ky took his prisoner straight to the
ranger's office and telephoned to Cullison.

"Don't I get anything to eat?" growled the convict while they waited.

"When I'm ready."

Bucky believed in fair play. The man had not eaten since last night. But
then neither had he. It happened that Bucky was tough as whipcord, as
supple and untiring as a hickory sapling. Well, Blackwell was a pretty
hard nut to crack, too. The lieutenant did not know anything about book
psychology, but he had observed that hunger and weariness try out the
stuff that is in a man. Under the sag of them many a will snaps that would
have held fast if sustained by a good dinner and a sound night's sleep.
This is why so many "bad men," gun fighters with a reputation for
gameness, wilt on occasion like whipped curs. In the old days this came to
nearly every terror of the border. Some day when he had a jumping
toothache, or when his nerves were frayed from a debauch, a silent
stranger walked into his presence, looked long and steadily into his eyes,
and ended forever his reign of lawlessness. Sometimes the two-gun man was
"planted," sometimes he subsided into innocuous peace henceforth.

The ranger had a shrewd instinct that the hour had come to batter down
this fellow's dogged resistance. Therefore he sent for Cullison, the man
whom the convict most feared.

The very look of the cattleman, with that grim, hard, capable aspect,
shook Blackwell's nerve.

"So you've got him, Bucky."

Luck looked the man over as he sat handcuffed beside the table and read in
his face both terror and a sly, dogged cunning. Once before the fellow had
been put through the third degree. Something of the sort he fearfully
expected now. Villainy is usually not consistent. This hulking bully
should have been a hardy ruffian. Instead, he shrank like a schoolgirl
from the thought of physical pain.

"Stand up," ordered Cullison quietly.

Blackwell got to his feet at once. He could not help it, even though the
fear in his eyes showed that he cowered before the anticipated attack.

"Don't hit me," he whined.

Luck knew the man sweated under the punishment his imagination called up,
and he understood human nature too well to end the suspense by making real
the vision. For then the worst would be past, since the actual is never
equal to what is expected.

"Well?" Luck watched him with the look of tempered steel in his hard
eyes.

The convict flinched, moistened his lips with his