fell into a clinch to get time for recovery. Reed jolted him out of it with a short arm left below the chin and followed with two slashing rights to the face.

The hobo was in a bad way. In ring parlance, he was what is known as groggy. His arms moved slowly and without force back of the blows. His knees sagged. There was a ringing in his head. He did not seem able to think clearly.

But the will in him functioned to push him to more punishment. He attacked feebly. Through a weak defense the ranchman’s driving arms tore cruelly.

Tug went down again. He tried to rise, but in spite of the best he could do was unable to get up. The muscles of the legs would not coöperate with the will.

Some one in khaki riding-breeches flashed past him. “That’s enough, Dad. I don’t care if he was impudent. You’ve hurt him enough. Let him go now.”

The figure was the boyish one of the equestrienne, but the high indignant voice was feminine enough.

“S’pose you try minding your own business, Bess,” her father said quietly.

“Now, Dad,” she expostulated. “We don’t want any trouble, do we? Make ’em move on, and that’s enough.”

“Tha’s what we’re doin’, Betty,” explained the foreman. “It ain’t our fault if there’s a rookus. We told ’em to light out, an’ they got sassy.”

Tug rose with difficulty. He was a badly hammered hobo. Out of swollen and discolored eyes he looked at the ranchman.

“You quite through with me?” he snarled.

It was a last growl of defiance. His companions were already clambering with their packs out of the wash to the bank above.

“Not quite.” Clint Reed took his daughter by the shoulders and spun her out of the way when she tried to stop him. “Be fresh if you want to, my young wobbly. I reckon I can stand it if you can.” He whirled the tramp round and kicked him away.

“Oh, Dad! Fighting with a tramp,” the girl wailed.

Tug swung round unsteadily, eyes blazing. He took a step toward the rancher. His glance fell on the girl who had just called him a tramp, and in saying it had chosen the last word of scorn. Her troubled, disdainful gaze met his fully. The effect on him was odd. It paralyzed action. He stopped, breathing hard.

She had called him a tramp, as one who belongs to another world might do—a world that holds to self-respect and decency. He had read in her voice utter and complete contempt for the thing he was. It was a bitter moment. For him it stamped the low-water mark of his degradation. He felt beneath her eyes a thing unclean.

What she had said was true. He was a tramp. He had ridden the rods, asked for hand-outs, rough-housed with hoboes, slept with them. He had just been thoroughly thrashed and kicked before her. What was the use of resenting it? He had become declassed. Why should he not be kicked and beaten? That was the customary way to treat his kind of cattle.

Tug swung heavily on a heel and followed his companions into the willows.

CHAPTER III
ONE OF THE LOST LEGION

Among the lost legion are two kinds of men. There are those who have killed or buried so deep the divine fire of their manhood that for them there seems no chance of recovery in this world. There are those in whom still burns somewhere a faint candle that may yet flame to a dynamic glow of self-respect.

The young tramp slouching along the bank of Willow Creek drank deep of the waters of despair. The rancher had called him a slacker, rotten to the core. It was a true bill. He was a man spoiled and ruined. He had thrown away his life in handfuls. Down and dragging, that’s what he was, with this damned vice a ball and chain on his feet.

There was in him some strain of ignoble weakness. There must be, he reasoned. Otherwise he would have fought and conquered the cursed thing. Instead, he had fought and lost. He could make excuses. Oh, plenty of them. The pain—the horrible, intolerable pain! The way the craving had fastened on him before he knew it while he was still in the hospital! But that was piffling twaddle, rank self-deception. A man had to fight, to stand the gaff, to flog his evil yearnings back to kennel like yelping dogs.

His declension had been swift. It was in his temperament to go fast, to be heady. Once he let go of himself, it had been a matter of months rather than of years. Of late he had dulled the edge of his despair. The opiates were doing their work. He had found it easier to live in the squalid present, to forget the pleasant past and the purposeful future he had planned.

But now this girl, slim, clean, high-headed, with that searing contempt for him in her clear eyes, had stirred up again the devils of remorse. What business had he to companion with these offscourings of the earth? Why had he given up like a quitter the effort to beat back?

In the cold waters of the creek he washed his swollen and bloodstained face. The cold water, fresh from the mountain snows, was soothing to the hot bruised flesh even though it made the wounds smart. He looked down into the pool and saw reflected there the image of himself. Beneath the eyes pouches were beginning to form. Soon now he would be a typical dope fiend.

He was still weak from the manhandling that had been given him. Into an inside coat pocket his fingers groped. They brought out with them a small package wrapped in cotton cloth. With trembling hands he made his preparations, bared an arm, and plunged the hypodermic needle into the flesh.

When he took the trail again after his companions, Tug’s eyes were large and luminous. He walked with a firmer step. New life seemed to be flowing into his arteries.

Where the dusty road cut the creek he found the other tramps waiting for him. Their heads had been together in whispered talk. They drew apart as he approached.

Taking note of Cig’s purple eye and bruised face, Tug asked a question. “Was it the big foreman beat you up?”

“You done said it, ’bo,” the crook answered out of the side of his mouth.

“I reckon you got off easy at that,” Tug said bitterly. “The boss bully didn’t do a thing to me but chew me up and spit me out.”

“Wotcha gonna do about it?” Cig growled significantly.

The young fellow’s glance was as much a question as his words. “What can I do but take it?” he asked sullenly.

Cig’s eyes narrowed venomously. He lifted his upper lip in an ugly sneer. “Watch my smoke. No roughneck can abuse me an’ get away with it. I’ll say he can’t.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m gonna fix him.”

Tug’s laughter barked. “Did you fix him when you had a chance?” he asked ironically.

“Call that a chance? An’ the big stiff wide as a door. ’F I’d had a gun I’d ’a’ croaked him.”

“Oh, if!”

“De bulls frisked me gun in Denver. But I’ll get me a gat somewheres. An’ when I do—” The sentence choked out in a snarl more threatening than words.

“Sounds reasonable,” Tug jeered.

“Listen, ’bo.” Cig laid a hand on the sleeve of the young fellow’s coat. “Listen. Are youse game to take a chance?”

Eyes filled with an expression of sullen distaste of Cig looked at him from a bruised and livid face. “Maybe I am. Maybe I ain’t. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m gonna get that bird. See?”

“How?”

“Stick around an’ gun him. Then hop a freight for ’Frisco.”

There was in the lopsided face a certain dreadful eagerness that was appalling. Was this mere idle boasting? Or would the gangster go as far as murder for his revenge? Tug did not know. But his gorge rose at the fellow’s assumption that he would join him as a partner in crime.

“Kill him without giving him a chance?” he asked.

Again there was a sound like the growl of a wild beast in the throat of the Bowery tough. “Wotcha givin’ me! A heluva chance them guys give us when they jumped us. I’ll learn ’em to keep their hands off Cig.” He added, with a crackle of oaths, “The big stiffs!”

“No!” exploded Tug with a surge of anger. “I’ll have nothing to do with it—or with you. I’m through. You go one way. I’ll go another. Right here I quit.”

The former convict’s eyes narrowed. “I getcha. Streak of yellow a foot wide. No more nerve than a rabbit. All right. Beat it. I can’t lose you none too soon to suit me.”

The two glared at each other angrily.

York the peacemaker threw oil on the ruffled waters. “’S all right, ’boes. No use gettin’ sore. Tug he goes one way, we hit the grit another. Ev’rybody satisfied.”

Tug swung his roll of blankets across a shoulder and turned away.

CHAPTER IV
BETTY RIDES

Betty Reed had watched unhappily the young tramp shuffle into the willows and disappear. She felt depressed by a complex she could not analyze. In part it was shame, for her father, for this tramp who looked as though he were made for better things, for the whole squalid episode; in part pity, not wholly divorced from admiration at the boy’s insolence and courage. He might be a wastrel, as her father had said. He might be a ne’er-do-well. But by some sure instinct she knew that there had been a time when he fronted with high hope to the future. That momentary meeting of the eyes had told her as much.

Something had killed him as surely as a bullet fired through the heart. The boy he had been was dead.

Lon Forbes chuckled. “They’ll keep going, I reckon, now they’ve found out this ain’t no Hotel de Gink. You certainly handed that youngest bum his hat, Clint. I’ll say you did.”

Now that it was over Reed was not very well satisfied with his conduct. The hobo had brought the punishment on himself. Still—there was something morally degrading about such an affray. One can’t touch pitch without paying the penalty.

“We’ll begin cutting this field to-morrow, Lon,” he said shortly. “Hustle the boys up so’s to finish the mesa to-day.” Across his shoulder he flung a question at the girl. “You going to town, Bess?”

“In an hour or so. Want me to do something?” she asked.

“Call at Farrell’s and see if he’s got in those bolts I ordered.”

The ranchman strode to the car followed by Forbes. The foreman was troubled by no doubts. His mind functioned elementally. If hoboes camped on the Diamond Bar K and made themselves a danger to the crops, they had to be hustled on their way. When they became insolent, it was necessary to treat them rough. That was all there was to it.

Betty swung to the saddle and rode back to the house. She was returning from an inspection of a bunch of two-year-olds that were her own private property. She was rather well off in her own right, as the ranch country counts wealth. The death of her uncle a year before had left her financially independent.

As Betty cantered into the open square in front of the house, her father and the foreman were getting out of the car. A chubby, flaxen-haired little lass came flying down the porch steps a-quiver with excited delight.

“Oh, Daddy, Daddy, what d’you fink? I went out to the barn an’—an’—an’ I fink Fifi’s got puppies, ’cause she—she—”

“Thought I told you to stay away from the barn,” the ranchman chided.

His harsh voice dried up the springs of the child’s enthusiasm. She drew back as though she had been struck. From the winsome, wee face the eager, bubbling delight vanished, the enchanting dimples fled. The blue eyes became wells of woe. A small finger found the corner of the Cupid’s-bow mouth.

Clint Reed, ashamed and angry at himself, turned away abruptly. Little Ruth was the sunshine of his life, the last pledge of his dead wife’s love, and he had deliberately and cruelly wounded her.

Swinging from the saddle, Betty ran to the porch. Her arms enfolded the child and drew her tenderly close. “Ruthie, tell big sister all about it,” she whispered gently.

“D-d-d-daddy—” the sobbing little girl began, and choked up.

“Daddy’s worried, dear. He didn’t mean to hurt your precious little feelings. Tell Betty about Fifi’s puppies, darling.”

Through her tears and between sobs Ruth told her great news. Presently she forgot to weep and was led to the scene of Fifi’s amazing and unique triumph. She gave little squeals of delight when Betty handed her a blind little creature to cuddle in spite of the indignant mother’s protesting growls. The child held the warm white-and-brown puppy close to her bosom and adored it with her eyes. With reluctance she returned it at last.

Ruth’s happiness was quite restored after her sister had given her a glass of milk and a cookie and sent her out to play.

The young woman waved her a smiling good-bye and went to work.

She had some business letters to write and she went to the room that served her as a library and office. The sound of the typewriter keys drifted out of the open window for an hour or more.

The girl worked swiftly. She had a direct mind that found fluent expression through the finger-tips. When she knew what she wanted to say, it was never any trouble for Betty Reed to say it. A small pile of addressed and sealed letters lay in the rack on the desk before she covered the machine.

These she took with her.

Clint Reed she found tinkering with a reaper that had gone temporarily out of service.

“Want anything more, Dad? I’m going now,” she said.

“You’ve got that list I left on the desk. That’s all, except the bolts.”

The sky was a vault of blue. Not even a thin, long-drawn skein of cloud floated above. A hot sun baked down on the dusty road over which Betty traveled. Heat waves danced in front of her. There was no faintest breath of breeze stirring.

The gold of autumn was creeping over the hills. Here and there was a crimson splash of sumac or of maple against the almost universal yellow toning. It seemed that the whole landscape had drunk in the summer sunshine and was giving it out now in a glow of warm wealth.

The girl took a short cut over the hills. The trail led by way of draw, gulch, and open slope to the valley in which Wild Horse lay. She rode through the small business street of the village to the post-office. Here she bought supplies of the storekeeper, who was also post-master.

Battell was his name. He was an amiable and harmless gossip. Wild Horse did not need a newspaper as long as he was there to hand tobacco and local information across the counter. An old maid in breeches, Lon Forbes had once called him, and the description serves well enough. He was a whole village sewing circle in himself. At a hint of slander his small bright eyes would twinkle and his shrunken little body seem to wriggle like that of a pleased pup. Any news was good news to him.

“Mo’ning, Miss Betty. Right hot, I’ll tell the world. Ninety-nine in the shade this very minute. Bart Logan was in to get Doc Caldwell for his boy Tom. He done bust his laig fallin’ from the roof of the root house. Well, Bart was sayin’ your paw needs help right bad to harvest his wheat. Seems like if the gov’ment would send out some of these here unemployed to work on the ranches it would be a good idee. Sometimes Congress acts like it ain’t got a lick o’ sense.”

Betty ordered coffee, sugar, tobacco, and other supplies. While he waited upon her Battell made comment pertinent and impertinent.

“That Mecca brand o’ coffee seems to be right popular. Three pounds for a dollar. O’ course, if it’s for the bunkhouse— Oh, want it sent out to the Quarter Circle D E. How’re you makin’ it on your own ranch, Miss Betty? Some one was sayin’ you would clean up quite a bit from your beef herd this year, mebbe twelve or fifteen thousand. I reckon it was Bart Logan.”

“Is Bart keeping my books for me?” the girl asked dryly.

The storekeeper cackled. “Folks will gossip.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “How much is that corn meal a hundred?”

“Cost you ten cents more’n the last. Folks talk about cost of livin’ coming down. Well, mebbe ’tis an’ mebbe ’tain’t. I told Bart I wouldn’t believe you’d cleared any twelve or fifteen thousand till I heard you say so. That’s a lot of money, if any one asks you.”

Apparently Betty misunderstood him. “Yes, you’re high, but I’ll take two sacks. Send it to the Quarter Circle and charge it to me.”

Betty stopped at the railroad station to ask the agent about a shipment of goods her father was expecting, and from there went to Farrell’s to find out about the bolts.

It was well on toward noon when she took the road for home. At Four-Mile Crossing it intersected the railroad track. A man with a pack on his back was plodding along the ties in the direction of Wild Horse. The instant her eyes fell on him, the girl recognized the tramp her father had beaten. The pallid face was covered with wheals and bruises. Both of the sullen eyes were ringed with purple and black.

They met face to face. Full into hers his dogged gaze challenged. Without a word they passed.

Betty crossed the grade and followed a descent to a small grove of pines close to the road. The sun was so hot that she decided to dismount and give the pony a breathing spell.

From the saddle she swung, then trailed the reins and loosened the cinch.

A sound brought her head round sharply. Two men had come over the brow of a little hill silently. One of them was almost at her elbow. A twisted, malevolent grin was on his lips. He was the hobo Lon Forbes had thrashed two or three hours ago.

“Welcome to our city, goil,” he jeered in choice Boweryese. “Honest to Gawd, you knock me dead. Surest thing you know. We’ll treat you fine, not like your dad an’ that other big stiff did us. We’ll not tell youse to move on, m’ dearie. Nothin’ like that.”

The girl’s heart felt as though drenched in ice-cold water. She had not brought with her the small revolver she sometimes carried for rattlesnakes. Both instinct and observation told her this man was vile and dangerous. She was in his power and he would make her pay for what her father had done.

She trod down the fear that surged up in her bosom. Not for nothing had she been all her life a daughter of the sun and the wind and wide outdoor spaces.

“I stopped to rest my pony from the heat of the sun,” she explained.

“You stopped to see old Cig,” he corrected. “An’ now you’re here it’ll be him an’ you for a while. The hop-nut don’t belong to de same push as us no longer. I shook him. An’ York don’t count. He’s no lady’s man, York ain’t.”

The slim girl in the riding-suit could not quite keep the panic out of her eyes. None of the motives that swayed the men she knew would have weight with him. He was both base and bold, and he had lived among those who had small respect for a woman.

Betty’s glance moved to York. It found no comfort there. The gross hobo was soft as putty. He did not count, as his companion had openly sneered.

“No. I won’t stop,” she said, and made as though to tighten the loosened cinch.

“Won’cha? Think again, miss. Old Cig ain’t seen a skirt since he left li’l’ old New York. Sure as youse is a foot high he’s hungry for a sweetie of his own.”

He put his hand on her arm. At the touch her self-control vanished. She screamed.

The man’s fingers slid down to the wrist and tightened. His other hand clamped over her mouth and cut off the cry.

She writhed, twisting to free herself. In spite of her slenderness she was strong. From her lips she tore his hand and again called for help in an ecstasy of terror.

The crook of his arm garroted her throat and cut off the air from her lungs. He bent her body back across his hip. Still struggling, she strangled helplessly.

