Jake Rule now."

"What you want with the sheriff?" Luke queried, uneasily.

"He's gonna help us in our li'l talk," explained the Judge, smoothly.

"I think I'll get my gun," observed Jack Harpe.

He made as if to rise but sank back immediately for Racey Dawson had
suddenly appeared in the open doorway behind him and run the chill
muzzle of a sixshooter into the back of his neck.

"Never sit with yore back to a doorway," advised Racey Dawson. "If
you'll clamp yore hands behind yore head, Jack, we'll all be the
happier. Luke, fish out the knife you wear under yore left armpit, lay
it on the floor and kick it into the corner."

Luke Tweezy's knife tinkled against the wall at the moment that the
sheriff, his deputy, and two other men entered from the street. The
third man was Mr. Johnson, the Wells Fargo detective. The fourth man
wore his left arm in a sling and hobbled on a cane. The fourth man was
Swing Tunstall.

"What kind of hell's trick is this?" demanded Jack Harpe, glaring at
the Wells Fargo detective.

"It's the last trick, Bill," said Mr. Johnson.

At the mention of which name Jack Harpe appeared to shrink inwardly.
He looked suddenly very old.

"Take chairs, gents," invited Judge Dolan, looking about him in the
manner of a minstrel show's interlocutor. "If everybody's comfortable,
we'll proceed to business."

"I thought you said this wasn't a trial," objected Luke Tweezy.

"And so it ain't a trial," the Judge rapped out smartly. "The trial
will come later."

Luke Tweezy subsided. His furtive eyes became more furtive than ever.

"Go ahead, Racey," said Judge Dolan.

Racey, still holding his sixshooter, leaned hipshot against the
doorjamb.

"It was this way," he began, and told what had transpired that day in
the hotel corral when he had been bandaging his horse's leg and had
overheard the conversation between Lanpher and Jack Harpe and later,
Punch-the-breeze Thompson.

"They's nothing in that," declared Jack Harpe with contempt, twisting
his neck to glower up at Racey. "Suppose I did wanna get hold of the
Dale ranch. What of it?"

"Shore," put in Luke Tweezy. "What of it? Perfectly legitimate
business proposition. Legal, and all that."

"Not quite," denied Racey. "Not the way you went about it. Nawsir.
Well, gents," he resumed, "what I heard in that corral showed plain
enough there was something up. Dale wouldn't sell, and they were bound
to get his land away from him. So they figured to