xed on Damer, who stood still, with a little, unpleasant
smile.

"Come right in!" he said.

Damer smothered an anathema as he recognized the command in the tone.
"No," he said. "If you don't mind, Mr. Hallam, I'll be getting on
again."

"Come in!" said Hallam, a trifle more sharply, but for just a moment
Damer remained motionless. A few steps would take him down the
verandah stairway, and then the shadowy bush lay before him. Had he
had a horse, he would have obeyed the impulse which prompted him to
avoid the encounter; but, as it happened, owing to the fact that Alton
had met the rancher who would otherwise have lent him one, he had none.
So with evident unwillingness he came slowly forward, and dropping his
bundles on the floor flung himself into a chair.

"Well," he said, "I'm here."

Hallam, who had been watching him, nodded reflectively. "I guess you
didn't expect to find me, or you wouldn't have come," he said. "Where
were you going?"

"To the railroad," said Damer. "Out of the country!"

"Without telling me? That was kind of foolish of you. Still, you
haven't much sense, anyway. You had quite a well-paid job at Somasco."

"Well," said Damer dryly, "I haven't got it now."

Hallam laughed, though the glint in his eyes did not express good will.
"You have got a temper that will be the ruin of you, and don't know
when a man's too big for you, while, now I come to look at you, there's
a lump on your forehead that makes the thing quite plain. You have
been fooling with Alton, and he has 'most pounded the life out of you.
Still, what do you want to leave the country for, anyway?"

Damer set his lips, and drummed with his fingers on the table. Then he
made a little deprecatory gesture, and glanced at Hallam.

"You'll hear it all by and by, but there's one point where you're
wrong," he said. "Now, I'm not scared too easily, but I kind of feel
it in me I'll make nothing but trouble for myself by worrying Alton.
Still, it's not the man himself I'm afraid of. I've met tougher ones,
and come out ahead of them."

Hallam sat silent a moment, for he knew the prospectors and survey
packers who passed their lives amidst the desolate ranges and in the
shadowy bush and their superstitions.

"You have had trouble with him before?" he said.

"Yes," said Damer, "I have. He cut my partner down with an axe back
there in Washington. It was in the big rush in the Baker foothills,
and we had a hard crowd sta