“Youse would, eh?” His voice, his narrowed eyes, exulted. “Forget it, miss. Cig’s an A1 tamer of Janes. That’s de li’l’ old thing he’s de champeen of de world at.”

He drew her closer to him.

There came a soft sound of feet thudding across the grass. The arm about Betty’s throat relaxed. She heard a startled oath, found herself flung aside. Her eyes opened.

Instantly she knew why Cig had released her. The man stood crouched, snarling, his eyes fixed on an approaching runner, one who moved with the swift precision of a half-back carrying a ball down a whitewashed gridiron.

The runner was the tramp whose face her father had battered to a pulp. He asked for no explanations and made no comment. Straight for the released convict he drove.

Cig had not a chance. The bad air and food of the slums, late hours, dissipation, had robbed him of both strength and endurance. He held up his fists and squared off, for he was game enough. But Tug’s fist smashed through the defense as though it had been built of paper. The second-story man staggered back, presently went down before a rain of blows against which he could find no protection.

Tug dragged him to his feet, cuffed him hard with his half-closed fist again and again, then flung him a second time to the ground. He stood over the fellow, his eyes blazing, his face colorless.

“Get up, you hound!” he ordered in a low voice trembling with anger. “Get up and take it! I’ll teach you to lay hands on a woman!”

Cig did not accept this invitation. He rolled away, caught up York’s heavy tramping stick, and stood like a wolf at bay, the lips lifted from his stained yellow teeth.

“Touch me again an’ I’ll knock your block off,” he growled, interlarding the threat with oaths and foul language.

“Don’t!” the girl begged of her champion. “Please don’t. Let’s go. Right away.”

“Yes,” agreed the young fellow, white to the lips.

York flat-footed forward a step or two. “No use havin’ no trouble. Cig he didn’t mean nothin’ but a bit of fun, Tug. Old Cig wouldn’t do no lady any harm.” The tramp’s voice had taken on the professional whine.

Tug fastened the girth, his fingers trembling so that he could hardly slip the leather through to make the cinch. Even in the reaction from fear Betty found time to wonder at this. He was not afraid. He had turned his back squarely on the furious gangster from the slums to tighten the surcingle. Why should he be shaking like a man in a chill?

The girl watched Cig while the saddle was being made ready. The eyes in the twisted face of the convict were venomous. If thoughts could have killed, Tug would have been a dead man. She had been brought up in a clean world, and she did not know people could hate in such a soul-and-body blasting way. It chilled the blood only to look at him.

The girl’s rescuer turned to help her into the saddle. He gave her the lift as one does who is used to helping a woman mount.

From the seat she stooped and said in a low voice, “I want you to go with me.”

He nodded. Beside the horse he walked as far as the road. “My pack’s back there on the track,” he said, and stopped, waiting for her to ride away.

Betty looked down at him, a troubled frown on her face. “Where are you going?”

A bitter, sardonic smile twitched the muscles of the bruised face. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Looking for work?” she asked.

“Maybe I am,” he answered sullenly.

“We need men on the Diamond Bar K to help with the harvest.”

“The ranch where I was kicked off?”

“Father’s quick-tempered, but he’s square. I’ll talk with him about you—”

“Why waste your time?” he mocked mordantly. “I’ll not impose on him a good-for-nothing loafer, a worthless rotten-to-the-core hobo, a slacker, a wastrel who ought to be on a rock-pile.”

“Dad didn’t mean all that. He was angry. But if you don’t want to work for him, perhaps you’d work for me. I own a ranch, too.”

He looked up the road into the dancing heat waves. She was wasting pity on him, was she? No doubt she would like to reform him. A dull resentment burned in him. His sulky eyes looked into hers.

“No,” he said shortly.

“But if you’re looking for work,” she persisted.

“I’m particular about who I work for,” he told her brutally.

She winced, but the soft dark eyes were still maternally tender for him. He had fought for her, had saved her from a situation that held at least degradation and perhaps horrible despair. Moreover, young though he was, she knew that life had mauled him fearfully.

“I need men. I thought perhaps—”

“You thought wrong.”

“I’m sorry—about Father. You wouldn’t need to see him if you didn’t want to. The Quarter Circle D E is four miles from the Diamond Bar K.”

“I don’t care if it’s forty,” he said bluntly.

Her good intentions were at an impasse. The road was blocked. But she could not find it in her heart to give up yet, to let him turn himself adrift again upon a callous world. He needed help—needed it desperately, if she were any judge. It was written on his face that he was sailing stormy seas and that his life barque was drifting toward the rocks. What help she could give she must press upon him.

“I’m asking you to be generous and forget what—what we did to you,” she pleaded, leaning down impulsively and putting a hand on his shoulder. “You saved me from that awful creature. Isn’t it your turn now to let me help you if I can?”

“You can’t help me.”

“But why not? You’re looking for work. I need men. Wouldn’t it be reasonable for us to get together on terms?” Her smile was very sweet and just a little wistful, her voice vivid as the sudden song of a meadow-lark.

Under the warmth of her kindness his churlishness melted.

“Good of you,” he said. “I’m much obliged. But it’s no use. Your father had the right of it. I’m not any good.”

“I don’t believe it. Your life’s got twisted somehow. But you can straighten it. Let me help. Won’t you? Because of what you did for me just now.”

Her hand moved toward him in a tentative offer of friendship. Automatically his eyes recorded that she wore a diamond ring on the third finger. Some lucky fellow, probably some clean young man who had given no hostages to vice, had won her sweet and gallant heart.

She was all eager desire and sympathy. For a moment, as he looked into the dusky, mobile face that expressed a fine and gallant personality, it seemed possible for him to trample down the vice that was destroying him. But he pushed this aside as idle sentiment. His way was chosen for him and he could not go back.

He shook his head and turned away. The bitter, sardonic smile again rested like a shadow of evil on his good-looking face.

CHAPTER V
TUG IS “COLLECTED”

Tug followed the rails toward Wild Horse.

He groped in an abyss of humiliation and self-disgust. Slacker! The cattleman’s scornful word had cut to the quick. The taste of it was bitter. For he had not always been one. In war days he had done his share.

How was it McCrae’s poem ran?

“We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie

In Flanders fields.

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.”

Yes, he had kept the faith in France, but he was not keeping it now. The obligation was as binding on him in peace as on the battle-field. He knew that. He recognized it fully. But when the pain in his head began, his mind always flew to the only relief he knew. The drug had become a necessity to him. If the doctors had only let him fight it out from the beginning without help, he would not have become accustomed to the accursed stuff.

But what was the use of going over that again and again? He was done for. Why send his thoughts forever over the same treadmill?

The flaming sun poured down into the bowl of the valley and baked its contents. He moved from the track to the shade of a cottonwood and lay down. His racing thoughts grew more vague, for the hot sun had made him sleepy. Presently his eyes closed drowsily. They flickered open and slowly shut a second time. He began to breathe deeply and regularly.

The sun passed the zenith and began to slide down toward the western hills. Still Tug slept.

He dreamed. The colonel was talking to him. “Over the top, Hollister, at three o’clock. Ten minutes now.” He shook himself out of sleep. It was time to get busy.

Slowly he came back blinking to a world of sunshine. Two men stood over him, both armed.

“Must be one of ’em,” the shorter of the two said.

“Sure thing. See his outfit. All rags. We’ll collect him an’ take him back to the ranch.”

They were cowboys or farmhands, Tug was not sure which. He knew at once, however, that their intentions were not friendly.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“You,” the short, stocky one answered curtly. He wore a big broad-rimmed hat that was both ancient and dusty.

“Interesting. You a sheriff? Got a warrant for me?”

The little man raised the point of his thirty-eight significantly. “Ain’t this warrant enough?”

“What’s the trouble? What d’you want me for?”

“Tell him, Dusty,” the lank cowboy said.

“All right, Burt.” To the tramp he said roughly: “We’ll learn you how to treat a lady. Get up. You’re gonna trail back to the Diamond Bar K with us.”

“You’ve got the wrong man,” explained Tug.

“Sure. You’re jus’ travelin’ through the country lookin’ for work,” Dusty jeered. “We’ve heard that li’l’ spiel before. Why, you chump, the ol’ man’s autograph is writ on yore face right now.”

Tug opened his mouth to expostulate, but changed his mind. What was the use? He had no evidence. They would not let him go.

“I guess you hold the aces.” He rose, stiffly, remarking to the world at large, “I’ve read about those three-gallon hats with a half-pint of brains in them.”

Dusty bridled. “Don’t get gay with me, young feller. I’ll not stand for it.”

“No?” murmured the hobo, and he somehow contrived to make of the monosyllable a taunt.

“Just for that I’ll drag you back with a rope.”

Dusty handed his weapon to the other cowboy, stepped to his horse, and brought back a rope. He uncoiled it and dropped the noose over the tramp’s head, tightening it around his waist.

The riders swung to their saddles.

“Get a move on you,” Dusty ordered, giving the rope a tug. The other end of it he had fastened to the horn of the saddle.

Tug walked ahead of the horses through the sand. It was a long hot tramp, and Dusty took pains to make it as unpleasant as possible. If the prisoner lagged, he dragged him on the ground, gibing at him, and asking him whether he would insult another woman next time he got a chance.

The cowpuncher found small satisfaction in the behavior of the man at the other end of the rope. The ragged tramp neither answered his sneers nor begged for mercy. He took what was coming to him silently, teeth clamped tight.

At last Burt interfered. “That’ll be about enough, Dusty. The old man’s gonna settle with him. It’s his say-so about what he wants done to this guy.” He added, a moment later: “I ain’t so darned sure we’ve got the right one, anyhow. This bird don’t look to me like a feller who would do a girl a meanness.”

“Hmp! You always was soft in the head, Burt,” his companion grunted.

But he left his prisoner in peace after that. Burt had said one true word. Clint Reed would not want a half-dead hobo dragged to the Diamond Bar K. He would prefer one that he could punish himself.

Tug plodded through the fine white dust that lay inches deep on the road. A cloud of it moved with them, for the horses kicked it up at every step until they ascended from the valley into the hills. The man who walked did not have the reserve of strength that had been his before he had gone to the hospital. There had been a time when he could go all day and ask for more, but he could not do it now. He stumbled as he dragged his feet along the trail.

They reached the summit of the pass and looked down on the Diamond Bar K. Its fenced domain was a patchwork of green and gold with a background of pineclad ridges. The green patches were fields of alfalfa, the gold squares were grain ripe for the mower.

Downhill the going was easier. But by the time the horsemen and their prisoner drew up to the ranch house, Tug was pretty well exhausted.

While Dusty went in to get Reed, the tramp sat on the floor of the porch and leaned against a pillar, his eyes closed. He had a ridiculous feeling that if he let go of himself he would faint.

CHAPTER VI
“NOTHING BUT A GAY-CAT ANYHOW”

With an unusual depression Betty had watched the tramp move down the dusty road to the railroad track after he had declined her offer of employment. An energetic young person, she was accustomed to having her own way. One of her earliest delightful discoveries had been that she could nearly always get what she wanted by being eager for it and assuming that, of course, the others involved would recognize her plan as best, or at least would give up theirs cheerfully when she urged hers.

But this ragged scamp, out of whose heart youth and hope had been trampled, was leaving her dashed and rebuffed. She liked to make conquests of people in bending them to the schemes she made for the regulation of her small universe, though she would have denied even to herself that she liked to manage her friends. In the case of this drear-eyed boy, the hurt was not only to her vanity. He might be five or six years older than she, but the mothering instinct—the desire to save him from himself and his fate—fluttered yearningly toward him.

She did not blame him. There was at least a remnant of self-respect in his decision. Nobody wants to be done good to. Perhaps she had seemed smug to him, though she had not meant to be.

He was on her mind all the way back to the ranch, so much so that she blurted out the whole story to her father as soon as she saw him.

Clint Reed moved to prompt action. He did not see eye to eye with his daughter. What concerned him was that these bums should waylay and insult Betty. It was a nice state of affairs when a girl was not safe alone on the roads. He gathered his men and gave them orders to find the hoboes and bring them to the ranch.

The girl’s protest was lost on Reed. It hardly reached his mind at all. Besides, this had become public business. It was not her personal affair. If hoboes needed to be taught a sense of decency, the men of the community would attend to that.

Betty went into the house dissatisfied with herself. She had not meant to make more trouble, but to enlist her father’s sympathy in the cause of the young fellow who had saved her from the other tramp. As for the one who had attacked her, she did not care whether he was punished or not. She had much rather no hue and cry over the country was made about it. Though she did not say so, she hoped the vagrants would get away uncaught.

She busied herself with household duties. Under her direction and with her help, Bridget the cook was putting up half a dozen boxes of peaches. The two women worked into the middle of the hot afternoon before they had finished.

“An’ that’s that,” Bridget said with a sigh of relief as she sealed the last jar. “Fegs, I don’t mind a hotter day this summer. It’s a b’iler.”

She was an old family servant and was in part responsible for the bringing up of Betty. More than one rancher in the neighborhood had attempted the adventure of wooing Bridget Maloney, but none of them had been able to lure her from the Diamond Bar K to become the mistress of a home of her own.

“You’d better lie down and sleep an hour, dear,” the girl advised.

“An’ phwat would I be doin’ that for wid all these kettles an’ pots to be cleaned up? Scat! Get ye out o’ my kitchen now, mavourneen, an’ I’ll redd up in a jiff.”

Betty found a magazine and walked out to the shade of a pine grove where a hammock hung. She settled herself comfortably and began to read. It was delightfully cool among the pines after the hot kitchen. She grew drowsy. Her eyes closed.

The sound of far-away voices was in her ears when she wakened. As her thoughts cleared, so did the voices. She heard Dusty’s, strident, triumphant.

“It’s up to the old man now.”

The girl turned in the hammock and saw the squat cowpuncher go jingling into the house. Burt lounged on a horse, his right leg thrown round the horn of the saddle. Some one else, partly hidden from her by the ponies, was sitting on the porch.

She got up quickly and walked toward the house. The man on the porch, she saw presently, had a rope around his waist the other end of which was fastened to the saddle of Dusty’s mount. An eyeflash later she recognized him.

“You!” she cried.

The tramp called Tug rose. He did not lift his hat, for he no longer had one. But his bow and sardonic smile gave an effect of ironic politeness.

“The bad penny back again,” he said.

“What have they been doing to you?” she asked breathlessly.

He had been a disreputable enough specimen when she had last seen him. The swollen and discolored face, the gaping shoes, the ragged coat; all of these he had carried then. But there were scratches like skin burns down one side of the jaw and on his hands that had come since. His coat was in shreds. From head to foot dust covered every available inch.

“Your men have been having a little sport. Why not? The boss had his first and they had to follow his example. They’re good obedient boys,” he scoffed bitterly.

“What do you mean? What did they do?” she demanded sharply.

He shrugged his shoulders and she turned imperiously to the man on horseback. “Burt, you tell me.”

The lank cowboy showed embarrassment. “Why, Dusty he—he kinda dragged him when the fellow lagged. Jus’ for a ways.”

“On the ground? That what you mean?” The dark eyes flashed anger.

“Well, you might say so. He sorta stumbled, an’ he’d been right sassy to Dusty, so—” Burt’s explanation died away. He felt he was not getting very far with it.

“So you acted like brutes to him—to a man who had just fought for me when—when—” A sob of chagrin and vexation choked up in her throat. She stamped her foot in exasperation.

“Don’t get excited about me,” the victim gibed. “I’m nothing but a gay-cat anyhow. What’s it matter?”

Dusty strutted out of the house, his spurs making music.

The girl turned on him with pantherish swiftness.

“Who told you to torture this man, Dusty? What right have you got to make yourself law on the Diamond Bar? You’re only a drunken lunkhead, aren’t you? Or did Father ask you to be judge and jury on the ranch?”

It was ludicrous to see the complacency vanish from the fatuous face. The jaw fell and the mouth opened.

“Why, Miss Betty, I figured as how he’d done you a meanness, an’ I thought—”

She cut his explanation short with stinging ruthlessness. “What for? You weren’t hired to think, but to obey orders. You’d better get back into the wheatfield before Father comes. Pronto.”

The cowboy shut his mouth with a view to opening it again in self-defense, but Betty would have none of his excuses. She shooed him from the scene indignantly. While she was busy with Dusty, the lank rider quietly vanished.

The prisoner watched her, the rope still about his waist. His mind paid tribute to the energy with which she got results.

“Greatly obliged,” he said with sarcasm. “I suppose your father won’t have me hanged now.”

“Take off that rope,” she said.

“That’s an order, is it?”

“I don’t blame you for hating us all,” she flamed. “I would in your place. The whole place is bewitched to-day, I believe. We’re all acting like bullies instead of the quiet, decent people we are. Take Dusty now. He’s a good little fellow, but he thought you’d attacked me. He wouldn’t stand that. Men in the ranch country won’t, you know. They look after us women.”

