dy
to send you to Canyon City."

"I ain't a-forgettin' nothing," said Peter cheerfully, casting himself
flat behind a heap of earth on the dump-edge.

While the sheriff's posse was picking its way gingerly over the loose
rock and earth dam formed by the landslide, the window went up in
the Rosemary and Winton saw Virginia. Without meaning to, she gave
him his battle-word.

"We are a dozen Winchesters to your one, Mr. Deckert, and we shall
resist force with force. Order your men back or there will be
trouble."

Winton stood out on the edge of the cutting, a solitary figure where
a few minutes before the earth had been flying from a hundred shovels.

The sheriff's reply was an order, but not for retreat.

"He's one of the men we want; cover him!" he commanded.

Unless the public occasion appeals strongly to the sympathies or the
passions, a picked-up sheriff's posse is not likely to have very good
metal in it. Peter Biggin laughed.

"Don't be no ways nervous," he said in an aside to Winton. "Them
professional veniry chumps couldn't hit the side o' Pacific Peak."

Winton held his ground, while the sheriff tried to drive his men up
a bare slope commanded by two hundred rifles to right and left. The
attempt was a humiliating failure. Being something less than soldiers
trained to do or die, the deputies hung back to a man.

Virginia could not forbear a smile. The sheriff burst into caustic
profanity. Whereupon Mr. Peter Biggin rose up and sent a bullet to
plow a little furrow in the ice within an inch of Deckert's heels.

"Ex-cuse _me_, Bart," he drawled, "but no cuss words don't go."

The sheriff ignored Peter Biggin as a person who could be argued with
at leisure and turned to Winton.

"Come down!" he bellowed.

Winton laughed.

"Let me return the invitation. Come up, and you may read your warrants
to us all day."

Deckert withdrew his men, and at Winton's signal the track-layers
came in and the earth began to fly again.

Virginia sighed her relief, and Bessie plucked up courage to go to
the window, which she had deserted in the moment of impending battle.

"Breakfast is served," announced the waiter as calmly as if the
morning meal were the only matter of consequence in a world of
happenings.

They gathered about the table, a silent trio made presently a quartet
by the advent of Mrs. Carteret, who had neither seen nor heard
anything of the warlike episode with which the day had begun.

Mr. Darrah