He nodded in anticipatory admiration.

"Old Minter had a name. Ain't I had my run-in with him? He was smooth with a cannon. And fast as a snake's tongue. But they say you beat him fair and square. Well, well, I call that a snappy start in the world!"

Terry was silent, but his companion refused to be chilled.

"That's Black Jack over again," he said. "No wind about what he'd done. No jabber about what he was going to do. But when you wanted something done, go to Black Jack. Bam! There it was done clean for you and no talk afterward. Oh, he was a bird, was your old man. And you take after him, right enough!"

A voice rose in Terry. He wanted to argue. He wanted to explain. It was not that he felt any consuming shame because he was the son of Black Jack Hollis. But there was a sort of foster parenthood to which he owed a clean-minded allegiance—the fiction of the Colby blood. He had worshipped that thought for twenty years. He could not discard it in an instant.

Denver was breezing on in his quick, husky voice, so carefully toned that it barely served to reach Terry.

"I been waiting for a pal like you, kid. And here's where we hit it off. You don't know much about the game, I guess? Neither did Black Jack. As a peterman he was a loud ha-ha; as a damper-getter he was just an amateur; as a heel or a houseman, well, them things were just outside him. When it come to the gorilla stuff, he was there a million, though. And when there was a call for fast, quick, soft work, Black Jack was the man. Kid, I can see that you're cut right on his pattern. And here's where you come in with me. Right off the bat there's going to be velvet. Later on I'll educate you. In three months you'll be worth your salt. Are you on?"

He hardly waited for Terry to reply. He rambled on.

"I got a plant that can't fail to blossom into the long green, kid. The store safe. You know what's in it? I'll tell you. Ten thousand cold. Ten thousand bucks, boy. Well, well, and how did it get there? Because a lot of the boobs around here have put their spare cash in the safe for safekeeping!"

He tilted his chin and indulged in another of his yawning, silent bursts of laughter.

"And you never seen a peter like it. Tin, kid, tin. I could turn it inside out with a can opener. But I ain't long on a kit just now. I'm on the hog for fair, as a matter of fact. Well, I don't need a kit. I got some sawdust and I can make the soup as pretty as you ever seen. We'll blow the safe, kid, and then we'll float. Are you on?"

He paused, grinning with expectation, his face gradually becoming blank as he saw no response in Terry.

"As nearly as I can make out—because most of the slang is new to me," said Terry, "you want to dynamite the store safe and—"

"Who said sawdust? Soup, kid, soup! I want to blow the door off the peter, not the roof off the house. Say, who d'you think I am, a boob?"

"I understand, then. Nitroglycerin? Denver, I'm not with you. It's mighty good of you to ask me to join in—but that isn't my line of work."

The yegg raised an expostulatory hand, but Terry went on: "I'm going to keep straight, Denver."

It seemed as though this simple tiding took the breath from Denver.

"Ah!" he nodded at length. "You playing up a new line. No strong-arm stuff except when you got to use it. Going to try scratching, kid? Is that it, or some other kind of slick stuff?"

"I mean what I say, Denver. I'm going straight."

The yegg shook his head, bewildered. "Say," he burst out suddenly, "ain't you Black Jack's kid?"

"I'm his son," said Terry.

"All right. You'll come to it. It's in the blood, Black Jack. You can't get away from it."

Terry tugged his shirt open at the throat; he was stifling. "Perhaps," he said.

"It's the easy way," went on Denver. "Well, maybe you ain't ripe yet, but when you are, tip me off. Gimme a ring and I'll be with you."

"One more thing. You're broke, Denver. And I suppose you need what's in that safe. But if you take it, the widow will be ruined. She runs the hotel and the store, too, you know."

"Why, you poor boob," groaned Denver, "don't you know she's the old dame that's trying to get you mobbed?"

"I suppose so. But she was pretty fond of the sheriff, you know. I don't blame her for carrying a grudge. Now, about the money, Denver; I happen to have a little with me. Take what you want."

Denver took the proffered money without a word, counted it with a deftly stabbing forefinger, and shoved the wad into his hip pocket.

"All right," he said, "this'll sort of sweeten the pot. You don't need it?"

"I'll get along without it. And you won't break the safe?"

"Hell!" grunted Denver. "Does it hang on that?"

Terry leaned forward in his chair.

"Denver, don't break that safe!"

"You kind of say that as if you was boss, maybe," sneered Denver.

"I am," said Terry, "as far as this goes."

"How'll you stop me, kid? Sit up all night and nurse the safe?"

"No. But I'll follow you, Denver. And I'll get you. You understand? I'll stay on your trail till I have you."

Again there was a long moment of silence, then, "Black Jack!" muttered Denver. "You're like his ghost! I think you'd get me, right enough! Well, I'll call it off. This fifty will help me along a ways."

At the door he whirled sharply on Terence Hollis. "How much have you got left?" he asked.

"Enough," said Terry.

"Then lemme have another fifty, will you?"

"I'm sorry. I can't quite manage it."

"Make it twenty-five, then."

"Can't do that either, Denver. I'm very sorry."

"Hell, man! Are you a short sport? I got a long jump before me. Ain't you got any credit around this town?"

"I—not very much, I'm afraid."

"You're kidding me," scowled Denver. "That wasn't Black Jack's way. From his shoes to his skin everything he had belonged to his partners. His ghost'll haunt you if you're turning me down, kid. Why, ain't you the heir of a rich rancher over the hills? Ain't that what I been told?"

"I was," said Terry, "until today."

"Ah! You got turned out for beaning Minter?"

Terry remained silent.

"Without a cent?"

Suddenly the pudgy arm of Denver shot out and his finger pointed into Terry's face.

"You damn fool! This fifty is the last cent you got in the world!"

"Not at all," said Terry calmly.

"You lie!" Denver struck his knuckles across his forehead. "And I was going to trim you. Black Jack, I didn't know you was as white as this. Fifty? Pal, take it back!"

He forced the money into Terry's pocket.

"And take some more. Here; lemme stake you. I been pulling a sob story, but I'm in the clover, Black Jack. Gimme your last cent, will you? Kid, here's a hundred, two hundred—say what you want."

"Not a cent—nothing," said Terry, but he was deeply moved.

Denver thoughtfully restored the money to his wallet.

