f his hand. "Gott gutt pig varm! Pat, Pat
Prydges . . . he sae he pay mae voman, one-huntred; mae, two huntred;
mae chil'en . . ." he smiled again, bigly and blandly, "mabbee, five,
ten. Yaw--?"

"One hundred and sixty acres each: twelve hundred acres for the kids,
not one of age, a quarter section to the man!" Then turning back from
Matthews to the foreign settler.

"You've got a thundering big farm?"

"Yaw! Ae mak' a pig yob of itt!"

"By George, I should think you do make a big job of it! This is the
way those two-thousand acres of coal lands were swiped! Are you the
fellow I gave a permit to cut timber up on the Ridge? What did you
change your homestead for?"

The Swede stood smiling showing all his white teeth and wrinkling his
nose and absorbing the meaning of the Ranger's questions into his skull.

"Pat did utt," he said.

"Who? Oh, Bat!" He looked at Matthews. "Do you mind riding back over
the Pass trail; so we can go to the Ridge by the Gully, the way the
outlaws escaped? I want to see where this fellow's upper lines run."

They rode back in silence almost all the way, coming up to the top
shoulder of the precipice where the outlaws had come tumbling down on
Matthews' hiding place a few weeks before. Wayland followed the lines
of the newly planted posts, where the wire had not yet been strung.

"There is not the slightest doubt," he burst out, "this has been done
to force a test case! Well, they'll get it."

"Wayland, is there no way of letting the public know what is going on?
A bet the people of this State don't know!"

"It's against the rule to give out information any more," answered
Wayland.

"Man alive--is this Russia? Y' mind me of Indians in the conjurors'
tent: they tie the medicine man hand and foot and throw him into a
tent; and he's t' make the tent shake. Only the devil-Indians can do
it. They tie y' hand an' foot, then they expect y' to serve the
Nation."

"No," corrected Wayland, "they tie us hand and foot to keep us _from_
serving the Nation."

And the Swede's tent was not the only one they saw, as the reader well
knows. Coming along the Gully on the Ridge crest, Wayland looked for
the pile of illegally-taken saw logs. They were gone. There was
nothing left but a timber skid, and the dry slash and a pile of saw
dust emitting the odor of imprisoned fragrance in the afternoon heat;
but a few yards back from the pile of saw dust stood a tepee tent with
the