face from a cut
on his forehead; he sank down again when she let go of him to welcome
this unexpected help.

"These men cut my fence; they're trespassing on me, trying to defy and
humiliate me because they know I'm alone!" she said. She stretched out
her hand toward Lambert as if in appeal to a judge, her face flushed
from the struggle and sense of outrage, her hat pushed back on her amber
hair, the fire of righteous anger in her eyes. The realization of her
beauty seemed to sweep Lambert like a flood of sudden music, lifting his
heart in a great surge, making him recklessly glad.

"Where do you fellers think you're goin'?" he asked, following the
speech of the range.

"We're goin' where we started to go," the man who had just remounted
replied, glaring at Lambert with insulting sneer.

This was a stocky man with bushy red-gray eyebrows, a stubble of roan
beard over his blunt, common face. One foot was short in his boot, as if
he had lost his toes in a blizzard, a mark not uncommonly set by
unfriendly nature on the men who defied its force in that country. He
wore a duck shooting-jacket, the pockets of it bulging as if with game.

His companion was a much younger man, slender, graceful in the saddle,
rather handsome in a swarthy, defiant way. He ranged up beside the
spokesman as if to take full share in whatever was to come. Both of them
were armed with revolvers, the elder of the two with a rifle in
addition, which he carried in a leather scabbard black and slick with
age, slung on his saddle under his thigh.

"You'll have to get permission from this lady before you go through
here," Lambert told him calmly.

Vesta Philbrook had stepped back, as if she had presented her case and
waited adjudication. She stood by the old negro where he sat in the
dust, her hand on his head, not a word more to add to her case, seeming
to have passed it on to this slim, confident, soft-spoken stranger with
his clear eyes and steady hand, who took hold of it so competently.

"I've been cuttin' this purty little fence for ten years, and I'll keep
on cuttin' it and goin' through whenever I feel like it. I don't have to
git no woman's permission, and no man's, neither, to go where I want to
go, kid."

The man dropped his hand to his revolver as he spoke the last word with
a twisting of the lip, a showing of his scorbutic teeth, a sneer that
was at once an insult and a goad. The next moment he was straining his
arms above his head