"You're white," he said gently. "And you're straight as they come. Keep it up if you can. I know damned well that you can't. I've seen 'em try before. But they always slip. Keep it up, Black Jack, but if you ever change your mind, lemme know. I'll be handy. Here's luck!"

And he was gone as he had entered, with a whish of the swiftly moved door in the air, and no click of the lock.



CHAPTER 19

The door had hardly closed on him when Terence wanted to run after him and call him back. There was a thrill still running in his blood since the time the yegg had leaned so close and said: "That wasn't Black Jack's way!"

He wanted to know more about Black Jack, and he wanted to hear the story from the lips of this man. A strange warmth had come over him. It had seemed for a moment that there was a third impalpable presence in the room—his father listening. And the thrill of it remained, a ghostly and yet a real thing.

But he checked his impulse. Let Denver go, and the thought of his father with him. For the influence of Black Jack, he felt, was quicksand pulling him down. The very fact that he was his father's son had made him shoot down one man. Again the shadow of Black Jack had fallen across his path today and tempted him to crime. How real the temptation had been, Terry did not know until he was alone. Half of ten thousand dollars would support him for many a month. One thing was certain. He must let his father remain simply a name.

Going to the window in his stocking feet, he listened again. There were more voices murmuring on the veranda of the hotel now, but within a few moments forms began to drift away down the street, and finally there was silence. Evidently the widow had not secured backing as strong as she could have desired. And Terry went to bed and to sleep.

He wakened with the first touch of dawn along the wall beside his bed and tumbled out to dress. It was early, even for a mountain town. The rattling at the kitchen stove commenced while he was on the way downstairs. And he had to waste time with a visit to El Sangre in the stable before his breakfast was ready.

Craterville was in the hollow behind him when the sun rose, and El Sangre was taking up the miles with the tireless rhythm of his pace. He had intended searching for work of some sort near Craterville, but now he realized that it could not be. He must go farther. He must go where his name was not known.

For two days he held on through the broken country, climbing more than he dropped. Twice he came above the ragged timber line, with its wind-shaped army of stunted trees, and over the tiny flowers of the summit lands. At the end of the second day he came out on the edge of a precipitous descent to a prosperous grazing country below. There would be his goal.

A big mountain sheep rounded a corner with a little flock behind him. Terry dropped the leader with a snapshot and watched the flock scamper down what was almost the sheer face of a cliff—a beautiful bit of acrobatics. They found foothold on ridges a couple of inches deep, hardly visible to the eye from above. Plunging down a straight drop without a sign of a ledge for fifty feet below them, they broke the force of the fall and slowed themselves constantly by striking their hoofs from side to side against the face of the cliff. And so they landed, with bunched feet, on the first broad terrace below and again bounced over the ledge and so out of sight.

He dined on wild mutton that evening. In the morning he hunted along the edge of the cliffs until he came to a difficult route down to the valley. An ordinary horse would never have made it, but El Sangre was in his glory. If he had not the agility of the mountain sheep, he was well-nigh as level-headed in the face of tremendous heights. He knew how to pitch ten feet down to a terrace and strike on his bunched hoofs so that the force of the fall would not break his legs or unseat his rider. Again he understood how to drive in the toes of his hoofs and go up safely through loose gravel where most horses, even mustangs, would have skidded to the bottom of the slope. And he was wise in trails. Twice he rejected the courses which Terry picked, and the rider very wisely let him have his way. The result was that they took a more winding, but a far safer course, and arrived before midmorning in the bottomlands.

The first ranch house he applied to accepted him. And there he took up his work.

It was the ordinary outfit—the sun- and wind-racked shack for a house, the stumbling outlying barns and sheds, and the maze of corral fences. They asked Terry no questions, accepted his first name without an addition, and let him go his way.

He was happy enough. He had not the leisure for thought or for remembering better times. If he had leisure here and there, he used it industriously in teaching El Sangre the "cow" business. The stallion learned swiftly. He began to take a joy in sitting down on a rope.

At the end of a week Terry won a bet when a team of draught horses hitched onto his line could not pull El Sangre over his mark, and broke the rope instead. There was much work, too, in teaching him to turn in the cow-pony fashion, dropping his head almost to the ground and bunching his feet altogether. For nothing of its size that lives is so deft in dodging as the cow-pony. That part of El Sangre's education was not completed, however, for only the actual work of a round-up could give him the faultless surety of a good cow-pony. And, indeed, the ranchman declared him useless for real roundup work.

"A no-good, high-headed fool," he termed El Sangre, having sprained his bank account with an attempt to buy the stallion from Terry the day before.

At the end of a fortnight the first stranger passed, and ill-luck made it a man from Craterville. He knew Terry at a glance, and the next morning the rancher called Terry aside.

The work of that season, he declared, was going to be lighter than he had expected. Much as he regretted it, he would have to let his new hand go. Terry taxed him at once to get at the truth.

"You've found out my name. That's why you're turning me off. Is that the straight of it?"

The sudden pallor of the other was a confession.

"What's names to me?" he declared. "Nothing, partner. I take a man the way I find him. And I've found you all right. The reason I got to let you go is what I said."

But Terry grinned mirthlessly.

"You know I'm the son of Black Jack Hollis," he insisted. "You think that if you keep me you'll wake up some morning to find your son's throat cut and your cattle gone. Am I right?"

"Listen to me," the rancher said uncertainly. "I know how you feel about losing a job so suddenly when you figured it for a whole season. Suppose I give you a whole month's pay and—"

"Damn your money!" said Terry savagely. "I don't deny that Black Jack was my father. I'm proud of it. But listen to me, my friend. I'm living straight. I'm working hard. I don't object to losing this job. It's the attitude behind it that I object to. You'll not only send me away, but you'll spread the news around—Black Jack's son is here! Am I a plague because of that name?"

"Mr. Hollis," insisted the rancher in a trembling voice, "I don't mean to get you all excited. Far as your name goes, I'll keep your secret. I give you my word on it. Trust me, I'll do what's right by you."

He was in a panic. His glance wavered from Terry's eyes to the revolver at his side.

"Do you think so?" said Terry. "Here's one thing that you may not have thought of. If you and the rest like you refuse to give me honest work, there's only one thing left for me—and that's dishonest work. You turn me off because I'm the son of Black Jack; and that's the very thing that will make me the son of Black Jack in more than name. Did you ever stop to realize that?"

