r. Women ain't reliable. She'd have showed it some way, an' then
there'd have been hell to pay."

"An' I've been pridin' myself on takin' care of Barbara," said Harlan. "I
feel a heap embarrassed an' useless--just like I'd been fooled."

"You've done a thing I couldn't do," confessed Morgan; "you've busted
Haydon's gang wide open. If you hadn't showed up there'd have been
nothin' done. There's some of the boys that ain't outlaws--boys that are
with me, havin' sneaked into the gang to help me out. But we wan't makin'
no headway to speak of."

Harlan looked at Haydon. "That guy was educated," he said. "What was his
game? I've felt all along that there was somethin' big back of him--that
he wasn't here just to steal cattle an' rob folks, an' such."

"You ain't heard," smiled Morgan. "Of course you wouldn't--unless Gage
had gassed to you.

"There's a gang of big men in Frisco, an' in the East, figurin' to run a
railroad through the basin. A year or so ago there was secret talk of it
in the capital. It leaked out that the railroad guys was intendin' to run
their road through the basin. They was goin' to build a town right where
the Rancho Seco lays; an' they was plannin' to irrigate a lot of the land
around there. The governor says it was to be big--an' likely it'll be
big, when they get around to it.

"But them things go slow, an' a gang of cheap crooks got wise to it. They
sent Haydon down here, to scare the folks in the basin into sellin' out
for a song. They've scared one man out--a Pole from the west end. But the
others have stuck. Looks like they was figurin' on grabbin' the Rancho
Seco without payin' _anything_ for it--Haydon intendin', I reckon, to put
dad an' me out of the way an' marry Barbara. Then he could have cut the
ranch up into town lots an' made a mint of coin."

"An' Deveny?"

"Deveny's a wolf. Haydon brought him here from Arizona--where he'd
terrorized a whole county, runnin' it regardless. He figured to cash in,
I reckon, but he's been grabbin' up everything he could lay his hands on,
on the way."

"You'll be tellin' Barbara, now?" suggested Harlan.

"You're shoutin'!" said Morgan, his eyes glowing. "I'm hittin' the breeze
to the Rancho Seco for fair." He looked at Haydon, and his eyes took on a
new expression. "I was almost forgettin' what the governor sent me here
for," he added. "The governor was wantin' to know who is behind Haydon
an' Deveny, an' I'm rummagin' around in Haydon's office to