udely took orders and delivered them. There were no
mixed drinks, no scale of prices. And there was no question of license.
The will of the majority ruled. The gold-seeking reduced things to
primitive methods, men to primitive manners.

Plimsoll himself presided over the stud-poker table, dealing the game.
He showed nothing of the nervousness that crawled beneath his skin. He
awaited the result of his play with Wyatt and the latter's companions.
If he could make Sandy, Mormon and Sam ridiculous, he would achieve his
end, but he hoped for bigger results. Wyatt and his fellow rider had
been detailed to ride down the tent that had been reported occupied by
the Three Star owners. That part of the plan had been suggested by Wyatt
out of the sheer deviltry of his invention. Plimsoll had enlisted others
of his following, none too fearless, to loiter in the brush and, in the
general confusion, fire to cripple and to kill.

Plimsoll had learned of the visit of the men who had come with Bill
Brandon to investigate Plimsoll's methods of running the Waterline Horse
Ranch. He had learned, through the leakage that always occurs in a
cattle community, that Brandon claimed to be an old acquaintance of
Sandy and his partners. So he had told his men who had come with him to
the camp from the Waterline Ranch that the Three Star outfit was a
danger to all of them, undoubtedly acting as spies for Brandon, and
that they should be eliminated for the general good. But there was none
of them, from Plimsoll down, who had any fancy to stand up against the
guns of Sandy, or of Mormon and Sam, when the breaks were anywhere
nearly even.

So Plimsoll dealt stud and collected the percentage of the house,
watching his planted players profit by their professionalism and by the
little signs bestowed upon them by Plimsoll that tipped them off as to
the value of the hidden cards. Plimsoll, with his ejection from
Hereford, the advent of woman suffrage, the coming of Brandon and other
irate horse owners, had begun to realize that his days were getting
short in the land. He looked to the camp for a final coup. If he held
the Casey claims and sold them, as he expected to do, to an eastern
capitalist to whom he had telegraphed some days before, he might
reestablish himself. Sandy's prompt arrival and subsequent events had
crimped that plan and he fell back upon all the crooked tactics that he
possessed in gambling. And now, if Wyatt....

He was dealing the