oticed the tears rolling
down her cheeks. She was a comely young woman and he asked her gallantly
in the bronco Spanish of the border if there was anything he could do to
relieve her distress.

She shook her head mournfully. "No, senor," she answered in her native
tongue. "Only time can do that. I mourn my husband. He was a drunken
ne'er-do-well, but he was my man. So I mourn a fitting period. He died in
that corner of the room where you slept."

"Indeed! When?" asked Billie politely.

"Ten days ago. Of smallpox."

The young men never ate that breakfast. They fled into the sunlight and
put many hurried miles between them and their amazed hostess. At the
first stream they stripped, bathed, washed their clothes, dipped the
saddles, and lay nude in the warm sand until their wearing apparel was
dry.

For many days they joked each other about that headlong flight, but
underneath their gayety was a dread which persisted.

"I'm like Dona Isabel with her grief. Only time can heal me of that scare
she threw into Billie Prince," the owner of that name confessed.

"Me too," assented Clanton, helping himself to pinole. "I'll bet I lost a
year's growth, and me small at that."

Prince had been in the employ of Webb for three years. During the long
hours when they rode side by side he told his companion much about the
Flying V Y outfit and its owner.

"He's a straight-up man, Homer Webb is. His word is good all over Texas.
He'll sure do to take along," said Billie by way of recommendation.

"And Joe Yankie--does he stack up A 1 too?" asked the boy dryly.

"I never liked Joe. It ain't only that he'll run a sandy on you if he can
or that he's always ridin' any one that will stand to be picked on. Joe's
sure a bully. But then he's game enough, too, for that matter. I've seen
him fight like a pack of catamounts. Outside of that I've got a hunch
that he's crooked as a dog's hind leg. Mebbe I'm wrong, I'm tellin' you
how he strikes me. If I was Homer Webb, right now when trouble is comin'
up with the Snaith-McRobert outfit, I'd feel some dubious about Joe. He's
a sulky, revengeful brute, an' the old man has pulled him up with a tight
rein more'n once."

"What do you mean--trouble with the Snaith-McRobert outfit?"

"That's a long story. The bad feelin' started soon after the war when
Snaith an' the old man were brandin' mavericks. It kind of smouldered
along for a while, then broke out again when both of them began to bid
on