“That’s a peculiarity of the ranch country, I suppose.”

She ignored the derisive gleam in his eyes. “No ... no! Good men always do. I wish I could tell you—could show you—my thanks because you stood up for me. I’ll never forget. It was fine, the way you fought for me.”

“Nothing to that. I’d been saving a punch or two for him. Don’t forget that I’m a good-for-nothing bum, on the authority of your own father. No need of getting sentimental. Don’t make the mistake of putting me in a class with him and other such truly good men as your friend Dusty and the lamblike foreman who beat up Cig because he wouldn’t apologize for being alive.”

Voice and manner both fleered at her, but she was determined to accept no rebuff.

“Did Dusty hurt you? Can I do anything for you? Tell me. I’d be so glad to. Let me get you a drink.”

Like a flash, she was off at her own suggestion to the kitchen. His impulse was to go at once, but he could not escape his past and be deliberately discourteous to a woman whose only desire was to help him. He waited, sullenly, for her return. Why could she not let him alone? All he asked of the Diamond Bar K was for it to let him get away and forget it as soon as possible.

When the girl came back, it was with a pitcher and a glass. The outside of the jug was beaded with moisture. From within came the pleasant tinkle of ice.

Betty filled the tumbler with lemonade.

The vagabond had no desire to accept the hospitality of the ranch, but he found it impossible to affront her churlishly again.

“Thank you,” he said, and drank.

The drink was refreshing. Two fresh-beaten eggs had been stirred into it for nutrition.

“Another?” she begged, and poured without waiting for an answer.

The ghost of a smile crept into his eyes. It was the first hint of wholesome humor she had yet seen in him. He offered her, with a little bow, a quotation.

“‘I can no other answer make, but thanks,

And thanks, and ever thanks.’”

The dimples broke into her cheeks as her smile flashed out in the pleasure of having broken the crust of his reserve.

“That’s Shakespeare, isn’t it? I’m dreadfully illiterate, but it sounds like him.”

“It does a little, doesn’t it?” He raised the glass before drinking. “Happy days, Miss Reed.”

“That goes double,” she said quickly.

The sardonic mask, that had for a moment been lifted, dropped again over his face. “Many more like this one,” he fleered.

“You may look back on it and find it a good day yet,” she said bravely.

He handed back the empty tumbler. “Afraid I’m not an optimist. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll be going. The ranch might change its mind about that hanging bee.”

“But I do mind,” she protested. “I don’t want you to go yet. Please stay and meet my father. He’s not really hard and cruel as you think.”

Again she saw on his lips the dry, bitter smile.

“Think I’ll take your word for it. I’ve met him once.”

“No, you haven’t met him—not to know him,” she cried softly, giving rein to swift impulse. “You’ve not met my Daddy—the best man in Paradise Valley. You can ask any one about him. He’s the squarest that ever was. The man you met was exasperated and—and not himself. Dad’s not like that—really.”

“Indeed!” His voice was a compound of incredulity and indifference. It put her out of court.

But her good impulses were not easily daunted. She had already learned that this young fellow wore armor of chain-mail to protect his sensitive pride. In her horoscope it had been written that she must give herself, and still give and give. The color beat through her dusky cheeks beneath the ardent eyes. She stabbed straight at his jaundiced soul.

“If it were my father only that you don’t like—but it isn’t—you don’t find joy in anything. Your mind’s poisoned. I was reading the other day how Mr. Roosevelt used to quote from Borrow’s ‘Lavengro’: ‘Life is sweet, brother—there’s day and night, brother; both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things—and likewise there’s a wind on the heath.’ It’s because he felt this in everything he did that they called him ‘Greatheart.’”

It came to him that the name might not inaptly be applied to her. He thought of Browning’s “My Last Duchess”:

“... She had

A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed: she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.”

He hardened his heart to her generous appeal to him. “It’s a very comfortable point of view to have,” he said with no spring of life in his voice.

“And a true one,” she added swiftly.

“If you say so, of course.” His skeptical smile made no concessions.

He turned to leave, but stopped to look at a cloud of white dust moving down the road toward them.

CHAPTER VII
TUG SAYS, “NO, THANK YOU”

The advancing dust cloud rose from a little group of horses and men. Some of the latter were riding. Others were afoot.

“Lon’s caught them,” said Betty. “I’m sorry.”

“Not so sorry as they’ll be,” returned the ragged youth grimly.

The foreman swung heavily from his horse. Though he was all muscle and bone, he did not carry his two hundred pounds gracefully.

“We got the birds all right, Miss Betty, even if they were hittin’ the trail right lively,” he called to the girl, an ominous grin on his leathery face. “I guess they’d figured out this wasn’t no healthy climate for them.” He added, with a swift reversion to business, “Where’s yore paw?”

“Not back yet. What’ll he do with them, Lon?” the girl asked, her voice low and troubled.

Distressed in soul, she was looking for comfort. The big foreman gave her none.

“He’ll do a plenty. You don’t need to worry about that. We aim to keep this country safe for our womenfolks.”

“Oh, I wish he wouldn’t. I wish he’d let them go,” she said, almost in a wail.

“He won’t. Clint ain’t that soft.” Forbes stared at the disreputable vagrant standing beside Betty. “What’s he doing here?”

“Dusty dragged him back. That’s all the sense he has.”

Lon spoke just as though the vagrant were not present. “Lucky for him he’s got an alibi this time.”

“Is it necessary to insult him after he protected me?” the girl demanded, eyes flashing. “I’m ashamed of you, Lon.”

He was taken aback. “I reckon it takes more’n that to insult a hobo.”

“Is a man a hobo because he’s looking for work?”

The foreman’s hard gaze took in the man, his white face and soft hands. “What would he do if he found it?” he asked bluntly.

“You’ve no right to say that,” she flung back. “I think it’s hateful the way you’re all acting. I tell you he fought for me—after what Father did to him.”

“Fought for you?” This was news to Lon. His assumption had been that the young fellow had merely entered a formal protest in order to clear himself in case retribution followed. “You mean with his fists?”

“Yes—against the thin-faced one. He thrashed him and put me on my horse and started me home. Then Dusty ropes him and drags him here on the ground and you come and insult him. He must think we’re a grateful lot.”

As they looked at the slim, vital girl confronting him with such passionate and feminine ferocity, the eyes of the foreman softened. All her life she had been a part of his. He had held her on his knee, a crowing baby, while her dimpled fingers clung to his rough coat or explored his unshaven face. He had fished her out of an irrigation ditch when she was three. He had driven her to school when for the first time she started on that great adventure. It had been under his direction that she had learned to ride, to fish, to shoot. He loved her as though she had been flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. It was a delight to him to be bullied by her and to serve her whims.

“I renig,” he said. “Clint never told me the boy done that. I had it doped out he was just savin’ his own hide. But I’ll take it all back if it’s like you say. Shake, son.”

The tramp did not refuse to grip the big brown hand thrust at him. Nor did he accept the proffered alliance. By a fraction of a second he forestalled the foreman by stooping to knot a broken lace in one of the gaping shoes.

Cig, who had been edging closer, gave Tug a rancorous look. “I ain’t forgettin’ this,” he promised. “I’ll get youse good some day for rappin’ on me.”

“He didn’t tell on you. Some of my men brought him here in the gather like we did you,” Forbes explained.

“Wot’ell youse givin’ me? He rapped. That’s wot he done, the big stiff. An’ I’ll soitainly get him right for it.”

“That kind of talk ain’t helpin’ you any,” the foreman said. “If you got any sense, you’ll shut yore trap an’ take what’s comin’.”

“I’ll take it. Don’t youse worry about that. You’d better kill me while youse are on the job, for I’ll get you, too, sure as I’m a mont’ old.”

Reed drove up in the old car he used for a runabout. He killed the engine, stepped down, and came up to the group by the porch.

“See you rounded ’em up, Lon.”

“Yep. Found ’em in the cottonwoods acrost the track at Wild Horse.”

The ranchman’s dominant eyes found Tug. “Howcome you here?” he asked.

The gay-cat looked at him in sullen, resentful silence. The man’s manner stirred up in the tramp a flare of opposition.

“Dusty brought him here. I want to tell you about that, Dad,” the girl said.

“Later.” He turned to Tug. “I want a talk with you—got a proposition to make you. See you later.”

“Not if I see you first,” the ragged nomad replied insolently. “I never did like bullies.”

The ranchman flushed angrily, but he put a curb on his temper. He could not afford to indulge it since he was so much in this youth’s debt. Abruptly he turned away.

“Bring the other two to the barn,” he ordered Forbes. “We’ll have a settlement there.”

York shuffled forward, in a torment of fear. “See here, mister. I ain’t got a thing to do with this. Honest to Gawd, I ain’t. Ask Tug. Ask the young lady. I got respeck for women, I have. You wouldn’t do dirt to an old ’bo wot never done you no harm, would you, boss?”

His voice was a whine. The big gross man was on the verge of blubbering. He seemed ready to fall on his knees.

“It’s true, Dad. He didn’t touch me,” Betty said in a low voice to her father.

“Stood by, didn’t he? Never lifted a hand for you.”

“Yes, but—”

“You go into the house. Leave him to me,” ordered Reed. “Keep this young man here till I come back.”

Betty knew when words were useless with her father. She turned away and walked to the porch.

The cowpunchers with their prisoners moved toward the barn. York, ululating woe, had to be dragged.

Left alone with the tramp called Tug, Betty turned to him a face of dread. “Let’s go into the house,” she said drearily.

“You’d better go in. I’m taking the road now,” he said in answer.

“But Father wants to see you. If you’ll wait just a little—”

“I have no business with him. I don’t care to see him, now or any time.” His voice was cold and hard. “Thank you for the lemonade, Miss Reed. I’ll say good-bye.”

He did not offer his hand, but as he turned away he bowed.

There was nothing more for Betty to say except “Good-bye.”

In a small voice of distress she murmured it.

Her eyes followed him as far as the road. A sound from the barn drove her into the house, to her room, where she could cover her ears with the palms of her small brown hands.

She did not want to hear any echo of what was taking place there.

CHAPTER VIII
A RIFT IN THE LUTE

In the cool of the evening Justin Merrick drove down from the Sweetwater Dam to the Diamond Bar K ranch. It was characteristic of him that his runabout was up to date and in perfect condition. He had an expensive taste in the accessories of life, and he either got the best or did without.

Hands and face were tanned from exposure to the burning sun of the Rockies, but he was smooth-shaven and immaculate in the engineer’s suit which fitted his strong, heavy-set figure so snugly.

He drove with precision, as he did everything else in his well-ordered life. There was in his strength no quality of impatience or turbulence. He knew what he wanted and how to get it. That was why he had traveled so far on the road to success and would go a great way farther.

To-night he anticipated two pleasant hours with Betty Reed. He would tell her about the work and how it was getting along, his difficulties with the sand formation at the head gates and how he was surmounting them. Even before she spoke, he would know from her eager eyes that she was giving him the admiration due a successful man from his sweetheart.

Afterward he would pass to more direct and personal love-making, which she would evade if possible or accept shyly and reluctantly. She was wearing his ring, but he doubted whether he had really stormed the inner fortress of her heart. This uncertainty, and the assurance that went with it of a precious gift not for the first chance comer, appealed to his fastidious instinct, all the more that he was sure she would some day come to him with shining eyes and outstretched hands.

To-night Merrick found Betty distrait and troubled. Her attention to the recital of his problems was perfunctory. He was conscious of a slight annoyance. In spite of his force, Justin was a vain man, always ready to talk of himself and his achievements in a modest way to an interested and interesting young woman.

It appeared that her father had had a difficulty with some tramps, which had eventuated in insolence that had brought upon the vagrants summary physical punishment. From her account of it, Justin judged that Reed had not handled the matter very wisely. There was a way to do such things with a minimum of friction.

But he saw no need of worrying about it. The tramps had been given what they deserved and the affair was closed. It was like a woman to hold it heavily on her conscience because one of the ne’er-do-wells chanced to be young and good-looking.

“If you’d seen him,” Betty protested. “A gentleman by the look of him, or had been once, fine-grained, high-spirited, and yet so down-and-out.”

“If he’s down-and-out, it’s his own fault. A man’s never that so long as he holds to self-respect.”

This was incontrovertibly true, but Betty chose to be irritated. Justin was so obviously successful. He might have had a little sympathy for the underdog, she thought. Everybody did not have a square, salient jaw like his. Weakness was not necessarily a crime.

“He looks as though life had mauled him,” she said. “It’s taken something vital out of him. He doesn’t care what happens any more.”

“If he can only mooch his three meals a day and enough cash to keep him supplied with bootleg poison,” the engineer added.

They were walking up to the Three Pines, a rocky bluff from which they could in the daytime see far down the valley. She stopped abruptly. If she did not stamp her foot, at least the girl’s manner gave eloquently the effect of this indulgence.

“He’s not like that at all—not at all. Don’t you ever sympathize with any one that’s in hard luck?” she cried out, her cheeks glowing with a suffusion of underlying crimson.

“Not when he lies down under it.”

She flashed at him a look resentful of his complacency. It held, too, for the first time a critical doubt. There was plenty to like about Justin Merrick, and perhaps there was more to admire. He got things done because he was so virile, so dominant. To look at the lines and movements of his sturdy body, at the close-lipped mouth and resolute eyes, was to know him a leader of men. But now a treasonable thought had wirelessed itself into her brain. Had he a mind that never ranged out of well-defined pastures, that was quite content with the social and economic arrangement of the world? Did there move in it only a tight little set of orthodox ideas?

“How do you know he lies down under it?” she asked with spirit. “How do we know what he has to contend with? Or how he struggles against it?”

If his open smile was not an apology, it refused, anyhow, to be at variance with her. “Maybe so. As you say, I didn’t see him and you did. We’ll let it go at that and hope he’s all you think he is.”

Betty, a little ashamed of her vagrant thoughts, tried to find a common ground upon which they could stand. “Don’t you think that men are often the victims of circumstance—that they get caught in currents that kinda sweep them away?”

“‘I am the captain of my soul,’” he quoted sententiously.

“Yes, you are,” she admitted, after one swift glance that took in the dogged, flinty quality of him. “But most of us aren’t. Take Dad. He’s strong, and he’s four-square. But he wouldn’t have gone as far as he did with these tramps if he hadn’t got carried away. Well, don’t you think maybe this boy is a victim of ‘the bludgeonings of chance’? He looked like it to me.”

“We make ourselves,” he insisted. “If the things we buck up against break us, it’s because we’re weak.”

“Yes, but—” Betty’s protest died away. She was not convinced, and she made another start. “It seems to me that when I read the new novelists—Wells, Galsworthy, or Bennett, say—one of the things I get out of them is that we are modified by our environment, not only changed by it, but sometimes made the prey of it and destroyed by it.”

“Depends on how solid on our feet we are,” answered the engineer. “That’s the plea of the agitator, I know. He’s always wanting to do impossible things by law or by a social upheaval. There’s nothing to it. A man succeeds if he’s strong. He fails if he’s weak.”

This creed of the individualist was sometimes Betty’s own, but to-night she was not ready to accept it. “That would be all very well if we all started equal. But we don’t. What about a man who develops tuberculosis, say, just when he is getting going? He’s weak, but it’s no fault of his.”

“It may or may not be. Anyhow, it’s his misfortune. You can’t make the world over because he’s come a cropper. Take this young tramp of yours. I’d like to try him out and show you whether there’s anything to him. I’d put him on the work and let him find his level. Chances are he’d drift back to the road inside of a week. When a man’s down-and-out, it isn’t because he doesn’t get a chance, but because of some weakness in himself.”

Betty knew that in the case of many this was true. For a year or more she had been an employer of labor herself. One of the things that had impressed her among the young fellows who worked for her was that they did find their level. The unskilled, shiftless, and less reliable were dropped when work became slack. The intelligent and energetic won promotion for themselves.

But she did not believe that it was by any means a universal truth. Men were not machines, after all. They were human beings. However, she dropped the subject.

“He’s gone, so you won’t have a chance to prove your case,” she said. “Tell me about the work. How is it going?”

The Sweetwater Dam project had been initiated to water what was known as the Flat Tops, a mesa that stretched from the edge of the valley to the foothills. It had been and still was being bitterly opposed by some of the cattlemen of Paradise Valley because its purpose was to reclaim for farming a large territory over which cattle had hitherto ranged at will. Their contention held nothing of novelty. It had been argued all over the West ever since the first nesters came in to dispute with the cattle barons the possession of the grazing lands. A hundred districts in a dozen States had heard the claim that this was a cattle country, unfit for farming and intensive settlement. Many of them had seen it disproved.

The opposition of powerful ranching interests had not deterred Justin Merrick. Threats did not disturb him. He set his square jaw and pushed forward to the accomplishment of his purpose. As he rode or drove through the valley, he knew that he was watched with hostile eyes by reckless cowpunchers who knew that his success would put a period to the occupation they followed. Two of them had tried to pick a quarrel with him at Wild Horse on one occasion, and had weakened before his cool and impassive fearlessness.

