agely. The boy's fingers closed like a vice on the hairy throat and
tightened. His other fist beat a merciless tattoo on the bruised and
bleeding face.

"Take him off!" Bandy presently gasped.

Dud appointed himself referee. With difficulty he unloosed the fingers
embedded in the flesh of the throat.

"Had enough, Bandy? You licked?" he asked.

"Take him off, I tell you!" the man managed to scream.

"Not unless you're whipped. How about it?"

"'Nough," the bully groaned.

Bob observed that Hawks had taken charge of the revolver. He released
Walker.

The bow-legged puncher sat at the side of the bed and coughed. The blood
was streaming from a face bruised and cut in a dozen places.

"He--he--jumped me--when I wasn't lookin'," the cowboy spat out, a word
at a time.

"Don't pull an alibi, Bandy. You had it comin'," Dud said with a grin. He
was more pleased than he could tell.

Dillon felt as though something not himself had taken control of him. He
was in a cold fury, ready to fight again at the drop of a hat.

"He said she--she--" The sentence broke, but Bob rushed into another.
"He's got to take it back or I'll kill him."

"Only the first round ended, looks like, Bandy," Dud said genially. "You
better be lookin' this time when he comes at you, or he'll sure eat you
alive."

"I'm not lookin' for no fight," Bandy said sulkily, dabbing at his face
with the bandanna round his neck.

"I'll bet you ain't--not with a catamount like Miss Roberta here," Tom
Reeves said, chuckling with delight.

One idea still obsessed Bob's consciousness. "What he said about
June--I'll not let him get away with it. He's got to tell you-all he was
lyin'."

"You hear yore boss speak, Bandy," drawled Dud. "How about it? Do we get
to see you massacreed again? Or do you stand up an' admit you're a dirty
liar for talkin' thataway?"

Bandy Walker looked round on a circle of faces all unfriendly to him. He
had broken the code, and he knew it. In the outdoor West a man does not
slander a good woman without the chance of having to pay for it. The
puncher had let his bad bullying temper run away with him. He had done it
because he had supposed Dillon harmless, to vent on him the spleen he
could not safely empty upon Dud Hollister's blond head.

If Bob had been alone the bow-legged man might have taken a
chance--though it is doubtful whether he would have invited that
whirlwind attack again, unless he had had a revolver close at hand