us treed in about two minutes if we don't," he assented. "Go ahead."

"Well," Andy lifted his head and shoulders that he might readjust a
pillow to his liking, "we wanted him to make a getaway. Fact is, if he
hadn't, we'd have been--strictly up against it. Right! If he hadn't--how
about it, Mig? I guess we'd have been to the Little Rockies ourselves."

"You've got a sweet little voice," Irish cut in savagely, "but we're
tired. We'd rather hear yuh say something!"

"Oh--all right. Well, Mig and I just ribbed up a josh on Dunk. I'd read
somewhere about the same kinda deal, so it ain't original; I don't lay
any claim to the idea at all; we just borrowed it. You see, it's like
this: We figured that a man as mean as this Dunk person most likely had
stepped over the line, somewhere. So we just took a gambling chance, and
let him do the rest. You see, we never saw him before in our lives. All
that identification stunt of ours was just a bluff. But the minute I
shoved my chips to the center, I knew we had him dead to rights. You
were there. You saw him wilt. By gracious--"

"Yuh don't know anything against him?" gasped Irish.

"Not a darned thing--any more than what you all know," testified Andy
complacently.

It took a minute or two for that to sink in.

"Well, I'll be damned!" breathed Irish.

"We did chain him to the anvil," Andy went on. "On the way down, we
talked about being in a hurry to get back to you fellows, and I told
Mig--so Dunk could hear--that we wouldn't bother with the horse. We tied
him to the corral. And I hunted around for that bum chain, and then we
made out we couldn't find the padlock for the door; so we decided, right
out loud, that he'd be dead safe for an hour or two, till the bunch of
us got back. Not knowing a darn thing about him, except what you boys
have told us, we sure would have been in bad if he hadn't taken a sneak.
Fact is, we were kinda worried for fear he wouldn't have nerve enough
to try it. We waited, up on the hill, till we saw him sneak down to the
corral and jump on his horse and take off down the coulee like a scared
coyote. It was," quoth the young man, unmistakably pleased with himself,
"pretty smooth work, if you ask me."

"I'd hate to ride as fast and far to-night as that hombre will,"
supplemented Miguel with his brief smile, that was just a flash of
white, even teeth and a momentary lightening of his languorous eyes.

Slim stood for five minutes, a stolid, stocky f