"Mr. Hollis," quavered the rancher, "I guess you're right. If you want to stay on here, stay and welcome, I'm sure."

And his eye hunted for help past the shoulder of Terry and toward the shed, where his eldest son was whistling. Terry turned away in mute disgust. By the time he came out of the bunkhouse with his blanket roll, there was neither father nor son in sight. The door of the shack was closed, and through the window he caught a glimpse of a rifle. Ten minutes later El Sangre was stepping away across the range at a pace that no mount in the cattle country could follow for ten miles.



CHAPTER 20

There was an astonishing deal of life in the town, however. A large company had reopened some old diggings across the range to the north of Calkins, and some small fragments of business drifted the way of the little cattle town. Terry found a long line of a dozen horses waiting to be shod before the blacksmith shop. One great wagon was lumbering out at the farther end of the street, with the shrill yells of the teamster calling back as he picked up his horses one by one with his voice. Another freight-wagon stood at one side, blocking half the street. And a stir of busy life was everywhere in the town. The hotel and store combined was flooded with sound, and the gambling hall across the street was alive even at midday.

It was noon, and Terry found that the dining room was packed to the last chair. The sweating waiter improvised a table for him in the corner of the hall and kept him waiting twenty minutes before he was served with ham and eggs. He had barely worked his fork into the ham when a familiar voice hailed him.

"Got room for another at that table?"

He looked up into the grinning face of Denver. For some reason it was a shock to Terry. Of course, the second meeting was entirely coincidental, but a still small voice kept whispering to him that there was fate in it. He was so surprised that he could only nod. Denver at once appropriated a chair and seated himself in his usual noiseless way.

When he rearranged the silver which the waiter placed before him, there was not the faintest click of the metal. And Terry noted, too, a certain nice justness in every one of Denver's motions. He was never fiddling about with his hands; when they stirred, it was to do something, and when the thing was done, the hands became motionless again.

His eyes did not rove; they remained fixed for appreciable periods wherever they fell, as though Denver were finding something worth remembering in the wall, or in a spot on the table. When his glance touched on a face, it hung there in the same manner. After a moment one would forget all the rest of his face, brutal, muscular, shapeless, and see only the keen eyes.

Terry found it difficult to face the man. There was need to be excited about something, to talk with passion, in order to hold one's own in the presence of Denver, even when the chunky man was silent. He was not silent now; he seemed in a highly cheerful, amiable mood.

"Here's luck," he said. "I didn't know this God-forsaken country could raise as much luck as this!"

"Luck?" echoed Terry.

"Why not? D'you think I been trailing you?"

He chuckled in his noiseless way. It gave Terry a feeling of expectation. He kept waiting for the sound to come into that laughter, but it never did. Suddenly he was frank, because it seemed utterly futile to attempt to mask one's real thoughts from this fellow.

"I don't know," he said, "that it would surprise me if you had been tailing me. I imagine you're apt to do queer things, Denver."

Denver hissed, very softly and with such a cutting whistle to his breath that Terry's lips remained open over his last word.

"Forget that name!" Denver said in a half-articulate tone of voice.

He froze in his place, staring straight before him; but Terry gathered an impression of the most intense watchfulness—as though, while he stared straight before him, he had sent other and mysterious senses exploring for him. He seemed suddenly satisfied that all was well, and as he relaxed, Terry became aware of a faint gleam of perspiration on the brow of his companion.

"Why the devil did you tell me the name if you didn't want me to use it?" he asked.

"I thought you'd have some savvy; I thought you'd have some of your dad's horse sense," said Denver.

"No offense," answered Terry, with the utmost good nature.

"Call me Shorty if you want," said Denver. In the meantime he was regarding Terry more and more closely.

"Your old man would of made a fight out of it if I'd said as much to him as I've done to you," he remarked at length.

"Really?" murmured Terry.

And the portrait of his father swept back on him—the lean, imperious, handsome face, the boldness of the eyes. Surely a man all fire and powder, ready to explode. He probed his own nature. He had never been particularly quick of temper—until lately. But he began to wonder if his equable disposition might not rise from the fact that his life in Bear Valley had been so sheltered. He had been crossed rarely. In the outer world it was different. That very morning he had been tempted wickedly to take the tall rancher by the throat and grind his face into the sand.

"But maybe you're different," went on Denver. "Your old man used to flare up and be over it in a minute. Maybe you remember things and pack a grudge with you."

"Perhaps," said Terry, grown strangely meek. "I hardly know."

Indeed, he thought, how little he really knew of himself. Suddenly he said: "So you simply happened over this way, Shorty?"

"Sure. Why not? I got a right to trail around where I want. Besides, what would there be in it for me—following you?"

"I don't know," said Terry gravely. "But I expect to find out sooner or later. What else are you up to over here?"

"I have a little job in mind at the mine," said Denver. "Something that may give the sheriff a bit of trouble." He grinned.

"Isn't it a little—unprofessional," said Terry dryly, "for you to tell me these things?"

"Sure it is, bo—sure it is! Worst in the world. But I can always tell a gent that can keep his mouth shut. By the way, how many jobs you been fired from already?"

Terry started. "How do you know that?"

"I just guess at things."

"I started working for an infernal idiot," sighed Terry. "When he learned my name, he seemed to be afraid I'd start shooting up his place one of these days."

"Well, he was a wise gent. You ain't cut out for working, son. Not a bit. It'd be a shame to let you go to waste simply raising calluses on your hands."

"You talk well," sighed Terry, "but you can't convince me."

"Convince you? Hell, I ain't trying to convince your father's son. You're like Black Jack. You got to find out yourself. We was with a Mick, once. Red-headed devil, he was. I says to Black Jack: 'Don't crack no jokes about the Irish around this guy!'

"'Why not?' says your dad.

"'Because there'd be an explosion,' says I.

"'H'm,' says Black Jack, and lifts his eyebrows in a way he had of doing.

"And the first thing he does is to try a joke on the Irish right in front of the Mick. Well, there was an explosion, well enough."

"What happened?" asked Terry, carried away with curiosity.

"What generally happened, kid, when somebody acted up in front of your dad?" From the air he secured an imaginary morsel between stubby thumb and forefinger and then blew the imaginary particle into empty space.

"He killed him?" asked Terry hoarsely.

