hands full without you hiring out to pester us. I'm not out to reform
the country. They set the fashion of dog eat dog and every man for
himself; so the Three Bar is all that interests me. You keep out of my
affairs and I'll let you go your own gait. If you mix in I'll have
your men hunted down like rats."

Harper glanced toward the group at the bar.

"You were prudent enough to pick a time when you're three to one to
tell me about that," he said. "If I'd kill you in your chair I might
have some trouble getting out the door."

"Of course I'd take every chance to play safe," Harris admitted. "But
that is beside the point. I'd have told you the same thing if the odds
had been reversed."

"Would you?" the albino pondered. "I wonder."

"You know I would," Harris stated. "You've got brains, or you'd have
been dead for twenty years. If I thought you were a haphazard homicide
I wouldn't be sitting here. But you wouldn't kill a man without
looking a few weeks ahead and making sure it was safe."

"Go ahead--Let's hear the rest of it," Harper urged. "You've got an
original line of talk."

"You're playing one game and I'm playing mine," Harris said. "You're
in the saddle now--like you have been once or twice before. But you
know that the sentiment of a community reverses almost overnight.
You've stepped out just ahead of a clean-up a time or two in the past.
You know how it goes--your friends drop off like you had the plague.
Every man's out after your scalp. I've got a hard bunch of terriers
over at the Three Bar and you couldn't raid us without a battle big
enough to go down in history as the Three Bar war. Either way you'd
lose for it would stir folks up--and when they're stirred you're
through. Do you remember what Al Moody did up on the Gallatin and what
old Con Ristine sprung on the Nations Trail? That will happen again
right here."

The two men were leaning toward each other, elbows resting on the
table. Harper relaxed and leaned back comfortably in his chair as he
twisted a smoke. Evans propped his feet on the table and Harris hung
one knee over the arm of his chair. The men at the bar knew that some
crisis had been safely passed.

"You talk as if I was running an outfit of my own and had a bunch of
riders that could swarm down on you," Harper objected. "I don't even
run a brand of my own or have one man riding for me."

"The wild bunch is riding for you," Harris stated.

"Suppose that