s
letter down is, you ain't _got_ no place to get back _to_."

"What you mean?" said Wid Gardner suddenly.

"Hell's loose in this valley to-day," said the mail carrier. "Five
fires, when I come through before noon. Wid, your house is gone, and
your barn, too. Sim, somebody's burned your hay and your barn, and
shot your stock, and set your house afire--it would of burned plumb
down if Nels Jensen hadn't got there just in time. They saved the
house. It wasn't burned very much anyways, so Nels told me."

Sim Gage and his companion, stupefied, sat looking at the bearer of
this news.

"Who done it?" asked Wid Gardner grimly after a time. "That ain't no
accident."

"Pop Bentley in here said Big Aleck, the squatter, come up the valley
this morning right early----"

"That hellion!" exclaimed Sim. "He's always made trouble in this
valley. We seen him down below here, driving a broad-tire wagon."

"Yes, a Company wagon, and a Company team. We found that wagon hitched
above your lane, Sim. Your mail box was busted down. There wasn't no
Big Aleck around, nor no one else."

"Not no one else?--_No one in the house_?"

"Nels said there wasn't."

"Light down, Sim," said Wid. "Let's go in and talk to Pop Bentley."

Pop Bentley, the keeper of the meager grocery store and little-used
post-office, met them with gravity on his whiskered face. He was a
tall and thin man, much stooped, who, as far as the memory of man, had
always lived here in Two-Forks Valley.

"Well, you heard the news, I reckon," said he to his neighbors. Both
men nodded.

"Big Aleck told me he was working on the Government job. He said he
was going on up with his team to help finish some roads."

"Well, if it was him," said Wid Gardner, "or any one else, we're
a-goin' to find out who it was done this. We been hearing a long while
about the free Industrials, whatever the damned Bolsheviks call
theirselves. They wander around now and won't settle. Hobos, I call
them, no more, but crazy ones. They threatened to burn all the hay in
the settlements below, and to wipe out all the wheat crop. Why? They
been busting up threshing machines acrosst the range--the paper's been
full of it. Why? They've got in here, and that's all about it. Well,
fellers, you reckon we're goin' to stand fer this sort of Bolshevik
business on the Two-Forks?"

"I say, Pop," broke in Sim Gage to the postmaster, with singular
irrelevance at this time, "haven't yo