ow; his face reflecting the anger that
boiled in his breast.

"I tell you, miss, you can't break your engagement to Major King! That
is out of your power, beyond you, entirely. It rests with me, and with
me solely, to terminate any such obligation. I have pledged a
soldier's word and a soldier's honor in this matter, miss. It is
incumbent on you to see that both are redeemed."

"I'm in a mind to do my own thinking now, father; I'm old enough."

"A woman is never old enough to know her own mind! What's the occasion
of this change in the wind? Surely not--"

Colonel Landcraft's brows drew together over his thin nose, making
small glaring points of his blue eyes among the gathered wrinkles and
bristling hair. He held his words suspended while he searched her face
for justification of his pent arraignment.

"Nonsense!" said he at last, letting his breath go with the word, as
if relief had come. "Put the notion out of your head, for you are
going to marry Major King."

"I tell you, father, you must adjust yourself to my decision in this
matter. I am not going to marry Major King. I have told him so, and it
is final."

His own stubbornness, his own fire, was reflected in her as she spoke.
But Colonel Landcraft was not to be moved from what he considered his
right to dispose of her in a way that he believed would be an honor to
the army and a glory to the nation.

"You'll marry Major King, or die a maid!" he declared.

"Very well, father," she returned, in ambiguous concession.

She left him frowning among his papers. In his small, tyrannical way
he had settled that case, finally and completely, to his own thinking,
as he had disposed of wild-riding Alan Macdonald and his bold,
outlandish petition.

CHAPTER VII

THROWING THE SCARE

Banjo Gibson arrived at Macdonald's place the following day, from
Sam Hatcher's ranch across the river, bringing news that three
homesteaders on that side had been killed in the past two days. They
had been shot from the willow thickets as they worked in their
fields or rode along the dim-marked highways. Banjo could not give
any further particulars; he did not know the victims' names.

Macdonald understood what it meant, and whose hand was behind the
slaying of those home-makers of the wilderness. It was not a new
procedure in the cattle barons' land; this scourge had been
fore-shadowed in that list of names which Frances Landcraft had given
him.

The word had gone out