But he did not deceive himself. At any hour the anger of these men might flare out against him in explosive action. For the first time in his life he was carrying a revolver.

Clint Reed was a stockholder and a backer of the irrigation project. He owned several thousand acres on the Flat Tops, and it was largely on account of his energy that capital had undertaken the reclamation of the dry mesa.

The head and front of the opposition was Jake Prowers, who had brought down from early days an unsavory reputation that rumor said he more than deserved. Strange stories were whispered about this mild-mannered little man with the falsetto voice and the skim-milk eyes. One of them was that he had murdered from ambush the successful wooer of the girl he wanted, that the whole countryside accepted the circumstantial evidence as true, and in spite of this he had married the young widow within a year and buried her inside of two. Nesters in the hills near his ranch had disappeared and never been seen again. Word passed as on the breath of the winds that Prowers had dry-gulched them. Old-timers still lived who had seen him fight a duel with two desperadoes on the main street of Wild Horse. He had been carried to the nearest house on a shutter with three bullets in him, but the two bad men had been buried next day.

The two most important ranchmen in the valley were Clint Reed and Jake Prowers. They never had been friendly. Usually they were opposed to each other on any public question that arose. Each was the leader of his faction. On politics they differed. Clint was a Republican, Jake a Democrat. There had been times when they had come close to open hostilities. The rivalry between them had deepened to hatred on the part of Prowers. When Reed announced through the local paper the inception of the Sweetwater Dam project, his enemy had sworn that it should never go through while he was alive.

Hitherto Prowers had made no move, but everybody in the district knew that he was biding his time. Competent engineers of the Government had passed adversely on this irrigation project. They had decided water could not be brought down from the hills to the Flat Tops. Jake had seen the surveys and believed them to be correct. He was willing that Reed and the capitalists he had interested should waste their money on a fool’s dream. If Justin Merrick was right—if he could bring water through Elk Creek Cañon to the Flat Tops—it would be time enough for Prowers to strike. Knowing the man as he did, Clint Reed had no doubt that, if it became necessary in order to defeat the project, his enemy would move ruthlessly and without scruple. It was by his advice that Justin Merrick kept the dam guarded at night and carried a revolver with him when he drove over or tramped across the hills.

CHAPTER IX
UNDER FIRE

All day the faint far whir of the reaper could have been heard from the house of the Diamond Bar K ranch. The last of the fields had been cut. Much of the grain had been gathered and was ready for the thresher.

The crop was good. Prices would be fair. Clint Reed rode over the fields with the sense of satisfaction it always gave him to see gathered the fruits of the earth. His pleasure in harvesting or in rounding-up beef steers was not only that of the seller looking to his profit. Back of this was the spiritual gratification of having been a factor in supplying the world’s needs. To look at rippling wheat ripening under the sun, to feed the thresher while the fan scattered a cloud of chaff and the grain dropped into the sacks waiting for it, ministered to his mental well-being by justifying his existence. He had converted hundreds of acres of desert into fertile farm land. All his life he had been a producer of essentials for mankind. He found in this, as many farmers do, a source of content. He was paying his way in the world.

To-day Reed found the need of vindication. He was fonder of Betty than he was of anything or anybody else in the world, and he knew that he was at the bar of her judgment. She did not approve of what he had done. This would not have troubled him greatly if he had been sure that he approved of it himself. But like many willful men he sometimes had his bad quarter of an hour afterward.

It was easy enough to make excuses. The Diamond Bar K had been troubled a good deal by vagrants on the transcontinental route. They had robbed the smokehouse only a few weeks before. A gang of them had raided the watermelon patch, cut open dozens of green melons, and departed with such ripe ones as they could find. Naturally he had been provoked against the whole breed of them.

But he had been too hasty in dealing with the young scamp he had thrashed. Clint writhed under an intolerable sense of debt. The boy had fought him as long as he could stand and take it. He had gone away still defiant, and had rescued Betty from a dangerous situation. Dragged back at a rope’s end to the ranch by the luckless Dusty, he had scornfully departed before Reed had a chance to straighten out with him this added indignity. The owner of the Diamond Bar K felt frustrated, as though the vagabond had had the best of him.

He was not even sure that the severe punishment he had meted out to the other tramps had been wise. The man Cig had endured the ordeal unbroken in spirit. His last words before he crept away had been a threat of reprisal. The fellow was dangerous. Clint read it in his eyes. He had given orders to Betty not to leave the ranch for the next day or two without an escort. Yet he still felt uneasy, as though the end of the matter had not come.

It was now thirty hours since he had last seen the hoboes. No doubt they were hundreds of miles away by this time and with every click of the car wheels getting farther from the ranch.

He rode back to the stable, unsaddled, and walked to the house. Betty was in the living-room at the piano. She finished the piece, swung round on the stool, and smiled at him.

“Everything fine and dandy, Dad?”

His face cleared. It was her way of telling him that she was ready to forgive and be forgiven.

“Yes.” Then, abruptly, “Reckon I get off wrong foot first sometimes, honey.”

He was in a big armchair. She went over to him, sat down on his knees, and kissed him. “’S all right, Dad,” she nodded with an effect of boyish brusqueness. Betty, too, had a mental postscript and expressed it. “It’s that boy. Nothing to do about it, of course. He wouldn’t let me do a thing for him, but—Oh, well, I just can’t get him off my mind. Kinda silly of me.”

“Not silly at all,” demurred Clint. “Feel that way myself—only more so.” He cleared his throat for a confession. “Fact is, Bess, he’s managed to put me in a hole. Or else I’ve put myself there. It’s that infernal quick temper of mine. I’d no business to let myself go. Of course, I was figurin’ him just a bum like the others, an’ for that matter he is a tramp—”

“He quoted Shakespeare at me,” inserted Betty, by way of comment.

“I dare say. He’s no ignorant fool. I didn’t mean that. What was it he called me?” The ranchman smiled ruefully. “A local God Almighty on tin wheels! Maybe I do act like one.”

“Sometimes,” agreed Betty.

The smile that went with the word robbed her concurrence of its sting. It was tender and understanding, expressed the world-old superiority of her sex over the blundering male who had always claimed mastership. There were times when Betty was a mother to her father, times when Clint marveled at the wisdom that had found lodgment in the soft young body of this vivid creature who was heritor of his life and yet seemed so strangely and wonderfully alien to it.

“Point is that I didn’t measure up to my chance and he did,” Reed went on gloomily. “It don’t set well with me, honey. After I’d thrashed him till he couldn’t stand, he goes right away an’ fights for you because you’re a woman. Makes me look pretty small, I’ll say. I’d like to take him by the hand and tell him so. But he wouldn’t have it that way. I’ve got to play my cards the way he’s dealt ’em. Can’t say I blame him, either.”

“No, he had a right to refuse to have anything more to do with us after the way we’d treated him.”

“Mostly we get second chances in this life, but we don’t always, Bess. Oh, well, no use crying over spilt milk. What’s done’s done.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Don’t worry, Dad. I did my best to get him to stay—went down on my knees almost. But he wouldn’t. There’s something queer about him. What is it? He acts as though he doesn’t care what becomes of him, as though he’s let go somehow. Did you notice that?”

“Going to the devil fast as he can, looked like to me.”

This was probably accurate enough as a summary, but it did not explain why to Betty. She dismissed the subject for the moment, because Ruth came into the room followed by Bridget.

The child was in her nightgown and had come to kiss them before going to bed. She ran to her father, threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a great bear hug. Long since she had forgotten his harshness of the morning.

But he had neither forgotten nor forgiven himself. In the first place, he had been unjust. The injunction against going to the barn had not been a blanket one. It had applied only to that part of the building where the blooded stallion was kept in a box stall. He had hurt her feelings as a vent to his annoyance at what had taken place by the creek a half-hour earlier. It was pretty small business, he admitted, to take out his self-disgust on an innocent four-year-old.

He held Ruth close in his arms while Bridget waited smilingly and the little one confided to him plans about the puppies.

“’N’ I’m gonna have Lon make me a wagon, ’n’ I’ll drive it jus’ like Betty does the team, ’n’ I fink I’ll call the puppies Prince ’n’ Rover ’n’ Baby Fifi ’n’—’n’ everyfing,” she concluded all in a breath.

“That’ll be bully,” the father agreed, stroking the soft flaxen curls fondly. He wondered reproachfully why it was that he could turn on those he loved, as he had done on the child this morning. He had never done it before with Ruth, and he resolved he never would again.

Ruth kissed Betty good-night and went out of the room in the arms of Bridget, held close to her ample bosom, kicking and squealing with delight because she was being tickled in the ribs.

As soon as Betty was in her own room, alone with her thoughts and the rest of the world shut out, her mind went back to the problem of the boy who had so early made such shipwreck of his life. She puzzled over this while she was preparing for bed and afterward while she lay between the white sheets, barred squares from the window frames checkering the moonlight on the linen. What in the world could cause a man, educated, clean-fibered, strong, to let go of life like that?

It could not be a woman. In spite of her youth, she knew this by instinct. A game man did not give up because of blows dealt to him from the outside. The surrender had to come from within. No wounds at the hands of another can subdue the indomitable soul. Young though she was, she knew that. Books of fiction might say the contrary, but she had a sure conviction they were wrong. What was it Browning said?—“...Incentives come from the soul’s self.” Well, the converse of it must also be true.

Somewhere in this boy—she persisted in thinking of him as a boy, perhaps because his great need so filled her with the desire to help him—there must be a weak strain. It was not, could not be, a vile one. She held to that steadily and surely, without any of the passionate insistence that doubt engenders. Ragged and dusty though he was physically, on the drift to destruction, cynically self-condemned, he was yet essentially clean and fine, a strain of the thoroughbred in him. That was her judgment, and she was prepared to wager all she had on the truth of it.

Betty did not sleep. Thoughts drifted through her mind as fleecy clouds do across a summer sky. The magnet of them was this youth who had already drunk so deeply of life’s bitterness. He extraordinarily stimulated her interest.

It must have been near midnight that she heard quick voices and lifted her head to the cry of “Fire!” Sketchily she dressed and ran downstairs. The blaze was in the lower meadow where the wheat was gathered for the thresher. A great flame leaped skyward and filled the night with its reflection.

One of the men from the bunkhouse was running toward the unpent furnace. She caught up a saddle blanket from the porch and followed. In the lurid murk figures like marionettes moved to and fro. As she ran, she saw that there were three fires, not only one. This surprised her, for the distance between two of them was at least one hundred and fifty yards. It was strange that in this windless night a spark had traveled so far.

The roar of the conflagration reminded her of some huge living monster in a fury. Tongues of flame shot heavenward in vain menace to the stars.

“Stand back!” Forbes shouted at her. “All we can do is see it don’t spread.” He was flailing at a line of fire beginning to run in the dry stubble.

“How did it start?” she asked breathlessly.

“Fire-bugs.”

“You mean—on purpose?”

“Yep.”

“The tramps?”

“I ain’t sayin’ who.” He shouted to make his voice heard above the crackle of the bellowing red demon that had been set loose. Already he spoke hoarsely from a throat roughened by smoke.

“Where’s Dad?” she called back.

“Don’t know. Ain’t seen him since I left the house.” Dusty gave information. “Saw him runnin’ toward the creek awhile ago.”

Almost instantly Betty knew why. He, too, must have guessed that this fire had come from no chance spark, but of set design. No doubt he was trying to head off the incendiary.

“Just which way?” she asked the cowpuncher.

Dusty jerked a thumb to the left. The girl turned and moved swiftly in the direction of the fringe of bushes that rose as a vague line out of the darkness. She believed her father’s instinct was true. Whoever had fired the stacks would retreat to the willows and make his escape along the creek bed, hiding in the bushes if the pursuit grew close.

Before she had taken a dozen steps a sound leaped into the night. It was a revolver shot. Fear choked her. She began to run, her heart throbbing like that of a half-grown wild rabbit in the hand. Faint futile little cries broke from her throat. A sure intuition told her what she would find by the creek.

Her father lay on a sand spit close to the willows. He was dragging himself toward the cover of some brush. From the heavy foliage a shot rang out.

Betty flew across the open to her father.

“Look out!” he called sharply to her. “He’s in the willows. Down here.” Reed caught at her arm and pulled her behind him where he lay crouched.

The automatic of the man in ambush barked again. A spatter of sand stung Betty’s face. Almost simultaneously came the bull roar of the foreman’s hoarse voice.

“You’re shot, Daddy,” the girl whimpered.

“Keep still!” he ordered.

A heavy body crashed through the bushes in flight. At the same time came the thump of running feet. Dusty broke into sight, followed by the foreman.

The wounded rancher took command. “He went that way, boys,” he said, and pointed down the creek. “Lit out a minute ago. Hustle back to the house and get guns, then cut down the road in the car and head him off.”

Forbes nodded to Dusty. “You do that. Take the boys with you. Hit the creek at the ford and work up.” He turned to his employer. “How about it, Clint? Where’d he hit you? How bad?”

“In the leg. It’ll wait. You get him, Lon.”

The foreman pushed into the willows and disappeared.

Reed called him back, but he paid no attention. The ranchman fumed. “What’s the matter with the dawg-goned old idiot? No sense a-tall. That’s no way to do. He’ll get shot first thing he knows.”

Her father was so much his usual self that Betty’s terror fell away from her. If he were wounded fatally, he would not act like this.

He had been hit just above the top of his laced boots. Betty uncovered the wound and bathed it with water she brought from the creek in Clint’s hat. Around the wound she bound a large handkerchief she found in his hip pocket.

“Does it hurt much?” she asked, her soft voice mothering him.

“Some. Know I’ve got a leg. Lucky for me you came along. It must ’a’ scared him off. You an’ Lon too.”

“See who he was?”

“Too dark.”

“Think it was the tramps? Or Jake Prowers?”

“The tramps. Not the way Jake pulls off a job. He’s no bungler.”

She sat down and put his head in her lap. “Anything else I can do, Dad? Want a drink?” she asked anxiously.

Reed caught her little hand and pressed it. “Sho! Don’t you go to worryin’ about me, sweetheart. Doc Rayburn, he’ll fix me up good as new. When Lon comes back I’ll have him—”

He stopped. A rough voice was speaking. A foot struck a stone. Vague figures emerged from the gloom, took on distinctness. The big one was Lon Forbes. He walked behind a man who was his prisoner, his great hands clamped to the fellow’s arms.

Betty stood up and waited, her eyes fastened on them as they moved forward. Her heart was going like a triphammer. She knew what she dreaded, and presently that her apprehensions were justified.

The foreman’s prisoner was the tramp who called himself Tug.

CHAPTER X
“ONE SQUARE GUY”

From Betty’s cheeks the delicate wild-rose bloom had fled. Icy fingers seemed to clutch at her heart and squeeze the blood from it. This was the worst that could happen, since she knew her father was not wounded to death.

Lon spoke, grimly. “Bumped into him down the creek a ways—hidin’ in the willows. Heard a rustling an’ drapped in on him onexpected. Thought he wouldn’t come with me at first, then he changed his mind an’ thought he would.”

The tramp said nothing. His dogged eyes passed from Betty to her father. She thought there leaped into them a little flicker of surprise when they fell upon the ranchman sitting on the ground with his leg bound up.

“Have you taken his gun from him?” Reed asked.

“Couldn’t find it. He must ’a’ throwed it away.” The foreman passed an exploring hand over the body of the prisoner to make sure that he had not missed a concealed weapon. “No, sir. He ain’t got a gat with him now, unless he’s et it.”

“Take him to the bunkhouse and keep him guarded. We’ll ’phone for the sheriff. Soon as you get to the house call up Doc Rayburn and have him run right out. Then hook up a team and come get me,” the ranch-owner directed.

From the fog of Betty’s distress a small voice projected itself. “You’re not going to send for the sheriff without making sure, Dad?”

“Sure of what?” The steel-gray eyes were hard and cold.

“Sure he did it. He hasn’t said so.”

Reed’s laughter was harsh and without humor. “Nor he ain’t liable to. Right now he’s trying to fix up his alibi.”

“Aren’t you going to hear what he’s got to say?”

“He can tell it in court.”

Betty turned from him to the prisoner. “Why don’t you say something?”

She did not get past the defense of his sardonic smile. “What shall I say?”

“Tell him you didn’t do it,” she begged, seeking assurance for herself.

“Would he believe me? Would you?”

There came to her a conviction that she would—if he said it in a way to inspire confidence.

“Yes,” she said.

The veil of irrision lifted from his eyes. He looked straight at her. “I didn’t do it.”

