disturbed the self-appointed
critic. "For a long time now, Barb," he continued, "you've been in the
nastiest kind of a fight on Jim Laramie. You've tried to run him off
the range and you tried to beat him out of his land and you've tried to
break him. He's got the best land in the Falling Wall and he's in your
way. One time his wire is all pulled off his fence. Another time your
foreman pokes a gun into his stomach."

Doubleday flared up: "Am I the only man that Laramie's got differences
with? When his fence is tore down, am I to blame? Am I to blame for
every drink Tom Stone takes? What are you talking about?" demanded
Doubleday with violence.

The doctor could not have been calmer had he been reaching at the
critical moment of an operation for Doubleday's appendix. "Be patient
a minute; be ca'm, Barb; I'll tell you what I'm talking about. I don't
know who cut his wire. I don't know who done it and I won't undertake
to say, but what I do say to you, Barb, and I say it hard, you're
making a big mistake on this man, and if you don't slow up it'll cost
you your life yet."

Doubleday was grimly silent. "I've known Jim Laramie," Carpy went on,
"since he was a boy. He's stubborn as a broncho if you try to ride
him. He's the easiest man in the world to get along with if you make a
friend of him. No matter what's said of Jim Laramie there ain't a
crooked hair in his head; but he's no angel and when his patience
quits--look out. What I'm going to tell you now, Barb, is on the
square. It can't go no further. I tell you because you ought to know.
A while back, just after this wire pulling, Jim Laramie walked into
this room, shut the door and locked it and sat down right where you're
sittin' now. He told me the wire story; he told me he was through.
He'd tracked the men to your ranch and was going to square accounts
with you and Stone and Van Horn. He was on his way to the Junction and
he told me he might not come back and wanted to tell me how to dispose
of his property. He was after you and he meant, before he fell down,
to get some or all of you. He asked me where you were, because he
heard I knew. I did know but I didn't tell him. I lied, Barb. I told
him the mines, but I knew you were at the Junction. He started for the
mines. What happened to turn him off your trail I never yet learned.
I never asked.

"Now you saw, or you heard anyway, what happened when Stone tried to
kill him the other nig