elf steady in the face of the
contemptuous insults with which Lanky casually replied to his threats.

He started to snarl an answer, his usual self-repression deserting him,
but Harris waved an impatient hand.

"Drag it!" he snapped. "Get moving. If I had my own way we'd lead
your horse out from under you--and we will if I ever hear of your
turning up on the Three Bar range again."

VI

Billie Warren rode with Harris on the last lap of the circle. There
were but two men remaining with them.

"Moore!" Harris called, and the man turned his horse down the head of a
draw that would lead him out into the bottoms a trifle less than a mile
above the wagon. Harris heard a shrill whistle behind him and turned
sidewise in the saddle to look back, saw that Moore had regained the
ridge and was signaling. They turned and rode back to him.

"There's another," Moore said, pointing down the gulch. "It's getting
to be a habit."

A dead cow lay on a little flat a hundred yards below. For three
consecutive days some rider had found a fresh-killed Three Bar cow.
Every animal had been shot.

"I'll look this one over myself," Harris decided. "There's only two
more gulches to work. Each one of you boys take one."

The girl followed him as he turned down the first steep pitch. They
pulled up their horses and sat looking at the cow. A trickle of blood
oozed out of a hole between her eyes. Harris rode in a circle round
the spot.

"He downed her from some point above," he said. "Not a sign anywhere
close at hand." He surveyed the ridges that flanked either side of the
draw and the little saddle-like depression at the head of it from which
they had just descended. From beyond this gap came the shrill nicker
of a horse, the sound chopped short as if a man had clamped his hand on
the animal's nostrils to silence it. Harris turned swiftly to the girl.

"It's a plant," he said. "Ride--hard!"

He suited his action to the words and jumped his horse off down the
bottoms. He waved her over to one side.

"Keep well away from me!" he ordered. "They don't want you."

They hung their spurs into their mounts and the horses plunged down the
steeply-pitching bottoms, vaulting sage clumps and bounding along the
cow trails that threaded the brush. Two hundred yards below the cow
the draw made an elbow bend. The girl rounded it and as Harris
followed a jump behind he felt a jarring tug at the cantle of his
saddle and the