Instantly Betty knew he was telling the truth. A warm resurgent wave flooded her veins. His life was bound up with tragedy. It had failed of all it had set out to be. But she knew, beyond doubt or evidence, that he had not fired the stacks or shot her father. The amazing thing now, to her mind, was that even for a moment she could have believed he would kill at advantage in cold blood.

“I knew it! I knew it all the time!” she cried.

“How did you know all that?” her father asked.

“Because.”

It was no answer, yet it was as good as any she could give. How could she phrase a feeling that rested only on faith in such a way as to give it weight to others?

“I’m one o’ these Missouri guys,” the foreman snorted. “He’ll have to show me. What’s he doin’ here? What was he hidin’ out in the bushes for? How could he tell soon as I jumped him that a man had been shot?”

“He can explain that,” she urged; and to the vagrant, “Can’t you?”

“I can,” he answered her.

“We’re waiting,” snapped Reed, and voice and manner showed that he had prejudged the case.

The young man met his look with one of cold hostility.

“You can keep on waiting—till the sheriff comes.”

“Suits me,” snapped the ranchman. “Hustle along, Lon. No use wasting time.”

The foreman and his prisoner departed. Betty stayed with her father, miserably conscious that she had failed to avert the clash of inimical temperaments. None the less she was determined to keep the young man out of the hands of the law.

She began at once to lay siege to her father.

“I knew he didn’t do it. I knew he couldn’t. It was that one they call Cig. I know it was.”

“All three of ’em in it likely.”

“No. They had quarreled. He wouldn’t be in it with them. That Cig thought he had told you about his attacking me. He threatened this Tug. I think he’d have shot him just as he did you—if he’d got a chance.”

“If he did shoot me. That’s not been proved.”

“Well, if this one—the one they call Tug—if he did it, why didn’t he have a gun when Lon found him? Lon says he came on him unexpectedly. He had no time to get rid of it. Where is it?”

“Maybe he dropped it while he was running.”

“You know you don’t believe that, Dad,” she scoffed. “He’d have stopped to pick it up. Don’t you see he had to have that gun—the man that shot you did—to make sure of getting away? And when Lon found him he would have killed Lon, too. He’d have had to do it—to save himself from the hangman. The fact that this Tug didn’t have a gun proves that he didn’t shoot you.”

“Say he didn’t, then. Does it prove he wasn’t in cahoots with the man who did? What was he hiding here on the ground for?”

“You didn’t give him a chance to tell. He was ready to, if you’d let him.”

“I asked him, didn’t I?”

“Oh, Dad, you know how you asked him,” she reproached. “He’s got his pride, same as we have. If he wasn’t in this—and I know he wasn’t—you can’t blame him for getting stubborn when he’s badgered. His explanations would have tumbled out fast enough if he’d been guilty.”

This struck Reed as psychologically true. The fellow had not acted like a guilty man. He had held his head high, with a scornful and almost indifferent pride.

“What did I say, for him to get his back up so quick?” the ranchman grumbled.

“It’s the way you said it, and the way Lon acted. He’s quick-tempered, and of course he’s fed up with our treatment of him. Wouldn’t you be?”

“What right has he to travel with a bunch of crooks if he doesn’t expect to be classed as one?”

“Well, he hasn’t.” Betty put her arms round his neck with a warm rush of feeling. Motives are usually mixed in the most simple of us. Perhaps in the back of her mind there was an intuition that the road to her desire lay through affection and not argument. “I can’t row with you now, Daddikins, when you’re wounded and hurt. I’m so worried about you. I thought—a while ago—when I saw you lying on the ground and that murderer shooting at you—”

She stopped, to steady a voice grown tremulous in spite of herself. He stroked her black hair softly.

“I know, li’l’ girl. But it’s all right now. Just a clean flesh wound. Don’t you feel bad,” he comforted.

“And then that boy. I don’t want us to rush into doing anything that will hurt the poor fellow more. We’ve done enough to him. We’d feel awf’ly bad if we got him into trouble and he wasn’t the right man.”

Reed surrendered, largely because her argument was just, but partly, too, because of her distress. “Have it your own way, Bess. I know you’re going to, anyhow. We’ll hear his story. If it sounds reasonable, why—”

Her arms tightened in a quick hug and her soft cheek pressed against his rough one. “That’s all I want, Dad. I know Clint Reed. He’s what Dusty calls one square guy. If you listen to this tramp’s story, he’ll get justice, and that’s all I ask for him.” She dismissed the subject, sure in her young, instinctive wisdom that she had said enough and that more would be too much. “Is the leg throbbing, Daddy? Shall I run down to the creek and get water to bathe it? Maybe that would help the pain.”

“No, you stay right here where it’s dark and quit talking. The boys may drive that fellow back up the creek. My leg’ll be all right till Rayburn sees it.”

“You think he’ll come back here again?” she asked, her voice a-tremble.

“Not if he can help it, you can bet on that. But if the boys hem him in, and he can’t break through, why, he’ll have to back-track.”

The girl’s heart began to flutter again. She had plenty of native courage, but to lie in the darkness of the night in fear of an assassin shook her nerves. What would he do if he came back, hard-pressed by the men, and found her father lying wounded and defenseless? In imagination she saw again the horrible menace of his twisted face, the lifted lip so feral, the wolfish, hungry eyes.

Would Lon Forbes never come back? What was he doing? What was keeping him so long? He had had time long since to have reached the house and hitched a team. Maybe he was wasting precious minutes at the telephone trying to get the sheriff.

A dry twig crackled in the willows and Betty’s hand clutched spasmodically at her father’s arm. She felt rather than saw his body grow taut. There came a sound of something gliding through the saplings.

Betty scarce dared breathe.

A patter of light feet was heard. Clint laughed.

“A rabbit. Didn’t think it could be any one in the willows. We’d ’a’ heard him coming.”

“Listen!” whispered Betty.

The rumble of wagon wheels going over disintegrated quartz drifted to them.

“Lon’s coming,” her father said.

Presently they heard his voice talking to the horses. “Get over there, Buckskin, you got plenty o’ room. What’s eatin’ you, anyhow?”

Forbes stopped on the bluff and came down. “Left the fellow with Burwell tied up in the bunkhouse. Got both the sheriff and Doc Rayburn. How’s the leg, Clint?”

Reed grunted a “’S all right,” and showed the foreman how to support him up the incline to the wagon.

Five minutes later they were moving back toward the ranch house. The fired stacks had burned themselves out, but smoke still rolled skyward.

“Keller’s watchin’ to see everything’s all right there,” Forbes said. “I don’t aim to take chances till we get the whole crop threshed.”

“Might ’a’ been worse,” Clint said. “If that fellow’d known how to go at it, he could have sent half the crop up in smoke. We’re lucky, I’ll say.”

“Luckier than he is. I’ll bet he gets ten years,” the foreman said with unction.

Neither father nor daughter made any answer to that prophecy.

CHAPTER XI
MR. NE’ER-DO-WELL

Tug walked to the bunkhouse beside the foreman, the latter’s fingers fastened like steel bands to his wrist. If Forbes said anything to his prisoner during the tramp through the wheatfield, the young fellow scarcely heard it. His mind was full of the girl who had defended him. In imagination she still stood before him, slim, straight, so vitally alive, her dark eyes begging him to deny the charge that had been made against him.

The low voice rang in his brain. He could hear the throb in it when she had cried, “Tell him you didn’t do it,” and the joyous lift of her confident “I knew it—I knew it all the time.”

The vagrant’s life was insolvent in all those assets of friendship that had once enriched it. He had deliberately bankrupted himself of them when he had buried his identity in that of the hobo Tug, driven to it by the shame of his swift declension. It had been many months since any woman had clung so obstinately to a belief in him regardless of facts. He had no immediate family, no mother or sister with an unshakable faith that went to the heart of life.

But this girl who had crossed his path—this girl with the wild-rose color, the sweetness that flashed so vividly in her smile, the dear wonder of youth in every glance and gesture—believed in him and continued to believe in spite of his churlish rejection of her friendliness.

Though he was one of the lost legion, it was an evidence of the divine flame still flickering in him that his soul went out to meet the girl’s brave generosity. In his bosom was a warm glow. For the hour at least he was strong. It seemed possible to slough the weakness that rode him like an Old Man of the Sea.

His free hand groped its way to an inner pocket and drew out a package wrapped in cotton cloth. A fling of his arm sent it into the stubble.

“What you doin’?” demanded Forbes.

“Throwing away my gun and ammunition,” the tramp answered, his sardonic mouth twitching.

“It don’t buy you anything to pull that funny stuff,” growled the foreman. “You ain’t got a gun to throw away.”

Forbes turned the captured vagrant over to Burwell, one of the extra harvest hands, and left him at the bunkhouse while he went to telephone the doctor and the sheriff.

It was a busy night at the Diamond Bar K. The foreman drove away and presently returned. Tug heard the voices of Betty and her father as they moved toward the house. Some one chugged up to the house in a car with one spark plug fouled or broken.

Burwell went to the door of the bunkhouse.

“Get ’em, Dusty?” he asked.

“Not yet,” the cowpuncher answered while he was loosening the plug. “But, y’betcha, we’ll get ’em if this bird we done got caged didn’t play a lone hand.”

Presently Dusty drove away again, in a hurry to rejoin his companions. He had come back to find out whether anything new had been discovered.

The foreman showed up in the doorway. “The boss wants to have a talk with you, young fellow,” he said.

Betty would have known without any explanation that the prisoner had no intention of running away. But Lon had no perception of this. He did not release his grip until the tramp was in the living-room.

The owner of the Diamond Bar K lay on a lounge and Betty was hovering close to him as nurses do in their ministrations.

Reed spoke at once. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, young man. Put your cards on the table if you’re in the clear. Come through clean. What do you know about this business?” The rancher’s voice was crisp, but not unfriendly.

Tug sensed at once a change in attitude toward him. He had come expecting to be put through the third degree. It was possible that was being held in reserve for him. His mind moved cautiously to meet Reed.

“What do you mean come clean—confess?” he asked.

“Call it what you want to. You claim you didn’t shoot me—that you weren’t in to-night’s job at all. Let’s hear your alibi.”

“If you’d care to tell it to us,” Betty suggested gently.

The vagrant looked at her. “Why not? I don’t fire wheatfields and I don’t shoot from ambush.”

“All right. Let’s have it,” the wounded man said impatiently.

“When I left the ranch yesterday, I went to Wild Horse and camped a mile or so out of town. I didn’t care to meet the fellows I’d been with. They blamed me for having them hauled back to the ranch here—thought I’d hurried back to squeal on them. But I was looking for work and I wasn’t going to run away from them. About noon I tramped it into town to see about getting a job. I saw this Cig in a store. He was buying a gun and ammunition for it. He didn’t see me, so I passed by. Later I went back to the store and made sure, by asking the clerk, that Cig had bought the gun.”

Betty broke in eagerly. “And you thought he meant to kill Father. So you followed him out here to-night,” she cried.

“Not quite,” the tramp answered with an edge of cold anger in his voice. “I wouldn’t have lifted a finger for your father. He brought it on himself. He could look out for himself. I don’t know what he did to Cig yesterday afternoon, but I know it was plenty. What would he expect from a fellow like Cig after he’d treated him that way? He’s dangerous as a trapped wolf and just about as responsible morally.”

“Very well. Say I brought this fellow and his gun on me by giving him what was coming to him. What next?” asked Reed brusquely.

“I couldn’t get him out of my head. If I could have been sure he’d limit his revenge to you and your foreman— But that was just it. I couldn’t. He might lie in wait for your daughter, or he might kidnap her little sister if he got a chance.”

“Kidnap Ruthie?” the girl broke in, all the mother in her instantly alert. “Oh, he wouldn’t do that, would he?”

“Probably not.” He turned to her with the touch of deference in voice and manner so wholly lacking when he faced her father. “I thought of it because the other day we were talking of the Charley Ross case, and Cig had a good deal to say about just how a kidnapping ought to be done. The point is that I wouldn’t trust him, after what your people have done to him, any more than I would a rattlesnake. His mind works that way—fills up with horrible ideas of getting even. And he’s absolutely unmoral, far as I’ve been able to find out.”

“So you trailed him out here—on the off chance that he might hurt Betty or Ruth. Is that it?” inquired the rancher.

“You see I can’t mind my own business,” the prisoner jeered. “You invited me forcibly to get off your land and stay off, but I had to come trespassing again.”

“No need to rub it in,” blurted Reed by way of apology. “I got off wrong foot first with you. Not all my fault, though. You acted mighty foolish yourself. Still, you’ve got a legitimate kick coming. I’ll admit that. Sorry—if that does any good.”

He did not offer to shake hands. It was his judgment that this youth with the somber eyes so ready to express bitter self-mockery did not want to have anything more to do with him.

The vagrant offered no comment. His white face did not soften or its rigidity relax. Clearly he would make no pact with the Diamond Bar K.

Betty asked a swift question, to bridge the silence left by his rejection of her father’s tentative acknowledgment of wrong. “How did you know when they were coming?”

“I knew they’d come after dark, and probably to-night.” He corrected himself at once. “I oughtn’t to say ‘they,’ for I knew York wouldn’t come. He hasn’t the nerve.”

“You’re dead right there,” the foreman said. “All we give him was a first-class chapping, an’ he howled like he was bein’ killed. That other guy, now, he’s one sure-enough bad actor, if you ask me, but he’s game.”

“So I lay in the brush near their camp,” the gay-cat explained. “York went down to the railroad yards. He’s likely riding the rods for ’Frisco by this time. After dark Cig started this way and I followed. When he left the track, I trailed behind. The moon wasn’t up, and I lost him. I knew he couldn’t be far away, so I headed for the ranch, keeping close to the creek. For a while I didn’t see or hear anything more of him. Just as I’d made up my mind to strike for the house, the fires flamed up. I heard two or three shots, then some one went by me on the run. Time for me to be going, I thought. Your Mr. Forbes was of another opinion. He showed up just then and invited me to stay.”

Reed’s cool, shrewd eyes had not lifted from the tramp while he was making the explanation. He was convinced that he had been told the truth. The man had come out to do a service for his children, which was equivalent to one for Clint himself. Again he felt the sting of self-reproach at having played a poor part in this drama that had been flung into the calmness of their quiet round of existence.

“Glad Lon did find you,” the wounded man responded. “I’ll go the whole hog and tell you straight I’m right sorry for the way I’ve treated you. That makes twice you’ve come through for me. I’ll not forget it, Mr.——” He hesitated, waiting for the other to supply the name.

“Mr. Ne’er-do-well,” suggested the white-faced tramp, and on his face was a grim, ironic smile.

Reed flushed. “You’ve a right to remind me of that if you want to. It’s not the first time I’ve been a damned fool, and it likely won’t be the last. But you can tie to this, young man.” The steel-gray eyes seized those of the hobo and held them fast. “If ever there comes a time when you need Clint Reed, he’ll be here waiting. Send for him, and he’ll come. That’s a promise.”

“Will he bring along with him Dusty and Mr. Forbes and the rest of his outfit?” Tug asked, a derisive flash in his eyes.

“Say anything you’ve a mind to. I’ll not blame you if you hold hard feelings. I would in your place. But don’t forget the fact. If you’re ever in trouble, Betty and I are here waiting to be called on.”

The girl slipped her hand into her father’s and gave it a quick squeeze. It told better than words how glad she was of the thing he was doing.

“I can count on that knock-out punch of yours, can I?” the prisoner asked ironically.

The girl came forward impulsively, a shell-pink flag fluttering in her cheeks. “Please don’t feel that way. We’re sorry—we truly are. We’d love to have you give us a chance to show you how we feel.”

The hard lines on his face broke. An expression warm and tender transformed it. He turned his back on the others and spoke for her ears alone.

“An angel from heaven couldn’t do more for me than you’ve done, Miss Reed. I’ll always remember it—always. If it’s any comfort for you to know it, be sure one scamp will never forget the girl who out of her infinite kindness stretched down a hand to him when he was sinking in the mud.”

“But won’t you take the hand?” she whispered, all eager desire to help. “It’s not a very strong one, I’m afraid, but it’s ever so willing.”

He took it, literally, and looked down at it where it lay in his. “I’m taking it, you see. Don’t blame yourself if it can’t pull the scalawag out of the mire. Facilis descensus Averni, you know.”

“Is your trouble so far beyond help?” she murmured, and in her eyes he read the leap of her sweet and gallant soul toward him. “I can’t believe it. Surely there can’t be any sorrow or distress that friendship won’t lighten. If you’ll let me in where you are—if you won’t shut me out by freezing yourself up—”

The honk of an automobile horn had drawn Forbes to the window, from which point of observation he was reporting progress to his employer.

“Reckon it’s the sheriff an’ Doc Rayburn.... Yep. They’re gettin’ outa the car an’ comin’ in.” He turned to Reed. “What about this fellow here? What’s the play we’re makin’ to Daniels?”

