flat rock of conference.

The "fixing" was not accomplished without some difficulty, as it
appeared to the young man sitting on the flat stone at the stream side.
Dick brought his father to the door, and Ballard did the
talking--considerably more of it than might have been deemed necessary
for the simple request to be proffered. At the end of the talk, Ballard
came back to the flat stone.

"You stay," he said briefly to Bigelow. "Carson will give you your
dinner. But he says he has a sick man on his hands in the cabin, and
you'll have to excuse him."

"He was willing?" queried Bigelow.

"No; he wasn't at all willing. He acted as if he were a loaded camel,
and your staying was going to be the final back-breaking straw. But he's
a Tennessean, and we've been kind to his boy. The ranch is yours for the
day, only if I were you, I shouldn't make too free use of it."

Bigelow smiled.

"I'll be 'meachum' and keep fair in the middle of the road. I don't know
anything that a prosecuting attorney could make use of against the man
who has given me my breakfast, and who promises to give me my dinner,
and I don't want to know anything. Please don't waste any more daylight
on me: Dick has the horses ready, and he is evidently growing anxious."

Ballard left the Forestry man smoking and sunning himself on the flat
boulder when he took the down-canyon trail with the sober-faced boy for
his file leader, and more than once during the rather strenuous day to
which the pocket-gulch incident was the introduction, his thoughts went
back to Bigelow, marooned in the depths of the great canyon with the
saturnine cattle thief, the sick man, and doubtless other members of the
band of "rustlers."

It was therefore, with no uncertain feeling of relief that he returned
in the late afternoon at the head of a file of as hard-looking
miscreants as ever were gathered in a sheriff's posse, and found Bigelow
sitting on the step of the Carson cabin, still nursing the bandaged arm,
and still smoking the pipe of patience.

"I'm left to do the honours, gentlemen," said the Forestry man, rising
and smiling quaintly. "The owner of the ranch regrets to say that he has
been unavoidably called away; but the feed in the corral and the
provisions in the kitchen are yours for the taking and the cooking."

The sheriff, a burly giant whose face, figure, garmenting and graceful
saddle-seat proclaimed the ex-cattleman, laughed appreciatively.

"Bat Carson kn