g bum. Guess you sort of think I'm just about the limit.
Well, maybe I'm nothing to shriek about. However, I've told you all I
feel. I've told you what you're going to feel--later. Meanwhile it's
up to me to help you all I know. Tell me the whole thing, and I'll do
the business for you. I'll see Dug McFarlane for you, and fix things.
But it's on one condition."

"What is it?"

Something of the coldness had passed from the girl's eyes. She was
smiling because she had achieved her purpose.

"Why--just this. That I don't touch one single dollar of the price
you're to receive for those poor devils' blood. That's all."

Just for a moment a dull flush surged up under the tan of the girl's
cheeks, and her eyes sparkled ominously. Then she returned to her
rocker with great deliberation.

"You're crazy, Bob," she said frigidly, but without any other display.
"Still--just sit around, and--I'll tell you it all."

And while the man listened to the story of his wife's adventures his
mind went back to the scene in Ju Penrose's saloon, and the denial he
had flung so heatedly at that philosophic cynic.

CHAPTER V

THE HANGING BEE

Dug McFarlane was a picturesque creature. He was big in height and
girth. He was also big in mind. And, which was much more important to
the people of the Orrville ranching world, big in purse. He was
grizzled and gray, and his eyes beamed out of a setting which was
surely made for such beaming; a setting which possessed no sharp angles
or disfiguring hollows, but only the healthy tissue of a well-nourished
and wholesome-living man in middle life.

As he sat his horse, beside his station foreman, gazing out at the
broken line of foothills which marked the approach to the barrier of
mountains cutting against the blue, he seemed to display in his bearing
something of that dominating personality which few successful men are
entirely without. All about them lay the heavy-railed corrals of a
distant out-station. Just behind stood the rough shanty, which was the
bunkhouse for the cowhands employed in this region. The doctor was
still within, tending the grievously injured man who had been so badly
wounded in the previous night's raid by the rustlers.

For the time Dug's beaming eyes were shadowed with a concern that was
half angry and wholly depressed. They searched the rolling grass-land
until the distance was swallowed up by the barrier of hills. He was
seeking one reassurin