“That he came to warn us, but got here too late. I’ll do the talking, Lon.”

A fat little man with a medicine case in his hand bustled into the room. At his heels moved a big blond cattleman whose faded blue eyes were set in a face of brown leather.

“What’s the trouble? What’s the trouble?” fumed the doctor. It was his habit of mind and manner to effervesce.

“Some tramps set fire to my wheat and shot me up, Doc. Nothing worth putting in the papers, I reckon,” answered the ranchman easily.

“Let’s see about that. Let’s see,” the doctor said with his little touch of pomposity.

He stripped his automobile gloves for action.

CHAPTER XII
“IS THIS BIRD A PRISONER, OR AIN’T HE?”

While Dr. Rayburn, with Betty and Forbes to wait upon him, made preparations to dress the wound, Sheriff Daniels listened to the story of the ranchman. The officer was a hard-headed Westerner who applied common sense to the business of maintaining law and order.

“Looks like that tramp Cig did it, unless this young fellow is passing the buck for an alibi,” he said in a low voice.

Reed shook his head. “No, Frank. This boy’s all right. I thought at first he might be in it, but I know now he wasn’t. He helped my girl out of a hole yesterday—licked this Cig because he got fresh with Bess. Even before that he had parted company with the other two. You’ll go to barkin’ up the wrong tree if you suspect him.”

The sheriff looked at Tug. The vagrant was standing beside the piano glancing at the music piled on top of it. Ragged, dusty, and unshaven, he was not a prepossessing youth. Livid and purple bruises ridged his pallid cheeks. Daniels found in the face something not quite normal, and, since he was a clean outdoor man himself, an unhealthy variation from the usual stirred in him a slight feeling of distrust.

“By yore way of it, Clint, you beat up this hobo here for trespassing on yore land. I’d say from the looks of him you gave him a plenty. Does it look reasonable to you that he’d trail the other hobo for miles to protect you from him?”

“Not to protect me, Frank. He gave it to me straight it wasn’t for me. ’Seems he got to worryin’ about what this Cig might do to the children. The fellow had been talkin’ about kidnapping and how easy it could be pulled off. So this one—Tug he calls himself—followed Cig here. Looks reasonable to me. He’s game. You’d ought to have seen him come at me with his legs wobbling under him. Well, a game man doesn’t make war on women and kids, does he?”

“Our kind of man doesn’t. But he’s not our kind. Looks to me like a dope fiend. Expect he’s got a lot of these anarchist ideas tramps are carryin’ around the country nowadays. I don’t say he’s guilty. What I do say is that I’m not convinced he’s innocent. Far as being game goes, this other man Cig is game enough, too, by what you say. Stood the gaff, and then bawled you out, didn’t he?”

“He’s game like a cornered wolf. I tell you this one’s different. He’s an educated man gone wrong. At first I didn’t get him right myself.”

“Sure you’ve got him right now?” the sheriff asked, smiling.

“Far as this business goes, I have. I’ll admit he’s got no cause to like me, but I’ve got a hunch he’s white.”

“I’d rather have facts than hunches.”

The owner of the Diamond Bar K was a new convert to the opinion he was giving voice to, and he was therefore a more eager advocate of it. “Look at this from my point of view, Frank. I thrash him till he can’t stand, and he pays me back by lookin’ out for Bess when she’s in trouble. One of my men hauls him back here at the end of a rope. He settles that score by tramping five or six miles to help us again. I’d be a poor sort if I didn’t come through for him now.”

“Well, I’ll not push on my reins, Clint,” the officer promised. “Very likely you’re right, and I’m sure not aimin’ to make trouble for any innocent man. This tramp of yours will have every chance in the world to show he’s straight. I’ll not arrest him unless I’ve got the goods on him.”

Dr. Rayburn, ready for business, came forward fussily. “You quit exciting my patient, Sheriff. Quit it. And move on out of this sick-room. I don’t want any one here but Miss Bessie and Bridget and Lon Forbes.”

The sheriff laughed. “All right, Doc. It’s yore say-so.”

He walked out of the room, the vagrant by his side.

“Am I under arrest?” the latter asked.

“You’re not under arrest, but I’d like yore word that you’ll stick around till I’ve had a chance to size this thing up.”

“If I’d fire wheat and shoot a man down from cover, what good would my word be?”

“That’s so.” The sheriff’s eyes swept up and down him. “Still, I’ll ask for yore word. Reed believes in you. I don’t reckon you did this job. Will you stay where I can reach you for a few days? I might need you as a witness.”

“Yes.”

The sheriff was surprised, not at the promise, but at the sense of reliance he put in it. It came to him that, if this young fellow gave his word, he would keep it at any cost. Since this was scarcely reasonable, he tried to reject the conviction. He recalled his court experience in listening to witnesses. Some of the most convincing were liars out of whole cloth, while honest ones with nothing to conceal were at times dragged sweating through a tangle of incompatible statements.

“Better go to the bunkhouse and wait there. I’ll fix it with Forbes so you can sleep there to-night,” Daniels said.

Tug walked to the bunkhouse and sat down on the porch. After a time the car returned with the men. They had not been able to find any one hiding in the brush or hurrying to escape.

Daniels took charge of the man-hunt. “We’ll tackle this job on horseback, boys,” he said. “This fellow will make for the railroad. He’ll jump a train at a station or a water-tank if he can. We’ll patrol the points where the cars stop.”

The foreman came down to the bunkhouse. Evidently he had his orders. “Boys, the sheriff’s in charge of this job now. You’ll do as he says.”

Dusty spoke up. He and others had been looking with open and menacing suspicion at the paroled prisoner. That young man sat on the porch, chair tipped back on two legs, smoking a cigarette with obvious indifference to their hostility. The coolness of his detachment from the business of the hour was irritating.

“What about this bird here?” Dusty wanted to know. “Is he a prisoner, or ain’t he?”

Forbes passed on further orders. He did it in a dry voice that refused responsibility. “He ain’t. The boss says he’s under obligations to him an’ you boys will treat him right. An’ he means every word of it. I wouldn’t advise none of you to get gay with—with our guest.”

“How is the boss?” asked Burt.

“Doc says he’ll do fine if no complications occur.”

“He’s got the right idea, Doc has,” Burwell grinned. “Always leave yoreself an alibi. Operation successful, but patient shy of vitality. No flowers, please.”

“Tha’s no way to talk,” reproved Forbes. “The old man’s all right. He’s lying there on the chaste lounge chipper as a woodchuck in the garbage barrel at a dude ranch. You got a consid’rable nerve to get funny about him, Burwell.”

“I didn’t aim for to get funny about him, but about the doc,” apologized the harvest hand. “Looks like when I open my mouth I always put my foot in it.”

“You put more ham an’ aigs an’ flannel cakes in it than any guy I ever did see,” commented the foreman. “I been watchin’ to see if all that fuel wouldn’t mebbe steam you up for work, but I ain’t noticed any results yet. Prob’ly you wear out all yore strength talkin’ foolishness.”

“That had ought to hold you hitched for a while, Burwell,” Dusty chuckled.

“All right, boys. Let’s go. Get busy,” the sheriff ordered crisply.

They poured out of the bunkhouse to get their horses.

CHAPTER XIII
A JOB

Betty rose at daybreak and got Justin Merrick on the telephone. After preliminary greetings she asked a question.

“Would it be convenient for you to come down this morning? There’s something I want to talk over with you if you have time.”

“I’ll make it convenient,” came the answer. “Anything serious happened?”

“That tramp Cig came back last night to fire the wheat. He shot Father. No, he’s not badly hurt, but—”

“I’ll be right down.”

It was like Merrick that he did not wait for breakfast. He was at the Diamond Bar K as soon as his car could bring him.

Betty set out a breakfast for him in the dining-room and waited on him herself with the aid of Ruth, who trotted back and forth with honey, syrup, and butter for his hot cakes. Miss Ruth was not exactly fond of Merrick. He did not give himself out enough. But she appreciated him. He had some good ideas about bringing her candy, teddy bears, and dolls.

When Betty had reassured her fiancé about Mr. Reed and answered such questions as he put about the fire and the man-hunt, she came to the real reason for asking him to call.

“It’s about that young man who was with the tramps,” she explained. “You offered to give him work. I wish you would, Justin. You’re so reliable. It might be a great thing for him to be under you—the very thing he needs.”

Merrick was not especially pleased at being chosen as the agent to reform a vagrant. He was a very busy man. Also, he had a theory that every man must stand on his own feet. But he had made a promise. He did not make many, but he always kept those he made.

“Let’s get this right, Beth,” he answered, smiling. “I said I’d put him to work and see what he had in him. I’m willing to do that. It’ll be up to him to make good. No special favors or sympathy or anything of that sort.”

Betty met his smile. “I don’t think you’d find it very easy to waste any sympathy on this young man. He’s not that kind. If you’ll give him work, that’s all you can do for him. Good of you, Justin. I’ll not forget it. I’ve got him on my conscience, you know.”

“Did he ask for work? Will he take it?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t ask us for it. He’s got his foolish pride. But he doesn’t know who you are. I mean—that I’m friendly with you or anything. Mr. Daniels wants him to stay in the neighborhood for a few days. I think he’d be glad to get a job with you if he felt you really needed him.”

“Then he’ll get a chance of one,” Justin said. “Probably I can’t put him on specialized work. Did he mention what his trade is?”

“No. He doesn’t look as though he’d had a trade. Maybe he was studying for some profession.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. At the bunkhouse, maybe, or wandering about the place. Shall I send for him?”

“No; I’d better meet him by chance and bring the thing up casually, don’t you think?”

“Yes, that would be better,” she agreed.

Having finished breakfast, Merrick went out to run down his man. He found presently a ragged young fellow sitting on the tongue of an old wagon puffing nervously at a cigarette.

The engineer nodded a good-morning at him and stopped. “Not so hot as yesterday,” he said by way of introduction.

“No,” assented the ragged one gloomily.

“I’ve learned that Sheriff Daniels wants you to stay around a few days. I’m in charge of the Sweetwater Dam irrigation project. We need men. Want a job?”

“If it’s one that suits me,” answered the tramp, eyeing Merrick ungraciously. He recognized the man’s strength and force. Every line of him, every glance, every inflection of the voice helped to bear out the impression of success he radiated. Clearly he was masterful and dominant, but the younger man did not like him less for that.

“What can you do? What’s your line?”

“I’m an engineer.”

“What kind?”

“I’ve done more bridge-building than anything else.”

Merrick looked him over more carefully. “College man?”

“Massachusetts Tech.”

“My name’s Merrick.”

The stranger hesitated a fraction of a second. “You can call me Jones.”

“One of my men quit yesterday. Would you care to take a try at it? It’s cement work.”

The man who had given his name as Jones was suffering the tortures of the damned. He wanted a shot in the arm to lift him out of himself, and he had thrown away his supply of the drug. Just now everything else in the world was unimportant beside this ravenous craving that filled his whole being.

“I’d just as soon,” he said without enthusiasm.

Ten minutes later he sat beside Merrick in the runabout. The car was taking the stiff grade of the road which climbed the Flat Tops to the hills.

CHAPTER XIV
ONE BAD HOMBRE MEETS ANOTHER

Old Jake Prowers looked grimly down upon the Flat Tops from the Notch. He could see the full stretch of the mesa and below it one end of Paradise Valley. The windmill of the Diamond Bar K was shining in the sun, miles away, flinging out heliographic signals that conformed to no man-made code.

“Wonder how Clint is this mo’ning,” he said in a high, squeaky voice that went congruously with the small, twisted figure and the wrinkled, leathery face.

His fidus Achates, Don Black, shifted in the saddle to ease himself and rested his weight on one stirrup. He was a black-bearded, fierce-looking man in blue overalls, faded flannel shirt, and run-down-at-the-heel boots.

“Didn’t know he was sick,” he said, chewing tobacco imperturbably.

“Fellow shot him last night, by jiminy by jinks, an’ set fire to his wheat.”

“Did?” Black shot one startled, questioning look at his employer.

Jake cackled with splenetic laughter. “No, sir. Don’t you look at me thataway, Don. I hadn’t a thing to do with it. If I’d ’a’ done it, it would ’a’ been done right. This fellow was a tramp, they say. He didn’t get any consid’rable amount of the wheat an’ he didn’t get Clint.”

Fate had played a strange trick when it put the unscrupulous and restless soul of a Lucifer in the warped body of Jake Prowers, when it expressed that soul through a thin, cracked voice and pale-blue, washed-out eyes. To the casual observer he seemed one of life’s ineffectives. Those who knew him best found reason to shudder at his mirthless laughter and his mild oaths, at the steady regard of his expressionless gaze. They seemed somehow to stress by contrast the man’s dark and ruthless soul. There were moments when from those cold eyes flamed something sinister and blasting that chilled the blood.

Black had been living for weeks at an out-of-the-way cabin in the hills. He was riding herd on a bunch of Prowers’s cattle feeding on the edge of the Government reservation. Consequently he had been out of the way of hearing the news of the community.

“What had this tramp got against Clint?” he asked, firing accurately with tobacco juice at the face of a flat rock.

“You know how high-headed Clint is. He beat up a bunch of tramps an’ one came back to even up things. Last night he took a whirl at it. The fellow set fire to some wheat-stacks an’ gunned Clint when he showed up, by the jumpin’ Jehosaphat. But Clint’s no invalid. He’d take right smart killing, an’ all he got was one pill in the leg. Trouble with most of these here bad men is they ain’t efficient. When you lay for Clint, Don, I’d advise you to spill about a pint of lead in him.”

The little man grinned with broken-toothed malevolence at his henchman.

“I don’t aim to lay for Clint,” growled Black. He was not a humorist and he never knew when Prowers’s jokes were loaded with dynamite.

Jake cackled. “O’ course not. Clint, he’s a good citizen if he did kick you off’n the Diamond Bar K once. What’s a li’l’ thing like that between friends.”

“I don’t claim him as any friend of mine. If you ask me, he’s too dawg-goned bossy—got to have everything his own way. But that ain’t sayin’ I got any notion of layin’ in the brush for him. Not so any one could notice it. If Clint lives till I bump him off, he’ll sure be a Methuselah,” Black answered sulkily.

“That’s fine,” jeered the cattleman. “I’ll tell Clint to quit worryin’ about you—that you ain’t got a thing against him. Everything’s lovely, even if he did kick you around some.”

The rider flushed darkly. “He ain’t worryin’ none about me, an’ I didn’t say everything was lovely. I like him same as I do a wolf. But all I ask is for him to let me alone. If he does that, we’ll not tangle.”

On the breeze there came to them from far to the left a faint booming. Prowers looked toward the rocky escarpment back of which lay the big dam under construction.

The wrinkled, leathery face told no tales. “Still blasting away on his dinged dam project. That fellow Merrick is either plumb fool or else we are. I got to find out which.”

“I reckon he can’t make water run uphill,” the dark man commented.

“No, Don. But maybe he doesn’t have to do that. Maybe the Government engineers are wrong. I’ll admit that don’t look reasonable to me. They put it down in black and white—three of ’em, one after another—that Elk Creek Cañon is higher at the far end than this dam site of his. They dropped the scheme because it wasn’t feasible. Probably Merrick’s one of these squirts that know it all. Still—” The sentence died out, but the man’s thoughts raced on.

Black desisted from chewing tobacco to hum a fragment of a song he had cherished twenty-five years.

“Every daisy in the dell

Knows my story, knows it well,”

he murmured tunelessly.

“If he should be right, by jiminy by jinks—” Prowers was talking to himself. He let the conditional clause stand alone. Slowly the palm of his hand rasped back and forth over a rough, unshaven chin.

“Did they catch this tramp that shot up Clint?” asked Black.

“Not yet. Daniels is patrolling the railroad. If the fellow hasn’t made his getaway on the night freight, they’ll likely get him. He’s got to stick to the railway.”

“Why has he?” the rider inquired. He was watching a moving object among the rocks below.

“So’s to skip the country. He ain’t acquainted here—knows nothing about these hills. If he wasn’t taken by some rancher and turned over to Daniels, he’d starve to death. Likely he’s lying under cover somewheres along the creek.”

“Likely he ain’t,” differed Black. “Likely he’s ducked for the hills.” His gaze was still on the boulder field below. From its case beside the saddle he drew a rifle.

“Why would he do that?”

“I dunno why, except that a fellow on the dodge can’t always choose the road he’s gonna travel. Any reward for this guy?”

“Ain’t heard of any. Yore conscience joggin’ you to light out and hunt for the man that shot up Clint, Don?” his employer probed derisively.

“I wouldn’t have to hunt far, Jake,” the herder replied, a note of triumph in the drawling voice. For once he had got the better of the boss in a verbal duel. “He’s right down there among the rocks.”

“Down where?”

The barrel of the rifle pointed to a group of large boulders which, in prehistoric days, perhaps, had broken from the ledge above and rolled down.

