flashed a gun on him now he could clean them down to the
ground with all legal justification, no questions asked.

Two appeared far down the road, riding for Glendora in a swinging
gallop. The sheriff, Lambert thought; missed the train, and had ridden
the forty and more miles across. No; one was Grace Kerr. Even at a
quarter of a mile he never could mistake her again. The other was Sim
Hargus. They had miscalculated in their intention of meeting the train,
and were coming in a panic of anxiety.

They dismounted at the hotel, and started across. Lambert stood near his
prisoner, waiting. Kerr had been sitting on the edge of the platform.
Now he got up, moving around the pole to show them that he was not to be
counted on to take a hand in whatever they expected to start.

Lambert moved a little nearer his prisoner, where he stood waiting. He
had not shaved during the two days between Chicago and Glendora; the
dust of the road was on his face. His hat was tipped forward to shelter
his eyes against the afternoon glare, the leather thong at the back
rumpling his close-cut hair. He stood lean and long-limbed, easy and
indifferent in his pose, as it would seem to look at him as one might
glance in passing, the smoke of his cigarette rising straight from its
fresh-lit tip in the calm air of the somnolent day.

As Hargus and Grace advanced, coming in the haste and heat of
indignation that Kerr's humiliating situation inflamed, two men left the
saloon. They stopped at the hitching-rack as if debating whether to
take their horses, and so stood, watching the progress of the two who
were cutting the long diagonal across the road. When Grace, who came a
little ahead of her companion in her eagerness, was within thirty feet
of him, Lambert lifted his hand in forbidding signal.

"Stop there," he said.

She halted, her face flaming with fury. Hargus stopped beside her, his
arm crooked to bring his hand up to his belt, sawing back and forth as
if in indecision between drawing his gun and waiting for the wordy
preliminaries to pass. Kerr stood embracing the pole in a pose of
ridiculous supplication, the bright chain of the new handcuffs
glistening in the sun.

"I want to talk to my father," said Grace, lashing Lambert with a look
of scornful hate.

"Say it from there," Lambert returned, inflexible, cool; watching every
movement of Sim Hargus' sawing arm.

"You've got no right to chain him up like a dog!" she said.

"You ain't