y. Then again he lifted his ponderous shoulders.

'He was looking for you,' he said, his meaning clear in the hardness of
his eyes. 'And, if you want to know, he's up Las Palmas way.'

'That happens to be lucky,' Alan told him, turning away. 'I'm going up
there now to look at some calves in French Valley. If I happen to miss
him and you see him you can tell him for me that I'm ready to talk with
him any time.'

He went out in dead silence. Many eyes followed him, many eyes which
when his tall form had passed through the door came back to other eyes
narrowed and thoughtful. For Alan Howard was well known here in San
Juan, and never before had a man of them seen him wearing a gun at his
hip. There were bets offered and taken before he was half-way to the
stable. His own men, hearing, were thoughtful and said nothing. All
except Bandy O'Neil, who smashed his big fist on the bar and stared
angrily into the florid face of Yates and cried out loudly that Jim
Courtot was a card sharp and a crook and that Jim Courtot's friends
were as Jim Courtot. Yates for the third time shrugged his thick
shoulders. But his look was like a knife clashing with the cowboy's.

Though it was dusk when he resaddled and Las Palmas was twenty-five
miles away, Howard's impatience hastened him on. It appeared that
Courtot had made up his mind and, further, was publishing the fact
across a wide sweep of country. Then there was no going back for him
and Courtot, and like a man borne along in a swift current which
offered rapids ahead, he was afire to get them behind him. If Courtot
were still in Las Palmas he would find him to-night.

But again, at the end of a tedious ride, he learned that the man he
sought had come and gone. No one knew just where, but at the one
lodging-house which the little settlement possessed, it was hinted that
Courtot had headed still further north, perhaps to Los Robles. Howard
went to bed that night wondering what it was that impelled the gambler
to this hurried travelling across the land. Was it something that
lured and beckoned? Was it something that drove and harassed? His
last thoughts were of the tracks he had seen by a dead calf and of the
tale Sandy Weaver had told.

Early the next morning he rode out to French Valley for a look at Tony
Vaca's calves. They proved to be about what he had expected of them,
close to a hundred, of mixed breeding, but for the most part good
beef-making stock in fai