of it, and tossed it into the fire. It
required a stronger narcotic than tobacco to soothe his fevered
spirits. After a while he whirled around and faced the two women.

"See here, Marion!" he said. "It's all our fault for not telling you
about Haig. But we didn't want to annoy you with our troubles, and we
never imagined you'd stumble on to him. Do you know now what this is
all about?"

She spared him the answer that she had heard something on that point
the day of the shooting.

"No; that is, very little."

"Well, it's just this: Before he came here we were all playing the
game peacefully together. Each of us had just about enough land, with
the cut hay and the winter pastures, to pull through the winter, and
there was just enough free grazing up in the edges of the timber to
keep the cattle going through the summer and early fall."

"That was government land," explained Claire.

"And open to all of us," added Seth. "We never had any dispute with
the Englishman who owned Haig's ranch before him, and he got fair
treatment, though he wasn't here much of the time to look after it. We
heard he had some family trouble, and one day when he'd been gone a
long time--"

"That's four years now," interrupted Claire.

"Yes. Haig showed up, and said the ranch was his. He started in
straight off to hog the whole thing. Bought a thousand head of
cattle--that made thirteen hundred head--almost as many as all the
rest of us had put together. He turned the thirteen hundred into the
open range, and hired men to keep them moving the right way for the
good feed, and--"

"He had a perfect right to do that, you see," Claire put in hastily.

"Legal right, maybe," Huntington went on. "But he didn't have any real
right to more than his share. We organized, bunched our cattle, and
stayed with 'em. That way we were stronger than he, and soon had his
cattle starving. Then he disappeared, and we didn't see anything of
him for three weeks. And what do you suppose the damned skunk--"

"Seth!" cried Claire warningly, with an anxious look at Marion.

Marion merely shook her head.

"Well, he fooled us. He went to Denver, got a lawyer on the job,
looked up the records, found there'd been a mistake in the surveys,
and came back to us with a government deed to almost half the forest
reserve that we'd been using as free pasture. Then he ordered us off,
and we went, with six Winchesters pointed at our fool backs. What do
you think of that,