ns to settle in full. Some
day there would come an hour of accounting.

CHAPTER XXXIII

ON THE DODGE

Up in the hills back of Bear Canon two men were camping. They breakfasted
on slow elk, coffee, and flour-and-water biscuits. When they had
finished, they washed their tin dishes with sand in the running brook.

"Might's well be hittin' the trail," one growled.

The other nodded without speaking, rose lazily, and began to pack
the camp outfit. Presently, when he had arranged the load to his
satisfaction, he threw the diamond hitch and stood back to take a chew of
tobacco while he surveyed his work. He was a squat, heavy-set man with a
Chihuahua hat. Also he was a two-gun man. After a moment he circled an
arrowweed thicket and moved into the chaparral where his horse was
hobbled.

The man who had spoken rose with one lithe twist of his big body. His
eyes, hard and narrow, watched the shorter man disappear in the brush.
Then he turned swiftly and strode toward the shoulder of the ridge.

In the heavy undergrowth of dry weeds and grass he stopped and tested the
wind with a bandanna handkerchief. The breeze was steady and fairly
strong. It blew down the canon toward the foothills beyond.

The man stripped from a scrub oak a handful of leaves. They were very
brittle and crumbled in his hand. A match flared out. His palm cupped it
for a moment to steady the blaze before he touched it to the crisp
foliage. Into a nest of twigs he thrust the small flame. The twigs, dry
as powder from a four-months' drought, crackled like miniature fireworks.
The grass caught, and a small line of fire ran quickly out.

The man rose. On his brown face was an evil smile, in his hard eyes
something malevolent and sinister. The wind would do the rest.

He walked back toward the camp. At the shoulder crest he turned to look
back. From out of the chaparral a thin column of pale gray smoke was
rising.

His companion stamped out the remains of the breakfast fire and threw
dirt on the ashes to make sure no live ember could escape in the wind.
Then he swung to the saddle.

"Ready, Dug?" he asked.

The big man growled an assent and followed him over the summit into the
valley beyond.

"Country needs a rain bad," the man in the Chihuahua hat commented.
"Don't know as I recollect a dryer season."

The big hawk-nosed man by his side cackled in his throat with short,
splenetic mirth. "It'll be some dryer before the rains," he prophesi