you get clear
around the Pinnacle field?"

"I sure did--and she's tight as a drum. Say, Mose is a good cook, but
he's a mighty punk housekeeper, if you ask me. I'm thinking of getting
to work here with a hoe!"

So life, which had of late loomed big and bitter before the soul of
Ford, slipped back into the groove of daily routine.

CHAPTER XV

The Climb

Into its groove of routine slipped life at the Double Cross, but it did
not move quite as smoothly as before. It was as if the "hill" which Ford
was climbing suffered small landslides here and there, which threatened
to block the trail below. Sometimes--still keeping to the simile--it was
but a pebble or two kicked loose by Ford's heel; sometimes a bowlder
which one must dodge.

Dick, for instance, must have likened Mose to a real landslide when he
came at him the next day, with a roar of rage and the rolling-pin. Mose
had sobered to the point where he wondered how it had all happened, and
wanted to get his hands in the wool of the "nigger" said to lurk in
woodpiles. He asked Jim, with various embellishments of speech, what it
was all about, and Jim told him and told him truly.

"He was trying to queer you with the outfit, Mose, and that's a fact,"
he finished; which was the only exaggeration Jim was guilty of, for Dick
had probably thought very little of Mose and his ultimate standing with
the Double Cross. "And he was trying to queer Ford--but you can search
me for the reason why he didn't make good, there."

Mose, like many of us, was a self-centered individual. He wasted a
minute, perhaps, thinking of the trick upon Ford; but he spent all of
that forenoon and well into the afternoon in deep meditation upon the
affair as it concerned himself. And the first time Dick entered the
presence of the cook, he got the result of Mose's reasoning.

"Tried to git me in bad, did yuh? Thought you'd git me fired, hey?" he
shouted, as a sort of punctuation to the belaboring.

A rolling pin is considered a more or less fearsome weapon in the hands
of a woman, I believe; when wielded by an incensed man who stands close
to six feet and weighs a solid two hundred pounds, and who has the
headache which follows inevitably in the wake of three pints of whisky
administered internally in the short space of three hours or so, a
rolling-pin should justly be classed with deadly weapons.

Jim said afterward that he never had believed it possible to act out the
rough stuff o