“Don’t see any one,” Jake said after the pale-blue eyes had watched the spot steadily for several moments.

“He’s seen us, an’ he’s lying hid. You keep him covered while I go down and collect him.”

Prowers gave this consideration and vetoed the suggestion. “No, you stay here, Don, and I’ll go get him.”

“If there’s any reward—”

“Don’t you worry about that. There ain’t gonna be any reward.”

The ranchman swung down from the saddle and descended from the bluff by way of a wooded gulch at the right. Ten minutes later, Black saw him emerge and begin to cross the rock slide toward the big boulders.

Presently Prowers stopped and shouted. “You fellow in the rocks, I wantta talk with you.”

There came no answer.

He moved cautiously a little closer, rifle ready for action. “We got you, fellow. Better come outa there an’ talk turkey. I don’t aim for to turn you over to the sheriff if you’re anyways reasonable,” he explained.

“Wotcha want with me?” a voice called from the rocks.

“Wantta have a pow-wow with you. Maybe you ’n’ me can do business together. No can tell.”

“Who are you?”

“Name’s Jake Prowers. No friend of Clint Reed if that’s what’s eatin’ you?”

After a delay of several seconds, a figure appeared and moved closer. The ranchman saw in the man’s hand the gleam of an automatic revolver.

The fugitive stopped a few yards from Prowers and eyed him suspiciously. “Wotcha want to chew the rag about?” he asked.

Jake sat down on a rock with an air so casually careless that a tenderfoot might not have guessed that he was ready for instant action if need be.

“Fellow, sit down,” he said. “We got all day before us. I don’t reckon you got any engagements you have to keep immediate—not since you had that one at the Diamond Bar K ranch last night.”

“I don’t getcha.”

“Sure you do. No use throwin’ a sandy with me. I tell you, fellow, I’m playin’ my own hand. Me, I don’t like Reed any more’n you do. So, entrey noo, as the frog-eaters say, we’ll take it for granted you were the uninvited guest at Reed’s ranch a few hours since. Yore work wasn’t first-class, if you ask old Jake Prowers. You didn’t burn but a small part of the wheat and you didn’t get Clint anyways adequate.”

“Meaning he wasn’t croaked?” Cig demanded out of the corner of his mouth.

“I’ll say he wasn’t, by jiminy by jinks. But I don’t know as that’ll help you any when his boys catch you.”

“They ain’t gonna catch me,” the New York crook boasted, his brain seething with suspicion of the dried-up little man in front of him.

Jake Prowers weighed this, a skeptical smile on his thin lips. “Interesting, but unreliable,” he decided aloud, in regard to the other’s prediction. “How do you aim to prevent it? The sheriff has got you cut off from the railroad. Food don’t grow on bushes in these hills. You’re done, unless—”

“You gotta ’nother guess coming,” the thug retorted. “Forget that stuff. I ain’t no hobo. Come to a showdown these country boobs’ll find me right there with a gun. I’m a good man to lay off.”

The Westerner laughed, softly and derisively. “Fellow, you talk plumb foolish. This ain’t New York. It’s Colorado. That popgun of yours ain’t worth a billy be damn. Why, I could pick you off right now an’ never take a chance. Or my man could do it from the ledge up there. But say, for the sake of argument, we let you go. Say you ain’t found by any posse or cowpuncher. What’s the end of the trail you’re following? It don’t lead anywhere but round an’ round in a circle. You got nothing to eat and no place to go for food. Maybe you can stick it out a week. Then you’re done.”

“I might get to a town and jump a freight.”

“Not a chance. In a country like this news spreads in all directions. There ain’t a man within fifty miles but has his eyes peeled for you. No, sir, you’re in Dutch.”

Cig felt his helplessness, in spite of the bluff he was putting up. This land of wide spaces, of a thousand hills and valleys, shook his confidence. In New York he would have known what to do, but here he was a child. The shrunken little man finished in brown leather was giving him straight facts and he knew it.

“Nothing to that. Say, old Jonah, do I look like I had a yellow streak?” the New York tough demanded.

“All right. Suits me if it does you.” Jake rose and waved a hand airily into space. “Drift right along, my friend. I’ll not keep you—not for a minute. But when you come to the end of yore trail, you’ll remember that you had one good bet you wouldn’t back because you’re one of these wise guys that know it all.”

The fugitive listened with sullen resentment. He did not want to trust this old man. His instinct told him that, if he did so, Prowers would be for the time at least his master. But he was driven by circumstances which gave him no choice.

“I ain’t said I wouldn’t listen to you, have I?” he growled.

Prowers sat down again on the rock. “If I help you, we’ve got to come to an understanding right now. It’ll be a business deal. I hide you an’ feed you. Some day I’ll need you. When I do, you’ll take orders like a lamb. If that ain’t agreeable to you, why, all you got to do is start on yore travels now.”

“Need me what for?” demanded Cig.

Into the mild, skim-milk eyes of the cattleman there flashed for an instant an expression of cold cruelty scarcely human. As Prowers’s thin lip smile met Cig, the tramp still felt the shock of that ruthless ferocity.

“How the jumpin’ Jehosaphat do I know?” the old man said suavely, almost in a murmur. “For murder, massacre, or mayhem. Not yore business, my friend. All you’ve got to do is jump when I say so. Understand?”

Cig felt a cold sinking of the heart. He belonged to the dregs of humanity, but he knew that this mild old man was his master in villainy. It was as though he were smoking a cigarette with a keg of gunpowder scattered all around him. Jake Prowers was a center of danger almost Olympic in possibilities.

“I dunno about that,” the crook snarled.

Again the wrinkled hand of the ranchman lifted in a gesture that included all space. “The world’s before you,” he said ironically. “The peace of the hills go with you while you hunt for a nice lonesome gulch as a coffin.”

“What do I get out of it if we do business? Or do youse figure on workin’ me for a sucker?”

Jake had won, and he knew it. “Now you’re talkin’ sense, my friend. You’ll find me no tightwad. I pay for what I get, and I pay big.” An ominous flash of warning was in his eyes as he leaned forward and spoke slowly and softly. “But if you throw me down—if there’s a finger crook about you that ain’t on the level with me—better say yore prayers backward and forward. No man ever double-crossed Jake Prowers an’ got away with it. It ain’t being done in this neck of the woods.”

Hardy villain though he was, Cig felt a shiver go down his spine. He was superstitious, as all criminals are. He had the feeling that some one was walking on his grave, that this wrinkled old devil had been appointed by fate to put a period to his evil ways and days.

He shook off the wave of foreboding and slouched forward, slipping the automatic into his coat pocket. “I’ll play square, boss, if you do. See me through an’ I’ll go the limit for you. It’s a bargain.”

Jake shook hands on it.

“Done, by jiminy by jinks,” he said in his high weak voice.

Cig was puzzled and a little annoyed. How had he ever been fooled into thinking that this inoffensive little specimen was dangerous? It was written on him that he would not hurt a fly.

CHAPTER XV
THE HOMESTEADER SERVES NOTICE

In later years the man who had called himself Tug Jones looked back on the days and nights that followed as a period of unmitigated dejection and horror. The craving for the drug was with him continually. If he had had a supply on hand, he would have yielded a hundred times to the temptation to use it. But he had burned the bridges behind him. There was no way to get the stuff without going in person to a town of some size.

This meant not only a definite surrender of the will, but a promise of relief that could not be fulfilled inside of twenty-four hours at the earliest. Just now this stretch of time was a period of torment as endless as a year.

Somehow he stuck it out, though he spent much of his time in an inferno of feverish desire. He tried to kill the appetite with work. Merrick, moving to and fro with a keen eye on the men, observed that the foreman was sloughing his work and letting it fall on Jones. At the end of the week, Merrick discharged him and raised the former tramp to his place as foreman. Jones accepted the promotion without thanks. He knew he had earned it, but he did not care whether he received it or not.

He grew worn and haggard. Dark shadows emphasized the hollows of the tortured eyes. So irritable was his temper that at a word it flashed to explosion. By disposition he was not one to pass on to subordinates the acerbity that was a residue of the storm that was shaking him. A sense of justice had always been strong in him. Fifty times a day he clamped his teeth to keep back the biting phrase. In general he succeeded, but malingerers found him a hard taskmaster.

They appealed to Merrick and got small comfort from him. The new cement foreman was getting the work done both rapidly and well. That was all the chief engineer asked of him. The details could be arranged by Jones as he pleased.

The nights were the worst. During the day he had the work to occupy his mind, but when darkness fell over the hills its shadows crept over his soul. He could not sleep. Sometimes he borrowed technical books from Merrick and tried to bury himself in study. More often he tramped till physical exhaustion drove him back to his cot to stare up sleeplessly at the canvas roof of his tent.

Suffering wears itself out at last. There came a time when the edge of the craving grew less keen, when its attack was less frequent. In the pure, untempered air of the hills the cement gang foreman came to sounder health. His appetite increased with his physical stamina. One day it struck him with a little shock of surprise that he had not had one of his racking headaches for two weeks. He began to sleep better, though there were still nights when he had to tramp the hills in self-defense.

Inevitably during those days the foreman found himself studying the project upon which Merrick had staked his reputation. As an engineer he took off his hat to the efficiency with which his chief got results. Merrick was a driver, but he was more than that. He had the fighting spirit that lifts from defeat to victory. Good engineers had said it was not feasible to water the Flat Tops by means of ditches carrying water from the drainage area above. Justin Merrick had not accepted their verdict. He had made his own surveys and meant to demonstrate that they were wrong.

He knew that a certain group of cattlemen, under the leadership of old Jake Prowers, were watching him sullenly. They believed, from the surveys made by Government engineers, that the grade made it impossible to bring water from the dam through Elk Creek Cañon to the mesa below. Yet Merrick knew, too, that they were uneasy. It was on the cards that the Reclamation Service experts might be wrong in their surveys. If Prowers discovered that they were, Justin felt sure he would move to ruthless and dynamic action.

The big dam was practically finished. Merrick kept a night guard over it and the tools. Sometimes, after supper, he strolled down to look it over and think out under the quiet stars the problems of supplies or canal construction. It was on such a night visit that he came face to face with the new concrete work foreman.

The superintendent of construction had been watching Tug Jones. He had found out that the man was one who would accept responsibility and could be trusted to get efficient results without supervision. Twice he had taken him from the work he had in charge and given him engineering difficulties to solve. Each time the man from Massachusetts Tech had eliminated the tangle in the clearest and simplest way.

Merrick was not given to asking advice of his subordinates, no matter how capable they might be. To-night he simply made an announcement of a detail in his plans that involved the foreman.

“About time we began work on Elk Creek Cañon, Jones,” he said. “I’m going to put you in charge and run the ditch line through right away. We may have trouble there. That fellow Prowers had one of his men, a rider named Don Black, file a homestead claim right in the cañon. It won’t stick. He knows that, but he wants some ground to fight us. Look out for him.”

“Yes,” agreed the foreman.

The habit of mind of the Massachusetts Tech man was to be thorough. He studied the surveys very closely and went over the ground carefully from the dam site to the cañon entrance. The conclusion was forced upon him that Merrick had made a mistake. The grade through the hills to Elk Creek Cañon would not do. He could put his finger on the very spot that made it impossible.

It was hard for him to believe that Merrick had made a blunder so vital to the success of the enterprise. He checked up his figures a second time and made a re-survey of that part of the line. There was no possible doubt about it. Since water will not run uphill by gravity, it could not flow from the dam to the upper entrance of the cañon.

He reported to his chief what he had discovered.

Merrick took this facer with no least hint of dismay. So far as his strong, square-cut visage gave any expression, it was one of impatience.

“Suppose you leave that to me, Jones,” he said curtly. “I know what I’m doing. What I’m asking of you is to determine the best path for the ditch along the side of the cañon. That’s all.”

“But if you can’t get the water to the cañon—”

“That’s my business. You’re not responsible for that.”

There remained nothing more to be said. Jones carried away with him the knowledge that his chief had flatly declined to give weight to his findings. He could either resign or he could do as he was told.

The younger man was puzzled. Was it possible that Merrick, after all, was a pig-headed four-flusher? That he could be a pretentious incompetent fed up with a sense of infallibility?

To see him on the work was a refutal of this view. He was an egoist through and through. To look at the salient jaw, into the cool, flinty eyes, was to recognize the man’s self-sufficiency. He was dominant and masterful. But it was hard to believe that his shrewd, direct, untiring energy masked any incapacity. He did not seem to have the quality of mind that is content to fool itself.

Tug knew that his chief had a much wider experience in engineering than he. This project must have been studied by him from every angle, all difficulties considered, all technical problems solved. Yet the fact stood in the way like a Rock of Gibraltar that water flows downhill and not up.

He shrugged his shoulders and stepped out from under. Merrick had told him with cool finality that it was none of his business. That was true. He had done his full duty when he reported the matter to the chief. He turned his attention to running the ditch line through the gorge.

To save time he moved his outfit to Elk Creek. A chuck wagon, mule teams, scrapers, and necessary supplies followed the little group of surveyors. Within a week the sound of blasting echoed from wall to wall of the ravine.

Two men rode up the defile to the engineer’s camp one sunny morning. Jones, in flannel shirt, corduroys, and high laced boots, directed operations as the workmen set out on the day’s work.

One of the visitors to the camp was a long, black-bearded, fierce-eyed man in blue overalls. The other was a mild little fellow in years well past middle age.

The dark man introduced himself rudely. “What the blue blazes you doing here? This is my homestead. You trying to jump my claim?”

The engineer met this brusque attack suavely. During the past weeks, as he had slowly fought his way back toward self-respect, the defiance and the bitter irony had disappeared from his manner. He was recovering the poise that characterizes the really able man of affairs when he is subjected to annoyance and worry.

“You are Mr. Donald Black?” he asked.

“I’m him. An’ I’m here to say that no man—I don’t care if he is backed by a big corporation—can jump my property an’ get away with it.”

“I don’t think we have any intention of prejudicing your rights, Mr. Black,” the engineer answered. “Of course, I’m only an employee. Mr. Merrick is the man you ought to see. You’ll find him up at the dam.”

“I’m servin’ notice on you right here an’ now to get off my land. I’m givin’ you till night to get yore whole outfit outa here. I ain’t a-going to see anybody. Understand? You’ve got me in one word short an’ sweet—git.”

The dried-up little man beside Black let out a cracked cackle of laughter. “Seems like that should ought to be plain enough,” he murmured.

Tug looked at the wrinkled cattleman. He guessed that this was Jake Prowers, of whose sinister reputation rumors had reached him. But it was to Black he spoke.

“Don’t you think, perhaps, you had better see a lawyer? There’s always a legal way to straighten out difficulties that—”

“Lawyer!” exploded Black with an oath. “Listen, fellow! I don’t aim for to see no lawyer. You’d like fine to tie this up in the courts while you went right on building yore end gates an’ runnin’ yore ditches on my land. No, sir. Cattle was here first, an’ we don’t aim to let you chase us off. See?”

“I expect the law will have to decide that, Mr. Black. But that’s merely an opinion of mine. I’m here to run a ditch through this cañon—an employee hired at so much a week. Unless I get orders to stop work, the ditch will be dug.” Jones spoke evenly, without raising his voice, but there was a ring of finality in his tone.

“You crow damn loud,” Black retorted angrily. “Think I don’ know who you are—a good-for-nothin’ tramp liable to go to the pen for burnin’ up wheat an’ bush-whackin’ Clint Reed? You’re all swelled up, ain’t you? Forget it, fellow. I’m givin’ you orders to clear out. If you don’t, some of you’re liable to be sorry. This here is a man’s country.”

Tug looked straight at the rawboned, dark man. “Meaning?” he asked pointedly.

Prowers answered. He knew that enough had been said. More would be surplusage and might carry the danger of a come-back in case men should be killed.

“You’d be sorry to beat a pore man outa his claim, wouldn’t you?” he said, tee-heeing with virulent laughter. “Come on, Don. Might as well be pushin’ on our reins.”

Over his shoulder the homesteader flung a last word that might be taken as a threat, a warning, or a prophecy. “Till to-night, Mr. Hobo.”

CHAPTER XVI
THE STAMPEDE

Jones sent a messenger to his chief with word of Don Black’s threat, and Merrick at once rode to Elk Creek to consult with the man he had put in charge.

“Do they mean to attack you? Is that what you gathered from what he said?” asked the chief engineer of his assistant.

“Don’t know. Prowers smoothed over what Black said. I judge he didn’t want to go on record as having made any threats. But the last thing the big fellow yelled at me was that we had till to-night to get out.”

“Good of him to give you warning. What do you suggest, Jones?”

“Give me half a dozen rifles and I’ll hold the fort,” the younger man replied, eyes gleaming. “Double the gang and let me rush the work.”

