advised him
to take a pair along when he went with a party of friends to the top
of Mount Tamalpais one Sunday. And because he had an instinctive
dislike for anything but the best obtainable, he had bought the
highest-priced glasses he could find in San Francisco,--and perhaps
the smallest. He buckled them back into their case, slapped them into
his pocket and closed the trunk lid with a bang. From the mantel in
the living room he gleaned a box of cartridges for an extra
six-shooter, which he cleaned and loaded carefully and tucked inside
the waistband of his trousers, on the left side, following an instinct
that brought him close to his grandfather, that old killer whom all
men feared to anger.

"The horse and the hat; he thought it was dad he was trailing!" he
said to himself, with his teeth clamped tight together. "Oh, well,
when it comes to that kind of a game--"

He went out and down to the corral, watered Coaley and mounted again,
taking the trail across pastures to Squaw Creek.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

LANCE RIDES ANOTHER TRAIL

With a two-days' growth of beard on his chin and jaws, a new, hard
look in his eyes and the general appearance of a man who has been
riding long and has slept in all his clothes, Lance rode quietly up to
the corral gate and dismounted. A certain stiffness was in his walk
when he led Coaley inside and turned a stirrup up over the saddle
horn, his gloved fingers dropping to the latigo. Lance was tired--any
one could see that at a glance. That he was preoccupied, and that his
preoccupation was not pleasant, was also evident to the least
observing eye.

Tom, coming out of the bunk house, studied him with narrowed lids as
he came walking leisurely down to the corral. Tom's movements also
betrayed a slight stiffness of the muscles, as though he had ridden
hard and long. He did not hurry. Lance had pulled off the saddle and
the sweaty blanket and the bridle, and had turned Coaley into the
corral before he knew that some one was coming. Even then he did not
turn to look. He was staring hard at a half-dozen horses grouped in
the farther corner of the corral,--horses with gaunt flanks and the
wet imprint of saddles. They were hungrily nosing fresh piles of hay,
and scarcely looked up when Coaley trotted eagerly up to join them.
Six of them--a little more than half of the outfit that had ridden
away the other night.

"Well! I see you helped yourself to a new saddle horse," Tom observe