if it's within riding distance."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE IMMORTAL TEN

Jimmie Welsh threw his hand into the discard and grinned sheepishly.

"Yuh got me this time," he said.

Billy Speaker, who held a full house, kings up, smiled pleasantly.

"I allow yuh'll have to put yore gun in the next pot if you want to stick
along," he said. "An' if yuh do I'll win it off yuh and get away from
here."

"No," said Jimmie regretfully, "if it was any other time I might resk it,
but not now."

Red Tarken, who had been shuffling the single greasy pack of cards, began
to deal. In the game beside these three were two more sheepmen and another
cattle-raiser.

The six sat in the shade of a huge bowlder that had broken off and rolled
down the side of the red scoria butte. The game had been going on for
hours, and captors and captives alike played with all the cowboys' fervent
love of gambling. Tarken, Speaker, and their companion were free to move
as they liked, but were on parole not to try to overpower their
guardians.

Others of the eleven owners sat about in the shade of rocks, playing
cards, or talking and doing their best to pass away the time. It was a
strange gathering. Only one man remained sitting by himself with bent head
and his hands bound behind him. This was Beef Bissell, the cattle-king,
who had steadfastly refused to give his word to remain peaceable, and
fumed his life away hour after hour with vain threats and recriminations.

At either end of the small inclosure that backed against the butte, two
men with Winchesters in their hands bestrode motionless horses.

This perpetual guard, kept night and day, though invisible from all but
one small point, was the only sign that there was anything but the
kindliest relations among all the members of the party.

When the cowmen had found that no personal harm was to be done them, all
but Bissell and one other had resigned themselves to making the best of a
laughably humiliating situation. It was Billy Speaker himself who had
suggested the idea of the paroles, and as Jimmie Welsh knew the word of a
Westerner was as good as his bond, the pact was soon consummated.

It was a remarkable formation in a desolate spot that the sheepmen had
taken for a prison. It is a common fact that on many of these high buttes
and mesas the pitiless weather of ages has chiseled figures, faces, and
forms which, in their monstrous grotesquery, suggest the discarded clay
modelings of