has to gentle
his horses before he can sit up on one, who has hitched a gun on his
belt because he thinks it's the thing to do, and has stowed it in a
place where he'd have to tie himself in a knot--or undress--to reach
it. And then you talk of pulling the Three Bar out of a hole! Why,
there are twenty men within fifty miles of here that would kill you the
first move you made."

"There's considerable sound truth in that," he said. He looked down at
his gun; it swung on his left side, in front, the butt pointing toward
the right. "It's easier to work with it sort of out of the way of my
hands," he explained and smiled.

She found herself liking him, even in the face of the treachery he had
practiced against her father and was correspondingly angry, both with
herself and at him. She left him without a word and returned to the
house.

He finished putting the shoes on the colt and as he turned him back
into the corral he observed a horseman jogging up the lane at a trail
trot. He knew the man for Slade, whose home ranch lay forty miles to
the south and a little west, the owner of the largest outfit in that
end of the State; a man feared by his competitors, quick to resent an
insinuation against his business methods and capable of backing his
resentment.

Slade dropped from his horse and accorded Harris only a casual nod as
he headed for the house. Slade's face was of a peculiar cast. The
black eyes were set very close together in a wide face; his cheek bones
were low and oddly protruding, sloping far out to a point below each
eye. His small ears were set so close to his skull that the
outcropping cheek bones extended almost an inch beyond them to either
side. Yet there was a certain fascination about his face and bearing
that appealed to the spark of the primitive in women; that last
lingering cell that harks fondly back to men in the raw. His age might
have been anywhere above twenty-six and under fifty-six.

He walked through the cookhouse and opened the door of the girl's
quarters without the formality of a knock, as if a frequent visitor and
sure of his privileges.

"How many times have I told you to knock?" she demanded. "The next
time you forget it I'll go out as you come in."

Slade dropped into a chair.

"I never have knocked--not in twelve years," he said.

"It was somewhat different when I was a small girl and you were only a
friend of my father," she pointed out. "But now----"

"But no