pped back from the window, leveling his pistol at Reid's
head. Joan was the subject of this infamous barter.

A moment Mackenzie's finger stiffened to send a bullet into Reid's
brain, for he considered only that such depravity was its own warrant
of death. But Reid was unarmed, and there was something in his
attitude that seemed to disclose that it was a bluff. Joan was not
there.

Joan was not there. She would not remain silent and unresisting, shut
in a room while a cold-blooded scoundrel bargained to deliver her for
a price like a ewe out of his flock. Reid was playing to even the
deceit Carlson had put over on him in dealing for the stolen sheep. It
was a bluff. Joan was not there.

Mackenzie let down the weapon. It was not the moment for interference;
he would allow the evidence to accumulate before passing sentence and
executing it with summary hand.

"Come across with the money before we go any further," said Reid, firm
in his manner, defiantly confident in his bearing. "I've got to get
out of this country before morning."

"I wouldn't give five hundred dollars for her," Swan declared. "How do
I know she'd stay with me? She might run off tomorrow if I didn't have
a chain on her."

Reid said nothing. He backed a little nearer the door as if he had it
in mind to call the negotiations off. Swan looked at him with chin
thrust forward, neck extended.

"She ain't here--you're a liar!" he charged.

"All right; there's a pair of us, then."

"I've brought my woman--" Swan stretched out his hand to call
attention to her where she cowered in her chair--"fixed up to meet you
like a bride. Woman for woman, I say; that's enough for any man."

"I don't want your woman, Carlson."

"You tried to steal her from me; you was lovin' her over on the
range."

"What do you care? You don't want her."

"Sure I don't," Swan agreed heartily; "if I did I'd 'a' choked your
neck over there that night. Woman for woman, or no trade."

"That's not our bargain, Carlson."

Reid spoke sharply, but with a dry quaver in his voice that betrayed
the panic that was coming over him on account of this threatened
miscarriage of his plans. Mackenzie was convinced by Reid's manner
that Swan had read him right. Joan was not there.

The thought that Joan would accompany Reid in the night to Swan
Carlson's house on any pretext he could devise in his crafty mind was
absurd. It was all a bluff, Reid playing on Swan's credulity to induce
him t