ey
didn't kill each other off--Potter says they sure tried. The time King got
it in the leg your father and his punchers were coming home from a breed
dance, and they were feeling pretty nifty, I guess; Potter told me they
started out with six bottles, and when they got to White Divide there
wasn't enough left to talk about. They cut King's fence at the north end,
and went right through, hell-bent-for-election. King and his men boiled
out, and they mixed good and plenty. Your father went home with a hole in
his shoulder, and old King had one in his leg to match, and since then
it's been war. They tried to fight it out in court, and King got the best
of it there. Then they got married and kind o' cooled off, and pretty soon
they both got so much stuff to look after that they didn't have much time
to take pot-shots at each other, and now we're enjoying what yuh might
call armed peace. We go round about sixty miles, and King's Highway is bad
medicine.

"King owns the stage-line from Osage to Laurel, where the Bay State gets
its mail, and he owns Kenmore, a mining-camp in the west half uh White
Divide. We can go around by Kenmore, if we want to--but King's Highway?
Nit!"

I chuckled to myself to think of all the things I could twit dad about if
ever he went after me again. It struck me that I hadn't been a
circumstance, so far, to what dad must have been in his youth. At my
worst, I'd never shot a man.

CHAPTER III.

The Quarrel Renewed.

That night, by a close scratch, we made a little place Frosty said was one
of the Bay State line-camps. I didn't know what a line-camp was, and it
wasn't much for style, but it looked good to me, after riding nearly all
day in a snow-storm. Frosty cooked dinner and I made the coffee, and we
didn't have such a bad time of it, although the storm held us there for
two days.

We sat by the little cook-stove and told yarns, and I pumped Frosty just
about dry of all he'd ever heard about dad.

I hadn't intended to write to dad, but, after hearing all I did, I
couldn't help handing out a gentle hint that I was on. When I'd been at
the Bay State Ranch for a week, I wrote him a letter that, I felt, squared
my account with him. It was so short that I can repeat every word now.
I said:

DEAR DAD: I am here. Though you sent me out here to reform me, I
find the opportunities for unadulterated deviltry away ahead of
Frisco. I saw our old neighbor, King, whom you may possib