cried, his tall form shaking
convulsively. "I'll never forget how you looked, Bill, when we tried
to run a bluff on her daddy last month!"

The other did not answer with a smile. Apparently the reminiscence
pleased him less than it did the older man. He spurred his horse
impatiently, and it plunged forward through the drifted banks of white
sand.

Mizzoo hastened to overtake him, still chuckling. "Old Man Walker
never knowed what a proposition he was handing us when he ordered us to
drive the old mountain-lion out of his lair! Looks like the six of us
ought to have done the trick. Them other fellows looked as wild as
bears, and you was just like a United States soldier marching on a
Mexican strongholt, not stopping at nothing, and it ain't for me to say
how brave _I_ done. Pity you and me was at the tail-end of the
attacking party. Fust thing we knowed, them other four galoots was
falling backwards a-getting out of that trap of a cove, and the bullets
was whizzing about our ears--"

He broke off to shout with laughter. "And it was all done by one old
settler and his gal, them standing out open and free with their
breech-loaders, and us hiking out for camp like whipped curs!"

The young man was impatient, but he compelled himself to speak calmly.
"As I never got around the spur of the mountain before you fellows were
in full retreat, I object to being classed with the whipped curs, and
you'll bear that in mind, Mizzoo. You saw the girl all right, didn't
you?"

"You bet I did, and as soon as I see her, I knowed it was the same I'd
came across on the trail, seven year ago. I'd have knowed it from her
daddy, of course, but there wasn't no mistaking HER. Her daddy give it
to us plain that if he ever catched one of us inside his cove he'd kill
us like so many coyotes, and I reckon he would. Well, he's got as much
right to his claim as anybody else--this land don't belong to nobody,
and there he's been a-squatting considerable longer than we've laid out
this ranch. He was in the right of it, but what I admire was his being
able to hold his rights. Lots of folks has rights but they ain't man
enough to hold 'em. And if von could have seen that gal, her eyes like
two big burning suns, and her mouth closed like a steel-trap, and her
hand as steady on that trigger as the mountain rock behind her! Lord,
Bill! what a trembly, knock-kneed, meaching sort of a husband she's
a-going to fashion to her hand, one of th