speak, "Oh, Daddy! don't you see? He really thinks we're a bunch
of wild and woolly bandits!"

The hunter looked uncertainly from her dimpled face to Gowan's ready
revolver. Turning sharply about to the cowman, he caught him in a
reluctant grin. With a sudden spring, he placed the girl between
himself and the scowling puncher. Behind this barrier of safety he
swept off his hat and bowed to the girl with an exaggerated display of
politeness that hinted at mockery.

"So it's merely a cowboy joke," he said. "I bend, not to the Queen of
the Outlaws, but to the Princess of the Cows!"

Her dimples vanished. She looked over his head with the barest shade
of disdain in her expression.

"The joke came near to being on us," she said. "Kid, put up your gun.
A tenderfoot who has enough nerve and no more sense than to draw when
you have the drop on him, you've hazed him enough."

Gowan sullenly reloaded his Colt's and replaced it in its holster.

"That's right," said Knowles; but he turned sharply upon the offender.
"Look here, Mr. Ashton, if that's your name--there's still the matter
of this yearling. Shooting stock in a cattle country isn't any
laughing matter."

"But, I say," replied the hunter, "I didn't know it was your cow,
really I didn't."

"Doesn't make any difference whose brand was on the calf. Even if it
had been a maverick--"

"But that's it!" interrupted Ashton. "I didn't see the brand--only
glimpses of the beast in the chaparral. I thought it a deer until
after it fell and I came up to look."

"You shore did," jeered Gowan. "That's why you was hurrying to yank
off the hide. No chance of proving a case on you with the brand down
in Deep Canyon."

"Indeed no," replied Ashton, drawing a trifle closer to the girl's
stirrup. "You are quite wrong--quite. I was dressing the animal to
take it to my camp. Because I had mistaken it for a deer was no reason
why I should leave it to the coyotes."

"What business you got hunting deer out of season?" questioned
Knowles.

"Pardon me, but are you the game warden?" asked Ashton, with a
supercilious smile.

"Never you mind about that," rejoined the cowman. "Just you answer my
question."

Ashton shrugged, and replied in a bored tone: "I fail to see that it
is any of your affair. But since you are so urgent to learn--I prefer
to enjoy my sport before the rush of the open season."

"Don't you know it's against the law?" exclaimed the girl.

"Ah--as to that, a trifl