ke to leave the battle-field. "Lemme stay here. You can
handle that end of the job better'n me, Mr. Crawford."

The old cattleman, his face streaked with black, looked at him from
bloodshot eyes. "Where do you get that notion I'll quit a job I've
started, son? You hit the trail. The sooner the quicker."

The young man wasted no more words. He swung to the saddle and rode for
town faster than he had ever traveled in all his hard-riding days.

CHAPTER XXXVI

FIGHTING FIRE

Sanders was in the office of the Jackpot Company looking over some
blue-prints when Joyce Crawford came in and inquired where her father
was.

"He went out with Bob Hart to the oil field this morning. Some trouble
with the casing."

"Thought Dad wasn't giving any of his time to oil these days," she said.
"He told me you and Bob were running the company."

"Every once in a while he takes an interest. I prod him up to go out and
look things over occasionally. He's president of the company, and I tell
him he ought to know what's going on. So to-day he's out there."

"Oh!" Miss Joyce, having learned what she had come in to find out, might
reasonably have departed. She declined a chair, said she must be going,
yet did not go. Her eyes appeared to study without seeing a field map on
the desk. "Dad told me something last night, Mr. Sanders. He said I might
pass it on to you and Bob, though it isn't to go farther. It's about that
ten thousand dollars he paid the bank when it called his loan. He got the
money from Buck Byington."

"Buck!" exclaimed the young man. He was thinking that the Buck he used to
know never had ten dollars saved, let alone ten thousand.

"I know," she explained. "That's it. The money wasn't his. He's executor
or something for the children of his dead brother. This money had come in
from the sale of a farm back in Iowa and he was waiting for an order of
the court for permission to invest it in a mortgage. When he heard Dad
was so desperately hard up for cash he let him have the money. He knew
Dad would pay it back, but it seems what he did was against the law, even
though Dad gave him his note and a chattel mortgage on some cattle which
Buck wasn't to record. Now it has been straightened out. That's why Dad
couldn't tell where he got the money. Buck would have been in trouble."

"I see."

"But now it's all right." Joyce changed the subject. There were teasing
pinpoints of mischief in her eyes. "My school physiology u