you mean?"

"If you want to go it alone, I can't stop you," replied the puncher.
"Needn't think I'm sucking around you for any favors or friendship. If
this was my range, I would run you off it so fast you'd reach
Stockchute with your tongue hanging out like a dog's. That's how much
I like you."

"The feeling is fully reciprocated, I assure you," rejoined Ashton.

"All right. Now what're we going to do about him?--each play a lone
hand, or make it pardners for this deal?"

"I--fail to understand," hesitated Ashton.

"No, you don't," jeeringly contradicted the puncher. "It's a
three-cornered fight. You see it now, even if you have been too big a
fool to see it before. We can settle ours after. But I'm free to own
up to it that you're a striped skunk if you won't work with me first
to get rid of him. Look at him now--and him married!"

Ashton's flush deepened to purple. "Married!--yes, married!" he choked
out.

"Right alongside his wife, too!" Gowan thrust the goad deeper. "You'd
think even that brand of skunk would have more decency. Not that his
wife is any friend of mine, like she is yours. But for a man with such
a wife and baby ... with Miss Chuckie! The--"

Gowan ended with a string of oaths so virulent that even Ashton's
half-mad anger was checked.

"You may be--er--I fear that we--Perhaps it's not so bad as it
appears!" he stammered.

"_Bah!_" disgustedly sneered the puncher, and he strode on ahead,
leaving Ashton torn between rage and doubt and terror of his own
furious jealousy.

The others continued to stand on a flat ledge that here formed the lip
of the canyon. Genevieve was trembling with awed delight. Her husband
and the girl appeared more calm, but they were drinking in the
grandeur of the tremendous gorge below them with no less intense
appreciation of its gloomy vastness.

Upstream, to their left, the precipices jutted so far out from each
wall of the canyon that they overlapped, a thousand or fifteen hundred
feet from the top. But downstream the upper part of the chasm flared
to a width that permitted the noonday sun to penetrate part way down
through the blue-black shadows.

"O-o-o-oh!" sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung
tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. "Isn't it
fearfully, fearfully delightful? It makes the soles of my feet tingle
to look at it!"

"That tickly feeling!" exclaimed Isobel. "I often ride up here to the
canyon, I do so love to feel