"No," said Denver, "he didn't do that. He just broke his heart for him. Kicked the gat out of the hand of the poor stiff and wrestled with him. Black Jack was a wildcat when it come to fighting with his hands. When he got through with the Irishman, there wasn't a sound place on the fool. Black Jack climbed back on his horse and threw the gun back at the guy on the ground and rode off. Next we heard, the guy was working for a Chinaman that run a restaurant. Black Jack had taken all the fight out of him."

That scene out of the past drifted vividly back before Terry's eyes. He saw the sneer on the lips of Black Jack; saw the Irishman go for his gun; saw the clash, with his father leaping in with tigerish speed; felt the shock of the two strong bodies, and saw the other turn to pulp under the grip of Black Jack.

By the time he had finished visualizing the scene, his jaw was set hard. It had been easy, very easy, to throw himself into the fierceness of his dead father's mood. During this moment of brooding he had been looking down, and he did not notice the glance of Denver fasten upon him with an almost hypnotic fervor, as though he were striving to reach to the very soul of the younger man and read what was written there. When Terry looked up, the face of his companion was as calm as ever.

"And you're like the old boy," declared Denver. "You got to find out for yourself. It'll be that way with this work idea of yours. You've lost one job. You'll lose the next one. But—I ain't advising you no more!"



CHAPTER 21

Terry left the hotel more gloomy than he had been even when he departed from the ranch that morning. The certainty of Denver that he would find it impossible to stay by his program of honest work had made a strong impression upon his imaginative mind, as though the little safecracker really had the power to look into the future and into the minds of men. Where he should look for work next, he had no idea. And he balanced between a desire to stay near the town and work out his destiny there, or else drift far away. Distance, however, seemed to have no barrier against rumor. After two days of hard riding, he had placed a broad gap between himself and the Cornish ranch, yet in a short time rumor had overtaken him, casually, inevitably, and the force of his name was strong enough to take away his job.

Standing in the middle of the street he looked darkly over the squat roofs of the town to the ragged mountains that marched away against the horizon—a bleak outlook. Which way should he ride?

A loud outburst of curses roared behind him, a whip snapped above him, he stepped aside and barely from under the feet of the leaders as a long team wound by with the freight wagon creaking and swaying and rumbling behind it. The driver leaned from his seat in passing and volleyed a few crackling remarks in the very ear of Terry. It was strange that he did not resent it. Ordinarily he would have wanted to, climb onto that seat and roll the driver down in the dust, but today he lacked ambition. Pain numbed him, a peculiar mental pain. And, with the world free before him to roam in, he felt imprisoned.

He turned. Someone was laughing at him from the veranda of the hotel and pointing him out to another, who laughed raucously in turn. Terry knew what was in their minds. A man who allowed himself to be cursed by a passing teamster was not worthy of the gun strapped at his thigh. He watched their faces as through a cloud, turned again, saw the door of the gambling hall open to allow someone to come out, and was invited by the cool, dim interior. He crossed the street and passed through the door.

He was glad, instantly. Inside there was a blanket of silence; beyond the window the sun was a white rain of heat, blinding and appalling. But inside his shoes took hold on a floor moist from a recent scrubbing and soft with the wear of rough boots; and all was dim, quiet, hushed.

There was not a great deal of business in the place, naturally, at this hour of the day. And the room seemed so large, the tables were so numerous, that Terry wondered how so small a town could support it. Then he remembered the mine and everything was explained. People who dug gold like dirt spent it in the same spirit. Half a dozen men were here and there, playing in what seemed a listless manner, save when you looked close.

Terry slumped into a big chair in the darkest corner and relaxed until the coolness had worked through his skin and into his blood. Presently he looked about him to find something to do, and his eye dropped naturally on the first thing that made a noise—roulette. For a moment he watched the spinning disk. The man behind the table on his high stool was whirling the thing for his own amusement, it seemed. Terry walked over and looked on.

He hardly knew the game. But he was fascinated by the motions of the ball; one was never able to tell where it would stop, on one of the thirty-six numbers, on the red or on the black, on the odd or the even. He visualized a frantic, silent crowd around the wheel listening to the click of the ball.

And now he noted that the wheel had stopped the last four times on the odd. He jerked a five-dollar gold piece out of his pocket and placed it on the even. The wheel spun, clicked to a stop, and the rake of the croupier slicked his five dollars away across the smooth-worn top of the table.

How very simple! But certainly the wheel must stop on the even this time, having struck the odd five times in a row. He placed ten dollars on the even.

He did not feel that it was gambling. He had never gambled in his life, for Elizabeth Cornish had raised him to look on gambling not as a sin, but as a crowning folly. However, this was surely not gambling. There was no temptation. Not a word had been spoken to him since he entered the place. There was no excitement, no music, none of the drink and song of which he had heard so much in robbing men of their cooler senses. It was only his little system that tempted him on.

He did not know that all gambling really begins with the creation of a system that will beat the game. And when a man follows a system, he is started on the most cold-blooded gambling in the world.

Again the disk stopped, and the ball clicked softly and the ten dollars slid away behind the rake of the man on the stool. This would never do! Fifteen dollars gone out of a total capital of fifty! He doubled with some trepidation again. Thirty dollars wagered. The wheel spun—the money disappeared under the rake.

Terry felt like setting his teeth. Instead, he smiled. He drew out his last five dollars and wagered it with a coldness that seemed to make sure of loss, on a single number. The wheel spun, clicked; he did not even watch, and was turning away when a sound of a little musical shower of gold attracted him. Gold was being piled before him. Five times thirty- six made one hundred and eighty dollars he had won! He came back to the table, scooped up his winnings carelessly and bent a kinder eye upon the wheel. He felt that there was a sort of friendly entente between them.

It was time to go now, however. He sauntered to the door with a guilty chill in the small of his back, half expecting reproaches to be shouted after him for leaving the game when he was so far ahead of it. But apparently the machine which won without remorse lost without complaint.

At the door he made half a pace into the white heat of the sunlight. Then he paused, a cool edging of shadow falling across one shoulder while the heat burned through the shirt of the other. Why go on?

Across the street the man on the veranda of the hotel began laughing again and pointing him out. Terry himself looked the fellow over in an odd fashion, not with anger or with irritation, but with a sort of cold calculation. The fellow was trim enough in the legs. But his shoulders were fat from lack of work, and the bulge of flesh around the armpits would probably make him slow in drawing a gun.

