o send them
out toward the little enclosed pasture, and went up to the range house.
At the door of the men's quarters Wayne stopped.

"I think I'll drop in and say hello to the boys," he remarked, already
at the door.

"Are you crazy?" cried Garth. "They've been asleep two hours, man.
And they've got a big day's work ahead of them to-morrow."

"Oh, shut up, Garth," laughed Wayne good naturedly. "Don't you ever
think of anything but work? Come ahead, and watch me bring 'em to
life!"

He flung open the door and entered, Garth following in stony silence.
It was dark within the long, narrow room, although the starlight
gleamed feebly through the dirty window panes. Wayne found the lantern
upon the nail where it had hung when he was a boy, lighted it, and
turned the wick low so that there was only a wan light in the bunk
house.

"Where's Big Bill's bunk?" he whispered to Garth.

Chuckling softly he drew near the bunk which Garth indicated against
the wall at the far end of the room. He leaned forward, stooping low,
peering into the shadows. Big Bill was fast asleep, his great, deep
lungs expelling his breath regularly and mightily, his head with its
touseled ink black hair half hidden by the hairy arm flung up over it.
Wayne tiptoed away from the bunk, moved two chairs further back against
the other wall, and still chuckling with vastly amused anticipation,
again approached Big Bill's bedside.

He put out his hands slowly, gently, until they slipped into Big Bill's
arm pits. Then, his laughter suddenly booming out he bunched his
muscles and a black haired giant of a man in shirt and underdrawers was
jerked floundering out of his bunk to the middle of the room.

Big Bill's mighty roar of mingled astonishment and anger brought a
dozen cowboys leaping out of their bunks. In the dimly lighted room
their blinking eyes made out the forms of two men struggling, one in
his night dress, the other in hat and boots. One was Big Bill, for his
roar was an unmistakable as the roar of summer thunder. But the other?

"I've been hungering to get my hands on you for a year!" came the
laughing voice of the man in hat and boots. "You said that you could
roll me, Bill. Now go to it!"

He lifted the mighty body of the struggling, half wakened cowboy clean
off the floor, carried him across the room and slammed him down in a
chair.

"It's Red Reckless!" cried a voice from the group of stupefied men.
"He's come home!"

"