e peaks were blanketed with thick gray clouds, while
eastward a sullen redness showed where the sun strove to rise on an
angry world. The wind was the kind that scrapes raw the nerves,
buffeting man and beast with cross-currents and unexpected blasts,
howling and shrieking around chimneys and gables, covering everything
with dust and sand.

Haig awoke to hear the wind tearing at the shutters and the roof, the
pines on the hillside thundering like surf, the hills reverberating
with the maddest trumpetings. He lay a moment listening; his pulse
quickened, at the sound of all that tumult; and he leaped from his bed
calling loudly for Slim Jim. It was a day for battle. The very
elements were up and at it, as if all nature had enlisted in the
struggle between man and brute.

For all his eagerness, he ate his breakfast leisurely, resolved to
make no such error as he had made before. There should be no mad haste
and no anger; no working on an empty stomach, on nerves drawn taut.
Bacon and eggs and buckwheat cakes, with coffee and a single pipe,
occupied an hour or more; and then, feeling fit for anything, he set
out for the corrals.

He did not scruple this time to take every precaution known to the
experts of the corrals. Bill was mounted on the wisest horse in the
stables, with a lariat ready against the event of Sunnysides trying
the fence again. Then Haig directed Farrish, Curly, and Pete to rope
and saddle the outlaw, saving himself for the supreme struggle. But to
their astonishment there was none of the difficulties in the
preliminaries that they encountered on the previous occasion; only two
or three vicious movements, no more.

"Foxy, ain't you?" said Farrish to the outlaw, when the saddle was on.
"Savin' yourself, are you, you yellow devil?"

The horse was led as before into the larger corral. He stepped nimbly,
obediently, as if resistance were the farthest thing from his
thoughts, even when Haig, his arch-enemy, walked up to him, grasped
the bridle, and looked steadily into his eyes. For a moment all stood
still, as the challenge passed between man and brute. Then Haig tested
the cinches of the saddle, looked carefully around him, and disposed
the men with a final word to each.

"Now then! Off with it!"

Farrish removed the last rope, and then only the bridle rein in Haig's
hand, and the fence yonder, stoutly repaired since the last battle,
remained between Sunnysides and the sandhills of the San Luis. True