Merrick shook his head. “No, this isn’t a little private war we’re having. Think I’ll just let you sit tight and see what happens. Prowers isn’t likely to go far to start with.”

“Suits me, but don’t blame me if they drive us out. I’m rather looking for a bunch of armed cowboys to descend upon us.”

“In which case you’ll enter a formal protest and retire in good order without resistance. The law’s with us. I filed our maps and plans with the Land Office before Black homesteaded. He obviously took up this quarter section only to hamper us.”

“Will it delay you much?”

Justin Merrick smiled, a rather peculiar smile that suggested a knowledge of facts not on the surface. “I don’t think so, but there’s no reason why Prowers shouldn’t.”

“Rather tame surrender, wouldn’t it be? If you’re within your rights, why not stand our ground and fight them off?”

“For the moral effect, you mean?”

“Yes. Isn’t it a sign of weakness for us to hoist the white flag after the first brush?”

“That’s a point of view. We’re playing for position. Let Prowers break the law and get in wrong. If we’re armed and looking for trouble, we don’t come into court with clean hands ourselves. I’d rather let him show his plan of campaign. Even though we should be driven out, we can come back whenever we want to. He can’t keep his men here and hold the gulch.”

“No. At least he won’t.”

The man who had fought in Flanders was not satisfied. The irrigation company was in the right. Prowers and the group of men with him were obstructionists, trying to hold back the progress of the country for their own selfish ends. They were outside the law, though they were using it as a cover. The policy to be expected of Merrick would have been bolder, less opportunistic. Why had the chief marched his men up the hill, like the King of France in the rhyme, only to march them down again? This did not seem to go well with his salient, fighting jaw.

Since it was his business to obey orders and not to ask for reasons, Tug said no more. He understood that Merrick was holding back something from him, and he had no desire whatever to force a confidence.

Merrick rode back to the dam and left his subordinate in charge of the camp. Throughout the day work went on uninterrupted. At dusk the surveyors and ditch-diggers returned to the draw where the tents had been set. At this point of the gorge the wall fell back and a slope led to the rim above.

At the summit of this rise the engineer posted a sentry with orders to fire a revolver in case of an attack. Two other guards were set, one at each mouth of the cañon. At the expiration of four hours, these were relieved by relays. At midnight, and again in the chill pre-dawn hours, Jones himself made a round of the posts to see that all was well.

He had scarcely lain down after the second tour when the crack of a revolver sounded. Tug leaped to his feet and was drawing on a boot before the echoes had died away.

As he ducked out from the tent flap, revolver in hand, a glance showed him scantily clad men spilling from their sleeping quarters.

“What is it? Where are they?” some one yelled.

A light breeze was stirring. On it was borne a faint rumble as of thunder. It persisted—seemed to be rolling nearer. The sound deepened to a steady roar. Tug’s startled glance swept the cañon sword cleft. Could there have been a cloudburst in the hills? The creek bed was still dry. His eyes swung round to the saddle ridge of the draw above him.

A living tidal wave was pouring across the rim and down the draw. Hundreds of backs tossed up and down like the swell of a troubled sea. Though he had never seen one before, the engineer knew that the camp was in the path of a cattle stampede.

He shouted a warning and raced for the higher ground at the edge of the draw. The men scattered to escape from the path of that charging avalanche. They were in a panic of fear. If any were caught beneath the impact of those scores of galloping hoofs, they would be crushed to death instantly. Startled oaths and staccato shouts rang out. An anguished yell of terror lifted itself shrilly. A running man had stumbled and gone down.

The thud of the hoofs died away. The stampede had swept down into the dry bed of the stream and swung to the right. It left behind it a devastated camp. Tents had been torn down and ripped to pieces. Cots were smashed to kindling. From the overturned chuck wagon scattered food lay trampled into the ground by sharp feet. The surveying instruments were broken beyond repair.

A huddled mass lay motionless in the track of the avalanche. Tug knelt beside it and looked into the battered outline of what a few moments earlier had been a man’s face quick with life. No second glance was necessary to see that the spirit had passed out of the crushed body. The engineer recognized him by the clothes. His name was Coyle. He had been a harmless old fellow of many quips and jests, one full of the milk of human kindness. He, too, had fought against his weakness, a fondness for liquor that had all his life kept him down. Now, in a moment, his smiles and his battles were both ended.

Jones straightened the twisted body and the sprawling limbs before he covered the face with a handkerchief. He rose and looked grimly round at the group of appalled men whose blanched faces made a gray semi-circle in the faint light of coming dawn. They were a rough-and-ready lot. Most of them had seen the lives of fellow workmen snuffed out suddenly. But this had come like a bolt from heaven. Each of them knew that it might have been he lying there; that if the boss had not set a watch, the stampede would have destroyed many of them. The shock of it still chilled the heart.

“They’ve murdered poor Coyle,” the engineer said, and his voice was a solemn accusation.

“How’s that?” asked one, startled.

“These cattle didn’t gather up there by themselves. They were rounded up and stampeded over the crest.”

“Jake Prowers!” exclaimed a mule-skinner.

“We’ll name no names yet, boys, not till we’ve put it up to Mr. Merrick.” The camp boss glanced up the hill. The sound of some one running had reached his ears. “Here comes Jensen. We’ll hear what he has to say.”

Jensen confirmed the charge of the engineer. He had heard voices, shots, the crack of whips, and then the thundering rush of cattle. He had fired once and fled for the safety of the rocks. The stampede had stormed past and down the slope. But he had seen and heard no more of the men who had been exciting the wild hill cattle to a panic of terror. They had disappeared in the darkness.

The engineer made arrangements for carrying the body of Coyle to the dam and sent a messenger to notify Merrick of what had taken place. This done, he climbed to the saddle of the draw with the intention of investigating the lay of the land where the stampede had started. He knew that, if he were only expert enough to read it, the testimony written there would convict those who had done this crime.

At work of this sort he was a child. He was from the East, and he knew nothing of reading sign. Stamped in mud, with outlines clear-cut and sharp, he would have known, of course, a pony’s tracks from those of a steer. But unfortunately the marks imprinted on the short brittle grass were faint and fragmentary. They told no story to Jones.

He quartered over the ground carefully, giving his whole mind to the open page which Nature had spread before him and covered with her handwriting. Concentration was not enough. It was written in a language of which he had not learned the vocabulary. Reluctantly he gave up the attempt. Sheriff Daniels was a Westerner, an old cattleman, skilled at cutting sign. This was a problem for him to solve if he could.

It was afternoon when the sheriff arrived. He had made one discovery before reaching the camp. A cow had broken a leg in the stampede and lay helpless in the bed of Elk Creek. The brand on it was the Diamond Bar K.

“Fine business,” he commented dryly. “Clint’s enemies try to bust up the irrigation proposition he’s interested in by stampedin’ his own cattle down the draw here. Maybe we can find out the hombres that rounded up a bunch of his stock yesterday. That’d help some.”

If the sheriff discovered anything from his examination of the lane over which the stampede had swept, he did not confide in either Jones or Merrick. Like many men who have lived much in the open, he had a capacity for reticence. He made his observations unhurriedly and rode away without returning to the camp.

Merrick gave his assistant orders to break camp and return to the dam. A force was still to continue at work in the cañon, but the men would be taken up and brought back each day.

CHAPTER XVII
HIS PICTURE IN THE PAPER

Summer had burned to autumn. The first frosts had crisped the foliage of the quaking asps and the cottonwoods to a golden glory in tune with the halcyon Indian summer. Faint threats of coming winter could be read in an atmosphere grown more pale and sharp, in coloring less rich and warm.

Betty could count the time in months now since she had sent her salvaged tramp into the hills to help her lover wrestle with the problems of the Sweetwater Dam project. It was still a joy to her that she had been intuitively right about him. He was making good. He had brains and ability and the power of initiative which marks the strong man from the subordinate. Justin admitted this generously, giving her credit for a keener insight than his own.

But that was not the best of it. She knew now, through Merrick, what the vice was that had dragged him down: and from the same source she learned that he had so far fought his campaign out to victory. Not since the day after her father had been shot had she seen the young man, but she wished she could send him a message of good cheer and faith.

She thought of him a good deal. She was thinking of him this morning as she cleaned the pantry shelves and substituted new papers for the old. Justin had been down the evening before and had told her of the threat Prowers had made through Don Black in case the young engineer did not evacuate the cañon. It was in her character to look for good rather than ill in men, but she had a conviction that the cackling little cattleman was a sink of iniquity. He would do evil without ruth. There was, she felt, something demoniac, unhuman about him.

How far would he go to begin with? She did not know, but she was glad Justin had given orders to retire from Elk Creek in case of attack. His reasons she appreciated and approved. He was no hothead, but a cool, hard-hitting, determined fighter. In the end he would win, no matter what difficulties were thrown in his way. She could not think of Justin in any way except as a success. He was the kind of man who succeeds in whatever he undertakes.

The telephone rang. Her father, at Wild Horse, was on the line.

“There’s been trouble at the cañon,” he explained. “I’ve been talkin’ with Daniels. Merrick has sent for him. A man was killed—some one working on the job. Haven’t heard any particulars yet. I’ll let you know if I do.”

“Killed—on purpose, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t hear who?”

“Daniels doesn’t know.”

Betty returned to her work very much disturbed in mind. There was no reason for assuming that the man who had been killed was her redeemed vagrant, but she could not get this possibility out of her mind. He would be in the forefront of danger if there was any. She knew him well enough for that.

She tried to get Merrick on the telephone, but the word that came down to her from the dam was that he had ridden to Elk Creek. Did the assistant superintendent know when he would be back? No, he did not.

Tremulously Betty asked another question. “Have you heard, Mr. Atchison, who the man is that was killed?”

“His name’s Coyle—a man sent out to us by an employment agency in Denver.”

Betty leaned against the wall a moment after she had hung up the receiver. She was greatly relieved, and in the reaction from the strain under which she had been holding herself tautly felt oddly weak.

“Don’t be a goose!” she told herself with stinging candor. “What does it matter to you who it was?”

But she knew it mattered a great deal. Nobody had ever stimulated her imagination as this tramp had. Her liking for Justin was of quite another sort. It had not in it the quality that set pulses pounding. She would have denied to herself indignantly that she did not love him. If not, why was she engaged to him? But her affection was a well-ordered and not a disturbing force. This was as it should be, according to her young philosophy. She gave herself with energy and enthusiasm to the many activities of life. The time had not yet come when love was for her a racing current sweeping to its goal so powerfully that there could be no dalliance by the way.

Betty moved the dishes from the last shelf. As she started to gather the soiled newspaper folded across the plank, her glance fell upon the picture of a soldier in uniform. The eyes that looked into hers were those of the man who had called himself Tug Jones.

Her breath caught as she read. The caption beneath the photograph was, “Captain Thurston K. Hollister, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for Gallantry in France.” The story below mentioned the fact that the man who had been given this recognition had disappeared and could not be found.

The girl’s blood sang. She had known from that first day he was of good blood, but she had not been sure that his record was worthy of him. He had not only fought in France; he had covered himself with glory. It was almost too good to be true.

She was on the porch to meet her father before he had swung down from the saddle. He told her details of the affair at Elk Creek as far as he had heard them.

Betty had cut the Hollister story out of the paper. She handed it to her father, all but the picture folded under.

“Who is this, Daddy?”

Reed glanced at it and answered promptly. “Looks like that young fellow Jones.”

Triumphantly she nodded. “That’s who it is. Read what it says about him.”

The cattleman read. “Hmp!” he grunted. “An’ I called him a slacker.”

“It doesn’t matter now what you called him, Dad. But I’m awf’ly glad he wasn’t one.”

“Some li’l’ stunt that—breakin’ up a German machine-gun nest and sittin’ tight for two days under fire till the boys reached him.” Clint smiled sardonically, the memory of the tongue-lashing he had given this man still vividly with him. “I reckon I can be more kinds of a durn fool in an hour than ’most anybody you know, Bess.”

“I’m so glad he’s making good with Justin. I just knew he was a splendid fellow.”

“I’m so dawg-goned hot-headed. Can’t wait an’ give myself time to cool off,” he grumbled.

“He told Justin about it. The doctors gave him a lot of morphine or something when he was wounded and he got in the habit of using it to relieve the pain. Before he knew it he couldn’t stop.”

“You’d think I’d learn a lick or two of sense, an’ me ’most fifty.”

“He hasn’t touched the stuff since he went up to the dam. Justin says it must have been horrible for him. Some nights he kept walking till morning.”

“What else was it I called him besides a slacker—after I’d beat him up till he couldn’t stand, an’ him a sick man at that?”

Betty laughed at the way each of them, absorbed in a personal point of view, was carrying on a one-sided conversation.

“Are you going up to Elk Creek to-day, Dad? If you are, I wish you’d let me go along.”

“I was thinkin’ about it. Like to go, would you? All right. We might drive and take Ruthie.”

“That’d be fine. Let’s go.”

Betty flew into the house to get ready.

CHAPTER XVIII
A HOT TRAIL

Sheriff Daniels rode across the hogback above Elk Creek to a small ranch recently taken up by a homesteader, much to the annoyance of Jake Prowers. He found the man in a shed that served temporarily as a barn.

Here a cow was proudly licking a very wobbly calf.

“’Lo, Sheriff. How’re things comin’ with you? Fine an’ dandy?”

“No complaint, Howard. Had an increase in yore herd, looks like.”

“Yessir, though it didn’t look much thataway ’bout three o’clock this mo’ning a.m.”

“Come near losing her?”

“Bet I did. Both of ’em. But you never can tell, as the old sayin’ is. I stayed with it, an’ everything’s all right now.”

“I come across the hogback to have a chin with Black. Know whether he’s home?” the officer asked.

“No, sir, I don’t. He passed down the road whilst I was up with old bossie here right early.”

The sheriff complimented his humor by repeating it. “At three o’clock this mo’ning a.m.?”

“Yessir. I figured he must be going somewheres to be settin’ off at that time o’ day.”

“Alone, was he?”

“Why, no, I reckon there was some one with him.”

Daniels threw a leg across a feed-rack, drew out a knife from his pocket, and began to sharpen it on the leather of his boot. “Dark as all git out, wasn’t it? How’d you know it was Don?”

The homesteader grinned. “Every daisy in the dell knows his story too darned well,” he parodied.

“Singin’ ‘Sweet Marie,’ was he?”

“Yep. Say, what kind of a mash would you feed her? She’s right feverish yet, I shouldn’t wonder.”

The sheriff gave advice out of his experience before he came back ten minutes later to a subject that interested him more.

“Don was out rounding-up cattle yesterday, wasn’t he? Seems some one told me so.”

“Likely enough. He was away from the shack all day. Wasn’t home by dark. I seen a light up there somewheres about nine-thirty.”

The officer rode up to the cabin Black was using. The door was hospitably unlatched, but nobody was at home. Daniels walked in and looked around. It was both dirty and untidy, but it told no tales of what its occupant had been doing in the past twenty-four hours.

Daniels remounted, skirted the edge of the Government reserve, and descended a draw which led into a small gorge almost concealed by a grove of young quaking asps. This received its name from box elders growing up the sides. If Black and his friends had rounded up a bunch of cattle during the day, and wanted to keep them unobserved until they could be stampeded into Elk Creek Cañon, there was no handier spot to hold them than in this little gulch. The sheriff had ridden these hills too many years as a cattleman not to know the country like a familiar book. In his youth, while riding as a puncher for Prowers, he and a companion had been caught in a blizzard and reached Box Elder Cañon in time to save themselves by building a fire. Since then he had been here many times.

A one-room log cabin clung to the slope at the edge of the quaking asps. It had been built by a hermit prospector thirty years before, and had many times in the intervening years been the refuge of belated punchers.

The officer walked in through the sagging door. On the floor was a roll of soiled blankets. Greasy dishes and remnants of food were on the home-made table. Three persons had eaten here as late as this morning. He could tell that by the live coals among the charred ends of wood in the fireplace. Also, the lard left in the frying-pan had not yet hardened.

Daniels made deductions. Of the three, one had spent the night here to keep an eye on the cattle, assuming that his guess about the herd was a correct one. The other two had ridden up to Black’s cabin and slept there, returning in the early morning for the drive to Elk Creek.

From the cabin the sheriff walked down into the bottom of the gulch. There was plenty of evidence to show that a large number of cattle had been here very recently. He followed the trail they made out of the cañon to the mesa and saw that it headed toward Elk Creek. He could not be quite sure, but he believed that three horsemen rode after them. The character of the ground made certainty impossible. The tracks were all faint and blurred. Daniels followed them for two or three miles to the rim of the draw down which the frightened herd had been stampeded.

The sheriff rode across the hills to the Circle J P ranch. He found Jake Prowers and Don Black greasing a wagon.

Black looked up as the officer came around the corner of the house and thrust his hand beneath the belt of his trousers. Prowers said something to him in a low voice and the hand came out empty.