lips, a smile which
expressed polite amusement along with a measured contempt--and the
boss herder was stung with a nameless shame at the false play.

"Put up them guns, you dam' gawky fools!" he yelled in a frenzy of
rage. "Put 'em up, I say. This man ain't goin' to eat ye!" And though
the poor browbeaten Chihuahuanos understood not a word of English they
felt somehow that they had been overzealous and shuffled back to their
blankets, like watchdogs that had been rebuked.

"Now," said the sheepman, taking his hand from his gun, "what can I do
for you, Mr. Hardy?"

"Well," responded Hardy, "of course there are several things you
_might_ do to accommodate me, but maybe you wouldn't mind telling me
how you got in here, just for instance?"

"Always glad to 'commodate--where I can, of course," returned the
sheepman grimly. "I came in over the top of them Four Peaks yonder."

"Um," said Hardy, glancing up at the rocky walls. "Then you must've
had hooks on your eyebrows, for sure. I suppose the rest of the family
is coming, too! And, by the way, how is my friend, Mr. Swope?"

He appended this last with an artless smile, quite lacking in
bitterness, but somehow the boss herder felt himself discredited by
the inquiry, as if he were consorting with thieves. It was the old
shame of the sheepman, the shame which comes to the social outcast,
and burns upon the cheek of the dishonored bastard, but which is
seared deepest into the heart of the friendless herder, the
Ishmaelite of the cow-country, whose hand is against every man and
every man's against him. Hunger and thirst he can endure, and the
weariness of life, but to have all men turn away from him, to
answer him grudgingly, to feed him at their table, but refuse
themselves to eat, this it is which turns his heart to bitterness
and makes him a man to be feared. As Thomas had looked at this trim
young cowboy, smooth-shaven and erect, sitting astride a blooded
horse which snorted and pawed the ground delicately, and then had
glanced at the low and brutal Mexicans with whom his lot was cast, a
blind fury had swept over him, wreaking its force upon his own
retainers; and now, when by implication he was classed with Jim Swope,
he resented it still more bitterly.

"Dam'fino," he answered sullenly. "Haven't seen 'im for a month."

"Oh, isn't he with you this trip?" asked Hardy, in surprise. "I had
hoped that I might find him up here." There was a suggestion of irony
in his wo