curtained door
back of Hoden's counter. I turned to peep out and was in time to see
George Wright enter with the red-headed cowboy called Brick.

That was the first time I had ever seen Wright come into Hoden's. He
called for tobacco.

If his visit surprised Jim he did not show any evidence. But Wright
showed astonishment as he saw the Ranger, and then a dark glint flitted
from the eyes that shifted from Steele to Hoden and back again.

Steele leaned easily against the counter, and he said good morning
pleasantly. Wright deigned no reply, although he bent a curious and hard
scrutiny upon Steele. In fact, Wright evinced nothing that would lead
one to think he had any respect for Steele as a man or as a Ranger.

"Steele, that was the second break of yours last night," he said
finally. "If you come fooling round the ranch again there'll be hell!"

It seemed strange that a man who had lived west of the Pecos for ten
years could not see in Steele something which forbade that kind of talk.

It certainly was not nerve Wright showed; men of courage were seldom
intolerant; and with the matchless nerve that characterized Steele or
the great gunmen of the day there went a cool, unobtrusive manner, a
speech brief, almost gentle, certainly courteous. Wright was a
hot-headed Louisianian of French extraction; a man evidently who had
never been crossed in anything, and who was strong, brutal, passionate,
which qualities, in the face of a situation like this, made him simply a
fool!

The way Steele looked at Wright was joy to me. I hated this smooth,
dark-skinned Southerner. But, of course, an ordinary affront like
Wright's only earned silence from Steele.

"I'm thinking you used your Ranger bluff just to get near Diane
Sampson," Wright sneered. "Mind you, if you come up there again there'll
be hell!"

"You're damn right there'll be hell!" retorted Steele, a kind of high
ring in his voice. I saw thick, dark red creep into his face.

Had Wright's incomprehensible mention of Diane Sampson been an instinct
of love--of jealousy? Verily, it had pierced into the depths of the
Ranger, probably as no other thrust could have.

"Diane Sampson wouldn't stoop to know a dirty blood-tracker like
you," said Wright hotly. His was not a deliberate intention to rouse
Steele; the man was simply rancorous. "I'll call you right, you cheap
bluffer! You four-flush! You damned interfering conceited Ranger!"

Long before Wright ended his tirade St