was true," Harper said. "Then what?"

"In one country after the next they've hit the toboggan whenever they
got to feeling too strong. If you line up against me that time has
come again. If I get potted from the brush I've hedged it so that
those boys that filed over there won't be left in the lurch. There'll
be a reward of a thousand dollars hung up for the scalp of each of
fifteen men whose names I gathered while I was prowling round--reliable
men to carry on what I've begun; and marshals thicker than flies to
protect the homestead filings on the Three Bar."

"Then it might be bad policy to bushwhack you," Harper observed.

"You can go your own gait," Harris said. "As long as you lay off Three
Bar cows. You invited me one time to come down to your hangout in the
Breaks. I won't ever make that visit unless you call on the Three Bar
first; then, just out of politeness, I'll ride over at the head of a
hundred men."

"Then it don't look as if we'd get anywhere, visiting back and forth,"
Harper said.

"Now don't think I'm throwing a bluff or threatening; I'm just telling
you. You could recite a number of things that could happen to me in
return--all of 'em true. I'm just counting that you've got brains and
can see it's not going to help either one of us to get lined up wrong.
What do you say--shall we call it hands off between the Three Bar and
you?"

The albino half-closed his eyes, the pale eyeballs glittering through
the slit of his lids as he reflected on this proposition, tapping a
careless finger on his knee. He glanced absent-mindedly toward the
bar, his thoughts wholly occupied with the matter in hand. A pair of
eyes that gazed back at him drew his own and he found himself looking
at Bentley, the man who repped with the Three Bar for Slade. The
albino's suspicions were as fluid and easily roused as those of a beast
of prey in a dangerous neighborhood. With one of those quick shifts of
which his mind was capable he concentrated every mental effort toward
linking Bentley with some unpleasant episode of the past. The man had
turned away and Harper could only sense a vague feeling that he was
dangerous to him, without definite point upon which to base his
suspicions. At the sound of Harris's voice his mind made another
lightning shift back to the present.

"Well?" Harris asked.

"Why, if I had anything to do with it, like you seem to think, I'd
advise against our bucking each other," Harper sa