ts with him. You thought I was taking
a fool chance of out-gaming him. In reality I was taking almost an
unfair advantage of him, providing he had the brains he must possess to
have lived to his age."

She could find no ready-made answer to this surprising statement. He
sprawled comfortably on the grass, turning over in his mind the
conditions that were but a repetition of the history of so many
frontiers; first the earliest settlers resenting the intrusion of the
later ones and resorting to lawless means of protecting their priority;
then the strengthening of the outlaw element, half the countryside in
league with the wild bunch, the two opposing factions secretly hiring
the predatory class to prey upon rival interests; then, inevitably, the
clean split, usually occasioned by the outlaws having increased in
power until they felt competent to defy both sides, to play both ends
against the middle, to commit atrocities that opened the eyes of those
who, believing they had subsidized the lawless, suddenly woke to the
fact that they had subsidized themselves; then the outlaws, in their
turn, discovering that every man's hand was against them; the ruthless
establishing of a definite line between those inside and those outside
the law, replacing the vague middle ground of semi-lawlessness. Always
their friends fell away from them, those secretly leagued with them
fearing to be seen in their company, and those not too definitely known
to belong to their ranks invariably quitting them cold, often joining
forces against them and developing into more or less substantial
citizens, according to the standards of their day.

"Don't you know that the albino will kill you for that?" the girl asked
at length.

"Not unless he can stage it as a personal quarrel," he said. "He'll
never follow it up as coming out of what happened to-day by taking it
out on me as temporary foreman of the Three Bar--for ordering him off."

"Why?" she puzzled. "What possible difference would that make to a man
like him?"

"Just this," he said: "There's a good majority of folks that don't
relish seeing Harper's bunch ride up--that feed them through policy.
But whenever you make it plain to a man that he's compelled to do a
thing whether he likes it or not it's ten to one he'll balk out of
sheer human pride. If Harper kills the Three Bar foreman on the
grounds that he refused to feed all his men--why then, right off, every
other foreman and owner wi