there to Cheyenne and lodging him in
jail. He believed there might be a better chance of holding him for
trial there, and some slight hope of justice.

A hail from the gate startled Macdonald. It was the custom of the
homesteaders in that country, carried with them from the hills of
Missouri and Arkansas, to sit in their saddles at a neighbor's gate
and call him to the door with a long "hello-o-oh!" It was the password
of friendship in that raw land; a cowboy never had been known to stoop
to its use. Cowboys rode up to a homesteader's door when they had
anything to say to him, and hammered on it with their guns.

Macdonald went to the door and opened it unhesitatingly. The horseman
at the gate was a stranger to him. He wore a little derby hat, such as
the cowpunchers despised, and the trappings of his horse proclaimed
him as a newcomer to that country. He inquired loudly of the road to
Fort Shakie, and Macdonald shouted back the necessary directions,
moving a step away from his open door.

The stranger put his hand to his ear and leaned over.

"Which?" said he.

At that sound of that distinctly-cowboy vernacular, Macdonald sprang
back to regain the shelter of his walls, sensing too late the trap
that the cowboy's unguarded word had betrayed. Chance Dalton at one
corner of the rude bungalow, his next best man at the other, had been
waiting for the decoy at the gate to draw Macdonald away from his
door. Now, as the homesteader leaped back in sudden alarm, they closed
in on him with their revolvers drawn.

There was the sound of a third man trying the back door at the same
time, and the disguised cowboy at the gate slung his weapon out and
sent a wild shot into the lintel above Macdonald's head. The two of
them on the ground had him at a disadvantage which it would have been
fatal to dispute, and Macdonald, valuing a future chance more than a
present hopeless struggle, flung his hands out in a gesture of
emptiness and surrender.

"Put 'em up--high!" Dalton ordered.

Dalton watched him keenly as the three in that picture before the door
stood keyed to such tension as the human intelligence seldom is called
upon to withstand. Macdonald stood with one foot on the low threshold,
the door swinging half open at his back. He was bareheaded, his rough,
fair hair in wisps on temples and forehead. Dalton's teeth were
showing between his bearded lips, and his quick eyes were scowling,
but he held his companion back with a