damned sight. You tell
your men to stop that monkey-business, and have them put those stakes
back where they found them." Ballard was hot.

"You give-a the h-order in this valley, senor?" asked the Mexican
softly.

"I do, where the company's property is concerned. Call your men off!"

"Senor Ballar', I have biffo to-day killed a man for that he spik to me
like-a that!"

[Illustration: "Senor Ballar', I have biffo' to-day killed a man for
that he spik to me like-a-that!"]

"Have you?" snorted Ballard contemptuously. "Well, you won't kill me.
Call your men off, I say!"

There was no need. The makeshift polo game had paused, and the riders
were gathering about the quarrelling two.

"Bat your left eye once, and we'll rope him for you, Manuel," said one.

"Wonder if I c'd knock a two-bagger with that hat o' his'n without
mussin' his hair?" said another.

"Say, you fellers, wait a minute till I make that bronc' o' his'n do a
cake-walk!" interposed a third, casting the loop of his riata on the
ground so that Ballard's horse would be thrown if he lifted hoof.

It was an awkward crisis, and the engineer stood to come off with little
credit. He was armed, but even in the unfettered cattle country one
cannot pistol a laughing jeer. It was the saving sense of humour that
came to his aid, banishing red wrath. There was no malice in the jeers.

"Sail in when you're ready, boys," he laughed. "I fight for my brand the
same as you'd fight for yours. Those pegs have got to go back in the
ground where you found them."

One of the flap-hatted riders dropped his reins, drummed with his
elbows, and crowed lustily. The foreman backed his horse deftly out of
the enclosing ring; and the man nearest to Ballard on the right made a
little cast of his looped rope, designed to whip Ballard's pistol out of
its holster. If the engineer had been the tenderfoot they took him for,
the trouble would have culminated quickly.

With the laugh still on his lips, the Kentuckian was watching every move
of the Mexican. There was bloodthirst, waiting only for the shadow of an
excuse, glooming in the handsome black eyes. Ballard remembered
Sanderson's fate, and a quick thrill of racial sympathy for the dead man
tuned him to the fighting pitch. He knew he was confronting a
treacherous bully of the type known to the West as a "killer"; a man
whose regard for human life could be accurately and exactly measured by
his chance for escaping the penalty fo