He shrugged his own lithe shoulders in contempt and turned. The man on the stool behind the roulette wheel was yawning until his jaw muscles stood out in hard, pointed ridges, and his cheeks fell in ridiculously. Terry went back. He was not eager to win; but the gleam of colors on the wheel fascinated him. He placed five dollars, saw the wheel win, took in his winnings without emotion.

While he scooped the two coins up, he did not see the croupier turn his head and shoot a single glance to a fat, squat man in the corner of the room, a glance to which the fat man responded with the slightest of nods and smiles. He was the owner. And he was not particularly happy at the thought of some hundred and fifty dollars being taken out of his treasury by some chance stranger.

Terry did not see the glance, and before long he was incapable of seeing anything saving the flash of the disk, the blur of the alternate colors as they spun together. He paid no heed to the path of the sunlight as it stretched along the floor under the window and told of a westering sun. The first Terry knew of it he was standing in a warm pool of gold, but he gave the sun at his feet no more than a casual glance. It was metallic gold that he was fascinated by and the whims and fancies of that singular wheel. Twice that afternoon his fortune had mounted above three thousand dollars—once it mounted to an even six thousand. He had stopped to count his winnings at this point, and on the verge of leaving decided to make it an even ten thousand before he went away. And five minutes later he was gambling with five hundred in his wallet.

When the sunlight grew yellow, other men began to enter the room. Terry was still at his post. He did not see them. There was no human face in the world for him except the colorless face of the croupier, and the long, pale eyelashes that lifted now and then over greenish-orange eyes. And Terry did not heed when he was shouldered by the growing crowd around the wheel.

He only knew that other bets were being placed and that it was a nuisance, for the croupier took much longer in paying debts and collecting winnings, so that the wheel spun less often.

Meantime he was by no means unnoticed. A little whisper had gone the rounds that a real plunger was in town. And when men came into the hall, their attention was directed automatically by the turn of other eyes toward six feet of muscular manhood, heavy-shouldered and erect, with a flare of a red silk bandanna around his throat and a heavy sombrero worn tilted a little to one side and back on his head.

"He's playing a system," said someone. "Been standing there all afternoon and making poor Pedro—the thief!—sweat and shake in his boots."

In fact, the owner of the place had lost his complacence and his smile together. He approached near to the wheel and watched its spin with a face turned sallow and flat of cheek from anxiety. For with the setting of the sun it seemed that luck flooded upon Terry Hollis. He began to bet in chunks of five hundred, alternating between the red and the odd, and winning with startling regularity. His winnings were now shoved into an awkward canvas bag. Twenty thousand dollars! That had grown from the fifty.

No wonder the crowd had two looks for Terry. His face had lost its color and grown marvellously expressionless.

"The real gambler's look," they said.

His mouth was pinched at the corners, and otherwise his expression never varied.

Once he turned. A broad-faced man, laughing and obviously too self- contented to see what he was doing, trod heavily on the toes of Terry, stepping past the latter to get his winnings. He was caught by the shoulder and whirled around. The crowd saw the tall man draw his right foot back, balance, lift a trifle on his toes, and then a balled fist shot up, caught the broad-faced man under the chin and dumped him in a crumpled heap half a dozen feet away. They picked him up and took him away, a stunned wreck. Terry had turned back to his game, and in ten seconds had forgotten what he had done.

But the crowd remembered, and particularly he who had twice laughed at Terry from the veranda of the hotel.

The heap in the canvas sack diminished, shrank—he dumped the remainder of the contents into his pocket. He had been betting in solid lumps of a thousand for the past twenty minutes, and the crowd watched in amazement. This was drunken gambling, but the fellow was obviously sober. Then a hand touched the shoulder of Terry.

"Just a minute, partner."

He looked into the face of a big man, as tall as he and far heavier of build: a magnificent big head, heavily marked features, a short-cropped black beard that gave him dignity. A middle-aged man, about forty-five, and still in the prime of life.

"Lemme pass a few words with you."

Terry drew back to the side.



CHAPTER 22

"My Name's Pollard," said the older man. "Joe Pollard."

"Glad to know you, sir. My name—is Terry." The other admitted this reticence with a faint smile.

"I got a name around here for keeping my mouth shut and not butting in on another gent's game. But I always noticed that when a gent is in a losing run, half the time he don't know it. Maybe that might be the way with you. I been watching and seen your winnings shrink considerable lately."

Terry weighed his money. "Yes, it's shrunk a good deal."

"Stand out of the game till later on. Come over and have a bite to eat with me."

He went willingly, suddenly aware of a raging appetite and a dinner long postponed. The man of the black beard was extremely friendly.

"One of the prettiest runs I ever see, that one you made," he confided when they were at the table in the hotel. "You got a system, I figure."

"A new one," said Terry. "I've never played before."

The other blinked.

"Beginner's luck, I suppose," said Terry frankly. "I started with fifty, and now I suppose I have about eight hundred."

"Not bad, not bad," said the other. "Too bad you didn't stop half an hour before. Just passing through these parts?"

"I'm looking for a job," said Terry. "Can you tell me where to start hunting? Cows are my game."

The other paused a moment and surveyed his companion. There seemed just a shade of doubt in his eyes. They were remarkably large and yellowish gray, those eyes of Joe Pollard, and now and again when he grew thoughtful they became like clouded agate. They had that color now as he gazed at Terry. Eventually his glance cleared.

"I got a little work of my own," he declared. "My range is all clogged up with varmints. Any hand with a gun and traps?"

"Pretty fair hand," said Terry modestly.

And he was employed on the spot.

He felt one reassuring thing about his employer—that no echo out of his past or the past of his father would make the man discharge him. Indeed, taking him all in all, there was under the kindliness of Joe Pollard an indescribable basic firmness. His eyes, for example, in their habit of looking straight at one, reminded him of the eyes of Denver. His voice was steady and deep and mellow, and one felt that it might be expanded to an enormous volume. Such a man would not fly off into snap judgments and become alarmed because an employee had a past or a strange name.

They paid a short visit to the gambling hall after dinner, and then got their horses. Pollard was struck dumb with admiration at the sight of the blood-bay.

