"I was studyin' erbout ther riders. I reckon they've done tuck thought
thet you an' Hump hev been seekin' evi_dence_ erginst 'em."

The man laughed.

"Don't disquiet yoreself erbout them fellers, honey. We _hev_ been
seekin' evi_dence_--an' gittin' hit, too, in some measure. Ef ther
riders air strong enough ter best us we hain't fit ter succeed."

The smile gave slowly way to a sterner and more militant expression, the
look which his wife had come to know of late. It had brought a gravity
to his eyes and a new dimension to his character, for it had not been
there before he had dedicated himself to a cause and taken up the
leadership which he had at first sought to refuse. Dorothy knew that he
was thinking of the fight which lay ahead, before the scattered enmities
of that community were resolved and the disrupted life welded and
cemented into a solidarity of law.

CHAPTER XXX

Sim Squires was finding himself in a most intricate and perplexing maze
of circumstance; the situation of the man who wears another man's collar
and whose vassalage galls almost beyond endurance.

It was dawning on Squires that he was involved in a web of such
criss-cross meshes that before long he might find no way out. He had
been induced to waylay Parish Thornton at the demand of one whom he
dared not incense on pain of exposures that would send him to the
penitentiary.

His intended victim had not only failed to die but had grown to an
influence in the neighbourhood that made him a most dangerous enemy; and
to become, in fact, such an enemy to Sim he needed only to learn the
truth as to who had fired that shot.

Squires had come as Rowlett's spy into that house, hating Thornton with
a sincerity bred of fear, but now he had grown to hate Rowlett the more
bitterly of the two. Indeed, save for that sword of Damocles which hung
over him in the memory of his murderous employment and its possible
consequences, he would have liked Parish, and Dorothy's kindness had
awakened in the jackal's heart a bewildering sense of gratitude such as
he had never known before.

So while compulsion still bound him to Bas Rowlett, his own sympathies
were beginning to lean toward the fortunes of that household from which
he drew his legitimate wage.

But complications stood irrevocably between Sim and his inclinations.
His feeling against Bas Rowlett was becoming an obsession of venom fed
by the overweening arrogance of the man, but Bas still hel