oard.

Colonel Sampson found a grim enjoyment in Wright's discomfiture.

"Diane's like her mother was, George," he said. "You've made a bad start
with her."

Here Wright showed manifestation of the Sampson temper, and I took him
to be a dangerous man, with unbridled passions.

"Russ, here's my own talk to you," he said, hard and dark, leaning
toward me. "Don't go to Linrock."

"Say, Mr. Wright," I blustered for all the world like a young and
frightened cowboy, "If you threaten me I'll have you put in jail!"

Both men seemed to have received a slight shock. Wright hardly knew what
to make of my boyish speech. "Are you going to Linrock?" he asked
thickly.

I eyed him with an entirely different glance from my other fearful one.

"I should smile," was my reply, as caustic as the most reckless
cowboy's, and I saw him shake.

Colonel Sampson laid a restraining hand upon Wright. Then they both
regarded me with undisguised interest. I sauntered away.

"George, your temper'll do for you some day," I heard the colonel say.
"You'll get in bad with the wrong man some time. Hello, here are Joe and
Brick!"

Mention of these fellows engaged my attention once more.

I saw two cowboys, one evidently getting his name from his brick-red
hair. They were the roistering type, hard drinkers, devil-may-care
fellows, packing guns and wearing bold fronts--a kind that the Rangers
always called four-flushes.

However, as the Rangers' standard of nerve was high, there was room left
for cowboys like these to be dangerous to ordinary men.

The little one was Joe, and directly Wright spoke to him he turned to
look at me, and his thin mouth slanted down as he looked. Brick eyed me,
too, and I saw that he was heavy, not a hard-riding cowboy.

Here right at the start were three enemies for me--Wright and his
cowboys. But it did not matter; under any circumstances there would have
been friction between such men and me.

I believed there might have been friction right then had not Miss
Sampson called for me.

"Get our baggage, Russ," she said.

I hurried to comply, and when I had fetched it out Wright and the
cowboys had mounted their horses, Colonel Sampson was in the one
buckboard with two men I had not before observed, and the girls were
in the other.

The driver of this one was a tall, lanky, tow-headed youth, growing like
a Texas weed. We had not any too much room in the buckboard, but that
fact was not going to spoil the ride