"Maybe you been up the Bear Creek way?" he asked Terry.

And when the latter admitted that he knew something of the Blue Mountain country, the rancher exclaimed: "By the Lord, partner, I'd say that hoss is a ringer for El Sangre."

"Pretty close to a ringer," said Terry. "This is El Sangre himself."

They were jogging out of town. The rancher turned in the saddle and crossed his companion with one of his searching glances, but returned no reply. Presently, however, he sent his own capable Steeldust into a sharp gallop; El Sangre roused to a flowing pace and held the other even without the slightest difficulty. At this Pollard drew rein with an exclamation.

"El Sangre as sure as I live!" he declared. "Ain't nothing else in these parts that calls itself a hoss and slides over the ground the way El Sangre does. Partner, what sort of a price would you set on El Sangre, maybe?"

"His weight in gold," said Terry.

The rancher cursed softly, without seeming altogether pleased. And thereafter during the ride his glance continually drifted toward the brilliant bay—brilliant even in the pallor of the clear mountain starlight.

He explained this by saying after a time: "I been my whole life in these parts without running across a hoss that could pack me the way a man ought to be packed on a hoss. I weigh two hundred and thirty, son, and it busts the back of a horse in the mountains. Now, you ain't a flyweight yourself, and El Sangre takes you along like you was a feather."

Steeldust was already grunting at every sharp rise, and El Sangre had not even broken out in perspiration.

A mile or so out of the town they left the road and struck onto a mere semblance of a trail, broad enough, but practically as rough as nature chose to make it. This wound at sharp and ever-changing angles into the hills, and presently they were pressing through a dense growth of lodgepole pine.

It seemed strange to Terry that a prosperous rancher with an outfit of any size should have a road no more beaten than this one leading to his place. But he was thinking too busily of other things to pay much heed to such surmises and small events. He was brooding over the events of the afternoon. If his exploits in the gaming hall should ever come to the ear of Aunt Elizabeth, he was certain enough that he would be finally damned in her judgment. Too often he had heard her express an opinion of those who lived by "chance and their wits," as she phrased it. And the thought of it irked him.

He roused himself out of his musing. They had come out from the trees and were in sight of a solidly built house on the hill. There was one thing which struck his mind at once. No attempt had been made to find level for the foundation. The log structure had been built apparently at random on the slope. It conformed, at vast waste of labor, to the angle of the base and the irregularities of the soil. This, perhaps, made it seem smaller than it was. They caught the scent of wood smoke, and then saw a pale drift of the smoke itself.

A flurry of music escaped by the opening of a door and was shut out by the closing of it. It was a moment before Terry, startled, had analyzed the sound. Unquestionably it was a piano. But how in the world, and why in the world, had it been carted to the top of this mountain?

He glanced at his companion with a new respect and almost with a suspicion.

"Up to some damn doings again," growled the big man. "Never got no peace nor quiet up my way."

Another surprise was presently in store for Terry. Behind the house, which grew in proportions as they came closer, they reached a horse shed, and when they dismounted, a servant came out for the horses. Outside of the Cornish ranch he did not know of many who afforded such luxuries.

However, El Sangre could not be handled by another, and Terry put up his horse and found the rancher waiting for him when he came out. Inside the shed he had found ample bins of barley and oats and good grain hay. And in the stalls his practiced eye scanned the forms of a round dozen fine horses with points of blood and bone that startled him.

Coming to the open again, he probed the darkness as well as he could to gain some idea of the ranch which furnished and supported all these evidences of prosperity. But so far as he could make out, there was only a jumble of ragged hilltops behind the house, and before it the slope fell away steeply to the valley far below. He had not realized before that they had climbed so high or so far.

Joe Pollard was humming. Terry joined him on the way to the house with a deepened sense of awe; he was even beginning to feel that there was a touch or two of mystery in the make-up of the man.

Proof of the solidity with which the log house was built was furnished at once. Coming to the house, there was only a murmur of voices and of music. The moment they opened the door, a roar of singing voices and a jangle of piano music rushed into their ears.

Terry found himself in a very long room with a big table in the center and a piano at the farther end. The ceiling sloped down from the right to the left. At the left it descended toward the doors of the kitchen and storerooms; at the right it rose to the height of two full stories. One of these was occupied by a series of heavy posts on which hung saddles and bridles and riding equipment of all kinds, and the posts supported a balcony onto which opened several doors—of sleeping rooms, no doubt. As for the wall behind the posts, it, too, was pierced with several openings, but Terry could not guess at the contents of the rooms. But he was amazed by the size of the structure as it was revealed to him from within. The main room was like some baronial hall of the old days of war and plunder. A role, indeed, into which it was not difficult to fit the burly Pollard and the dignity of his beard.

Four men were around the piano, and a girl sat at the keys, splashing out syncopated music while the men roared the chorus of the song. But at the sound of the closing of the door all five turned toward the newcomers, the girl looking over her shoulder and keeping the soft burden of the song still running.



CHAPTER 23

So turned, Terry could not see her clearly. He caught a glimmer of red bronze hair, dark in shadow and brilliant in high lights, and a sheen of greenish eyes. Otherwise, he only noted the casual manner in which she acknowledged the introduction, unsmiling, indifferent, as Pollard said: "Here's my daughter Kate. This is Terry—a new hand."

It seemed to Terry that as he said this the rancher made a gesture as of warning, though this, no doubt, could be attributed to his wish to silently explain away the idiosyncrasy of Terry in using his first name only. He was presented in turn to the four men, and thought them the oddest collection he had ever laid eyes on.

Slim Dugan was tall, but not so tall as he looked, owing to his very small head and narrow shoulders. His hair was straw color, excessively silky, and thin as the hair of a year-old child. There were other points of interest in Slim Dugan; his feet, for instance, were small as the feet of a girl, accentuated by the long, narrow riding boots, and his hands seemed to be pulled out to a great and unnecessary length. They made up for it by their narrowness.

His exact opposite was Marty Cardiff, chunky, fat, it seemed, until one noted the roll and bulge of the muscles at the shoulders. His head was settled into his fat shoulders somewhat in the manner of Denver's, Terry thought.

Oregon Charlie looked the part of an Indian, with his broad nose and high cheekbones, flat face, slanted dark eyes; but his skin was a dead and peculiar white. He was a down-headed man, and one could rarely imagine him opening his lips to speak; he merely grunted as he shook hands with the stranger.

