to kill that knot-head!"

Bowers dried his hands on his overalls and stepped inside the wagon. He
returned with his shotgun.

"And I aim to blow the top of your head off ef you try it," Bowers said,
breathing heavily. "That little innercent sheep don't mean no harm to
nobody. Sence we're speakin' plain, I don't like you nohow. I don't like
the way you act; I don't like the way you talk; I don't like the way
your face grows on you; I don't like nothin' about you, and ef I never
see you agin it'll be soon enough. You'd better go while I'm ca'm, for
when I gits mad I breaks in two in the middle and flies both ways!"

Panting from his chase, the stranger stopped and stood looking at Bowers
in baffled fury. Then he turned sharply on his heel, caught his horse
and swung into the saddle. He hesitated for the part of a second before
spurring his horse a little closer.

"You kin take a message to your boss--you locoed sheepherder. Tell her
it's from an old friend that knew her when she was kickin' in her
cradle. Show her that photygraph of the feller with the runnin' horse
and tell her I said it was the picture of her father, and that he's
scoured the country for her, spendin' more money to locate her than
she'll make if she wrangles woolies till she's a hundred. Tell her a
telegram would bring him in twenty-four hours--on a special, probably.
Give her that message, along with the love of an old, old friend what
was well acquainted with her at the Sand Coulee!" He laughed mockingly,
and with a malevolent look at Bowers, plunged into the quaking asp and
vanished.

Bowers stared after him open-mouthed and round-eyed. He had placed his
visitor. "The feller that smelled like a Injun tepee in the drug store
the night Mormon Joe was murdered!"

The discovery that his visitor was the malodorous stranger of the drug
store impressed Bowers far more than his mocking message to Kate
concerning her father. That might or might not be true, but he was
entirely sure about the other.

His first impulse was to deliver the message, but upon second thought he
decided that nothing would be accomplished by it, and it might disturb
her. He argued that with a range war pending she already had enough
worries. If only he could get word to Teeters somehow--or Lingle,
even--to keep a lookout for the fellow, but since he was many miles off
the line of travel and he dared not leave his sheep, there was small
chance of notifying either.

It was a g