t," said Laramie. "I meant by the bunch at the range. And
when they start they'll stir things up over this way."

Hawk hazarded a guess on another subject: "It looks like Van
Horn--putting in Stone over at Doubleday's."

"It is Van Horn."

Hawk looked in silence out of the open door at the distant snow-capped
mountains. "Why don't you kill him, Jim?" he asked after a moment,
possibly in earnest, possibly in jest, for his iron tone sometimes
meant everything, sometimes nothing.

Laramie, at all events, took the words lightly. He answered Hawk's
question with another. But his retort and manner were as easy as
Hawk's question and expression were hard. "Why don't you?"

The bearded man across the table did not hesitate nor did he cast about
for words. On the contrary, he replied with embarrassing promptness:
"I will, sometime."

"A man that didn't know you, Abe, might think you meant it," commented
Laramie, filling his coffee cup.

Hawk's white teeth showed just for the instant that he smiled; then he
talked of other things.

CHAPTER IX

AT THE BAR

The arrival of a baby at the home of Harry Tenison in Sleepy Cat had an
immediate effect on Kate Doubleday's fortune in the mountains--and,
indeed, on the fortunes of a number of other people in Sleepy Cat--wholly
out of proportion to its importance as a family event. It was not, it is
true, for the Tenisons a mere family event. Married fifteen years, they
had been without children until the advent of this baby. And the birth
of a boy to Harry Tenison excited not alone the parents, but the town,
the railroad division and the hundred miles of range and desert, north
and south, tributary to the town.

For a number of years Tenison had run his place in Sleepy Cat undisturbed
by the swiftly changing fortunes of frontiersmen and railroad men.
Tragedies, in their sudden sweep across the horizon of his activities,
the poised gambler and hotel man had met unmoved. Men went to the
heights of mining or range affluence and to the depths of crude passion,
inevitable despair and tragic death, with Harry Tenison coldly unruffled.
He was a man in so far detached from his surroundings, yet with his
finger on the pulse of happenings in his unstable world. But the birth
of one baby--and that a small one--upset him completely and very
unexpectedly shocked others of his motley circle of acquaintance.

The complications followed on the announcement--on a Monday when