XXIX The Calm 321

ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Instinctively each knew the other for a foe. Frontispiece

"You are going to marry me--some day. That's
what I think of you!" 97

"You men are blind. Corrigan is a crook who
will stop at nothing." 283

"FIREBRAND" TREVISON

CHAPTER I

THE RIDER OF THE BLACK HORSE

The trail from the Diamond K broke around the base of a low hill dotted
thickly with scraggly oak and fir, then stretched away, straight and
almost level (except for a deep cut where the railroad gang and a steam
shovel were eating into a hundred-foot hill) to Manti. A month before,
there had been no Manti, and six months before that there had been no
railroad. The railroad and the town had followed in the wake of a party of
khaki-clad men that had made reasonably fast progress through the country,
leaving a trail of wooden stakes and little stone monuments behind.
Previously, an agent of the railroad company had bartered through,
securing a right-of-way. The fruit of the efforts of these men was a dark
gash on a sun-scorched level, and two lines of steel laid as straight as
skilled eye and transit could make them--and Manti.

Manti could not be overlooked, for the town obtruded upon the vision from
where "Brand" Trevison was jogging along the Diamond K trail astride his
big black horse, Nigger. Manti dominated the landscape, not because it was
big and imposing, but because it was new. Manti's buildings were
scattered--there had been no need for crowding; but from a distance--from
Trevison's distance, for instance, which was a matter of three miles or
so--Manti looked insignificant, toy-like, in comparison with the vast
world on whose bosom it sat. Manti seemed futile, ridiculous. But Trevison
knew that the coming of the railroad marked an epoch, that the two thin,
thread-like lines of steel were the tentacles of the man-made monster that
had gripped the East--business reaching out for newer fields--and that
Manti, futile and ridiculous as it seemed, was an outpost fortified by
unlimited resource. Manti had come to stay.

And the cattle business was going, Trevison knew. The railroad company had
built corrals at Manti, and Trevison knew they would be needed for several
years to come. But he could foresee the day when they would be replaced by
buil