To finish the picture, there was a man as huge as Joe Pollard himself, and as powerful, to judge by appearances. His face was burned to a jovial red; his hair was red also, and there was red hair on the backs of his freckled hands.

All these men met Terry with cordial nods, but there was a carelessness about their demeanor which seemed strange to Terry. In his experience, the men of the mountains were a timid or a blustering lot before newcomers, uneasy, and anxious to establish their place. But these men acted as if meeting unknown men were a part of their common, daily experience. They were as much at their ease as social lions.

Pollard was explaining the presence of Terry.

"He's come up to clean out the varmints," he said to the others. "They been getting pretty thick on the range, you know."

"You came in just wrong," complained Kate, while the men turned four pairs of grave eyes upon Terry and seemed to be judging him. "I got Oregon singing at last, and he was doing fine. Got a real voice, Charlie has. Regular branded baritone, I'll tell a man."

"Strike up agin for us, Charlie," said Pollard good-naturedly. "You don't never make much more noise'n a grizzly."

But Charlie looked down at his hands and a faint spot of red appeared in his cheek. Obviously he was much embarrassed. And when he looked up, it was to fix a glance of cold suspicion upon Terry, as though warning him not to take this talk of social acquirements as an index to his real character.

"Get us some coffee, Kate," said Pollard. "Turned off cold coming up the hill."

She did not rise. She had turned around to her music again, and now she acknowledged the order by lifting her head and sending a shrill whistle through the room. Her father started violently.

"Damn it, Kate, don't do that!"

"The only thing that'll bring Johnny on the run," she responded carelessly.

And, indeed, the door on the left of the room flew open a moment later, and a wide-eyed Chinaman appeared with a long pigtail jerking about his head as he halted and looked about in alarm.

"Coffee for the boss and the new hand," said Kate, without turning her head, as soon as she heard the door open. "Pronto, Johnny."

Johnny snarled an indistinct something and withdrew muttering.

"You'll have Johnny quitting the job," complained Pollard, frowning. "You can't scare the poor devil out of his skin like that every time you want coffee. Besides, why didn't you get up and get it for us yourself?"

Still she did not turn; but, covering a yawn, replied: "Rather sit here and play."

Her father swelled a moment in rage, but he subsided again without audible protest. Only he sent a scowl at Terry as though daring him to take notice of this insolence. As for the other men, they had scattered to various parts of the room and remained there, idly, while the boss and the new hand drank the scalding coffee of Johnny. All this time Pollard remained deep in thought. His meditations exploded as he banged the empty cup back on the table.

"Kate, this stuff has got to stop. Understand?"

The soft jingling of the piano continued without pause.

"Stop that damned noise!"

The music paused. Terry felt the long striking muscles leap into hard ridges along his arms, but glancing at the other four, he found that they were taking the violence of Pollard quite as a matter of course. One was whittling, another rolled a cigarette, and all of them, if they took any visible notice of the argument, did so with the calmest of side glances.

"Turn around!" roared Pollard.

His daughter turned slowly and faced him. Not white-faced with fear, but to the unutterable astonishment of Terry she was quietly looking her father up and down. Pollard sprang to his feet and struck the table so that it quivered through all its massive length.

"Are you trying to shame me before a stranger?" thundered the big man. "Is that the scene?"

She flicked Terry Hollis with a glance. "I think he'll understand and make allowances."

It brought the heavy fist smashing on the table again. And an ugly feeling rose in Hollis that the big fellow might put hands on his daughter.

"And what d'you mean by that? What in hell d'you mean by that?"

In place of wincing, she in turn came to her feet gracefully. There had been such an easy dignity about her sitting at the piano that she had seemed tall to Terry. Now that she stood up, he was surprised to see that she was not a shade more than average height, beautifully and strongly made.

"You've gone about far enough with your little joke," said the girl, and her voice was low, but with an edge of vibrancy that went through Hollis. "And you're going to stop—pronto!"

There was a flash of teeth as she spoke, and a quiver through her body. Terry had never seen such passion, such unreasoning, wild passion, as that which had leaped on the girl. Though her face was not contorted, danger spoke from every line of it. He made himself tense, prepared for a similar outbreak from the father, but the latter relaxed as suddenly as his daughter had become furious.

"There you go," he complained, with a sort of heavy whine. "Always flying off the handle. Always turning into a wildcat when I try to reason with you!"

"Reason!" cried the girl. "Reason!"

Joe Pollard grew downcast under her scorn. And Terry, sensing that the crisis of the argument had passed, watched the other four men in the room. They had not paid the slightest attention to the debate during its later phases. And two of them—Slim and huge Phil Marvin—had begun to roll dice on a folded blanket, the little ivories winking in the light rapidly until they came to a rest at the farther end of the cloth. Possibly this family strife was a common thing in the Pollard household. At any rate, the father now passed off from accusation to abrupt apology. "You always get me riled at the end of the day, Kate. Damn it! Can't you never bear with a gent?"

The tigerish alertness passed from Kate Pollard. She was filled all at once with a winning gentleness and, crossing to her father, took his heavy hands in hers.

"I reckon I'm a bad one," she accused herself. "I try to get over tantrums—but—I can't help it! Something—just sort of grabs me by the throat when I get mad. I—I see red."

"Hush up, honey," said the big man tenderly, and he ran his thick fingers over her hair. "You ain't so bad. And all that's bad in you comes out of me. You forget and I'll forget."

He waved across the table.

"Terry'll be thinking we're a bunch of wild Indians the way we been actin'."

"Oh!"

Plainly she was recalled to the presence of the stranger for the first time in many minutes and, dropping her chin in her hand, she studied the new arrival.

He found it difficult to meet her glance. The Lord had endowed Terry Hollis with a remarkable share of good looks, and it was not the first time that he had been investigated by the eyes of a woman. But in all his life he had never been subjected to an examination as minute, as insolently frank as this one. He felt himself taken part and parcel, examined in detail as to forehead, chin, and eyes and heft of shoulders, and then weighed altogether. In self-defense he looked boldly back at her, making himself examine her in equal detail. Seeing her so close, he was aware of a marvellously delicate olive-tanned skin with delightful tints of rose just beneath the surface. He found himself saying inwardly: "It's easy to look at her. It's very easy. By the Lord, she's beautiful!"

