w grasped it for a quick shake to seal their
agreement. He was committed now--to the Range and to a small partnership
with its master. But he still wondered if he had made the right choice.

Two days later he dropped bedroll and saddlebags on the spare bunk at one
end of the long adobe-walled room and studied his surroundings with deep
curiosity. It was a fort, all right, this whole stronghold of Rennie's--not
just the bunkhouse which formed part of a side wall. Bunkhouse, feed
store, and storage room, blacksmith shop, cookhouse, stables, main house,
the quarters for the married men and their families--all arranged to
enclose a patio into which choice stock could be herded at the time of an
attack, with a curbed well in the center.

The roofs of all the buildings were flat, with loopholed parapets to be
manned at need. A sentry post on the main house was occupied twenty-four
hours a day by relays of Pimas. A loaded rifle leaned at every window
opening, ready to be fired through loopholes in the wooden war shutters.
The walls were twenty-five inches thick, and mounted on the roof of the
stable, facing the hills from which Apache attacks usually came, was a
small brass cannon--_Don_ Cazar's legacy from troops marching away in '61.

What he saw of the resources of this private fort led Drew to accept the
other stories he had heard of the Range, like the one that _Don_ Cazar's
men practiced firing blindfolded at noise targets to be prepared for night
raids. The place was self-contained and almost self-supporting, with
stores of food, good water, its own forge and leather shop, its own
craftsmen and experts. No wonder the Apaches had given up trying to break
this Anglo outpost and Rennie had accomplished what others found
impossible. He had held his land secure against the worst and most
unbeatable enemy this country had nourished.

There were other Range forts, smaller, but as stoutly and ingeniously
designed, each built beside a water source on Rennie land--defense points
for _Don_ Cazar's riders, their garrisons rotated at monthly intervals.
And Drew had to thank that system for having taken Johnny Shannon away
from the Stronghold before the Kentuckian arrived. Rennie's foster son was
now riding inspection between one water-hole fortification and another.
But Drew was uncertain just how he would rub along with Shannon in the
future.

"_Senor_ Kirby, _Don_ Cazar--he would speak with you in the Casa Grande,"
Leon Rivas