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Dave Silverthorn entered the office, and for more than an hour the two talked, their conversation being punctuated with futile queries and profanity. At ten o'clock the next morning Dale appeared at the Double A ranchhouse.

But up at the Flying W ranchhouse, a tall, grim, bearded giant of a horseman was just dismounting, his pony trembling because of heart-breaking effort. Randerson had not seen Ruth, of course. But he had wondered much over her whereabouts when he had been looking through the house for Uncle Jepson and Aunt Martha.

She stood, watching for a while until the group of horsemen became clearly defined and then, with a sudden fear that the men might be outlaws of the same type as Harlan possibly he had sent for them because they were she returned to the ranchhouse and watched from one of the windows. When the T Down men rode up to the corral gate they dismounted and surrounded Harlan.

Mebbe I'd have been a hero if I'd have let him shoot me, but I wouldn't have been here any more to know about it. An' I'm plumb satisfied to be here, ma'am." "How did you come to hear about me not getting home?" she asked. "I'd rode in to see Catherson. I couldn't see him because he wasn't there. Then I come on over to the ranchhouse, an' Uncle Jepson told me about you not comin' in." "Was Mr.

He stood silent while the men filed back and resumed seats on the gallery edge. Darkness had come on while he had been talking to the men and inside the ranchhouse Mrs. Norton had lighted the kerosene lamp and its weak, flickering rays straggled out into the darkness and upon Hollis's face and the faces of several of the men who sat on the edge of the gallery.

Langford's reticence further aggravated the passions which rioted in his heart, and finally one afternoon when they rode up to the ranchhouse his curiosity could be held in check no longer, and he put the blunt question: "What have you done about Doubler?"

The prosperity that had descended upon them had made them restless, and the night before they had importuned Lawler to permit them to spend "one more night in town before holin' up for the winter." Lawler had consented; and now he was wishing that he hadn't. For when he emerged from the ranchhouse this morning he saw a dark cloud bank far in the north, moving southward on the chill wind.

On the night following the day upon which the small owners had received this word from Dunlavey a number of the former waited upon Hollis. They found him seated on the lower gallery of the ranchhouse talking to Norton and Potter. Lemuel Train, of the Pig-pen outfit, had been selected as their spokesman.

He had been a fool for not making sure that he had killed Haydon, but he would not make that mistake again. The gleam in his eyes revealed that. Harlan, too, divined what had happened. Purgatory was in the stable which was farther from the ranchhouse than the corral.

But, before starting for Sanchia's Town, he slipped into the ranchhouse and shaved and changed to a new shirt and chaps and recently blackened boots. Thereafter he brushed his best black hat. Then from a bottom drawer of his old bureau, where it was hidden under a pile of clothing, he brought out a parcel which had come with him from a store in San Juan.