nage the irrigation. The hill billy
had gone to town early in the afternoon, and would return directly to
the Chandler ranch where he was still on guard at nights. Bob believed
his warning to Jenkins had stopped all further molestation, but he was
not willing to take any chances--at least not with Imogene Chandler.

Bob had been irrigating all day and was dead tired. After supper he
sat in front of his shack as usual to cool a little before turning in.
The day had been the hottest of the summer, and now at eight o'clock it
was still much over a hundred.

In that heat there is little life astir even in the most luxuriant
fields. It was still to-night--scarcely the croak of a frog or the
note of a bird. There was no moon, but in the deep, vast, clear spaces
of the sky the stars burned like torches held down from the heavens. A
wind blew lightly, but hot off the fields. The weeds beside the
ditches shook slitheringly, and the dry grass roof of the shack rustled.

To be the centre of stillness, to be alone in a vast space, either
crushes one with loneliness or gives him an unbounded exhilaration.
To-night Bob felt the latter sensation. It seemed instead of being a
small, lost atom in a swirling world, he was a part of all this lambent
starlight; this whispering air of the desert.

He breathed slowly and deeply of the dry, clean wind, rose, and
stretched his tired muscles, and turned in. So accustomed had he
become to the heat that scarcely had he stretched out on the cot before
he was asleep. And Bob was a sound sleeper. The sides of the shack
were open above a three-foot siding of boards, open save for a mosquito
netting. An old screen door was set up at the front, but Bob had not
even latched that. If one was in danger out here, he was simply in
danger, that was all, for there was no way to hide from it.

A little after midnight two Mexicans crept along on all-fours between
the cotton rows at the edge of Bob's field. At the end of the rows,
fifty yards from the shack, they crouched on their haunches and
listened. The wind shook the tall rank cotton and rustled the weeds
along the ditches. But no other sound. Nothing was stirring anywhere.

Bending low and walking swiftly they slipped toward the back of the
shack. Their eyes peered ahead and they slipped with their hearts in
their throats, trusting the Americano was asleep.

He was. As they crouched low behind the shelter of the three-foot wall
of