wing hidden weapons from
shirt or trousers or bootleg to repel the danger they did not
understand.

By the time the stranger across the river had replied twice only one
face was visible about the camp.

From a shack part way up the bank toward the trestle a small man had
bounded at the first report. In his right hand was a hairbrush, and a
pair of mauve suspenders hung from his hips. Anxious but angry, he
searched the camp with those firm eyes.

Adrian Conrad, Torrance's foreman, Tressa's lover--the latter first in
sequence of time as in everything else--knew these men and hated them
with an intensity born of enforced association. Their unorthodox but
definitive methods of settling the smallest dispute were familiar to
him by experience. Indeed, on his small wiry frame were sundry scars
of knives, whose customarily decisive operations he had thus far
escaped by an arrogance of manner and a promptness of action that
disconcerted a bohunk's aim and riddled his nerve.

About the camp he saw only the panic of getting to cover. As he
wondered, he caught the movement of the lifting rifle across the river.
Ahead of the bullet his eye reached the shack beside the trestle, and
Torrance's quick turn pointed out its course. Conrad, who kept no
rifle at his shack, had to be satisfied with watching, mechanically
completing his toilet where he stood. Mauve suspenders jerked to his
shoulders--brush slashing across his hair--one hand to test the poise
of his tie--Conrad was preparing for eventualities.

He marvelled at his own lack of concern. He could see Tressa's
struggle with her father, and he suspected its cause. Also he had
sufficient faith in her to feel that she was right. The stranger
puzzled him. In the way he handled a rifle was the carelessness of
complete confidence. Even before the third bullet directed Torrance's
amazed eyes upward, Conrad knew that Tressa and her father were in no
danger.

It was a fleeting glimpse of the horses disappearing among the trees
that galvanised him into action. Running back into the shack, he
satisfied himself with a hasty glance in the mirror, stuck a jaunty
stiff hat askew on his head, and sped away up the path his feet had
worn through the months straight to Tressa's door.

Torrance was still examining the bullet marks when Conrad dropped over
the grade.

"There!" He placed a big finger tip importantly over one hole. "And
there--and there!" He turned to Conrad w