he south
line of the fence on a day when Lambert had been on the ranch a little
more than a week.

Kerr was out looking for strays, he said, although he seemed to overlook
the joke that he made in neglecting to state from whose herd. Lambert
gave him the benefit of the doubt and construed him to mean his own. He
rode up to the fence, affable as a man who never had an evil intention
in his life, and made inquiry concerning Lambert's connection with the
ranch, making a pretense of not having heard that Vesta had hired new
men.

"Well, she needs a couple of good men that will stand by her steady," he
said, with all the generosity of one who had her interests close to his
heart. "She's a good girl, and she's been havin' a hard time of it. But
if you want to do her the biggest favor that a man ever did do under
circumstances of similar nature, persuade her to tear this fence out,
all around, and throw the range open like it used to be. Then all this
fool quarreling and shooting will stop, and everybody in here will be on
good terms again. That's the best way out of it for her, and it will be
the best way out of it for you if you intend to stay here and run this
ranch."

While Kerr's manner seemed to be patriarchal and kindly advisory, there
was a certain hardness beneath his words, a certain coldness in his eyes
which made his proposal nothing short of a threat. It made all the
resentful indignation which Lambert had mastered and chained down in
himself rise up and bristle. He took it as a personal affront, as a
threat against his own safety, and the answer that he gave to it was
quick and to the point.

"There'll never be a yard of this fence torn down on my advice, Mr.
Kerr," he said. "You people around here will have to learn to give it a
good deal more respect from now on than you have in the past. I'm going
to teach this crowd around here to take off their hats when they come to
a fence."

Kerr was a slender, dry man, the native meanness of his crafty face
largely masked by his beard, which was beginning to show streaks of gray
in its brown. He was wearing a coat that day, although it was hot, and
had no weapon in sight. He sat looking Lambert straight in the eyes for
a moment upon the delivery of this bill of intentions, his brows drawn a
bit, a cast of concentrated hardness in his gray-blue eyes.

"I'm afraid you've bit off more than you can chew, much less swallow,
young man," he said. With that he rode away,