As for the girl, it seemed that she was not quite sure in her judgment. For now she turned to her father with a faint frown of wonder. And again it seemed to Terry that Joe Pollard made an imperceptible sign, such as he had made to the four men when he introduced Terry.

But now he broke into breezy talk.

"Met Terry down in Pedro's—"

The girl seemed to have dismissed Terry from her mind already, for she broke in: "Crooked game he's running, isn't it?"

"I thought so till today. Then I seen Terry, here, trim Pedro for a flat twenty thousand!"

"Oh," nodded the girl. Again her gaze reverted leisurely to the stranger and with a not unflattering interest.

"And then I seen him lose most of it back again. Roulette."

She nodded, keeping her eyes on Terry, and the boy found himself desiring mightily to discover just what was going on behind the changing green of her eyes. He was shocked when he discovered. It came like the break of high dawn in the mountains of the Big Bend. Suddenly she had smiled openly, frankly. "Hard luck, partner!"

A little shivering sense of pleasure ran through him. He knew that he had been admitted by her—accepted.

Her father had thrown up his head.

"Someone come in the back way. Oregon, go find out!"

Dark-eyed Oregon Charlie slipped up and through the door. Everyone in the room waited, a little tense, with lifted heads. Slim was studying the last throw that Phil Marvin had made. Terry could not but wonder what significance that "back way" had. Presently Oregon reappeared.

"Pete's come."

"The hell!"

"Went upstairs."

"Wants to be alone," interrupted the girl. "He'll come down and talk when he feels like it. That's Pete's way."

"Watching us, maybe," growled Joe Pollard, with a shade of uneasiness still. "Damned funny gent, Pete is. Watches a man like a cat; watches a gopher hole all day, maybe. And maybe the gent he watches is a friend he's known for ten years. Well—let Pete go. They ain't no explaining him."

Through the last part of his talk, and through the heaviness of his voice, cut another tone, lighter, sharper, venomous: "Phil, you gummed them dice that last time!"

Joe Pollard froze in place; the eyes of the girl widened. Terry, looking across the room, saw Phil Marvin scoop up the dice and start to his feet.

"You lie, Slim!"

Instinctively Terry slipped his hand onto his gun. It was what Phil Marvin had done, as a matter of fact. He stood swelling and glowering, staring down at Slim Dugan. Slim had not risen. His thin, lithe body was coiled, and he reminded Terry in ugly fashion of a snake ready to strike. His hand was not near his gun. It was the calm courage and self- confidence of a man who is sure of himself and of his enemy. Terry had heard of it before, but never seen it. As for Phil, it was plain that he was ill at ease in spite of his bulk and the advantage of his position. He was ready to fight. But he was not at all pleased with the prospect.

Terry again glanced at the witnesses. Every one of them was alert, but there was none of that fear which comes in the faces of ordinary men when strife between men is at hand. And suddenly Terry knew that every one of the five men in the room was an old familiar of danger, every one of them a past master of gun fighting!



CHAPTER 24

The uneasy wait continued for a moment or more. The whisper of Joe Pollard to his daughter barely reached the ear of Terry.

"Cut in between 'em, girl. You can handle 'em. I can't!"

She responded instantly, before Terry recovered from his shock of surprise.

"Slim, keep away from your gun!"

She spoke as she whirled from her chair to her feet. It was strange to see her direct all her attention to Slim, when Phil Marvin seemed the one about to draw.

"I ain't even nearin' my gun," asserted Slim truthfully. "It's Phil that's got a strangle hold on his."

"You're waiting for him to draw," said the girl calmly enough. "I know you, Slim. Phil, don't be a fool. Drop your hand away from that gat!"

He hesitated; she stepped directly between him and his enemy of the moment and jerked the gun from its holster. Then she faced Slim. Obviously Phil was not displeased to have the matter taken out of his hands; obviously Slim was not so pleased. He looked coldly up to the girl.

"This is between him and me," he protested. "I don't need none of your help, Kate."

"Don't you? You're going to get it, though. Gimme that gun, Slim Dugan!"

"I want a square deal," he complained. "I figure Phil has been crooking the dice on me."

"Bah! Besides, I'll give you a square deal."

She held out her hand for the weapon.

"Got any doubts about me being square, Slim?"

"Kate, leave this to me!"

"Why, Slim, I wouldn't let you run loose now for a million. You got that ugly look in your eyes. I know you, partner!"

And to the unutterable astonishment of Terry, the man pulled his gun from its holster and passed it up to her, his eyes fighting hers, his hand moving slowly. She stepped back, weighing the heavy weapons in her hands. Then she faced Phil Marvin with glittering eyes.

"It ain't the first time you been accused of queer stunts with the dice. What's the straight of it, Phil? Been doing anything to these dice?"

"Me? Sure I ain't!"

Her glance lingered on him the least part of a second.

"H'm!" said the girl. "Maybe not."

Slim was on his feet, eager. "Take a look at 'em, Kate. Take a look at them dice!"

She held them up to the light—then dropped them into a pocket of her skirt. "I'll look at 'em in the morning, Slim."

"The stuff'll be dry by that time!"

"Dry or not, that's what I'm going to do. I won't trust lamplight."

Slim turned on his heel and flung himself sulkily down on the blanket, fighting her with sullen eyes. She turned on Phil.

"How much d'you win?"

"Nothin'. Just a couple of hundred."

"Just a couple of hundred! You call that nothing?"

Phil grunted. The other men leaned forward in their interest to watch the progress of the trial, all saving Joe Pollard, who sat with his elbows braced in sprawling fashion on the table, at ease, his eyes twinkling contentedly at the girl. Why she refused to examine the dice at once was plain to Terry. If they proved to have been gummed, it would mean a gun fight with the men at a battling temperature. In the morning when they had cooled down, it might be a different matter. Terry watched her in wonder. His idea of an efficient woman was based on Aunt Elizabeth, cold of eye and brain, practical in methods on the ranch, keen with figures. The efficiency of this slip of a girl was a different matter, a thing of passion, of quick insight, of lightning guesses. He could see the play of eager emotion in her face as she studied Phil Marvin. And how could she do justice? Terry was baffled.

"How long you two been playing?" "About twenty minutes."

"Not more'n five!" cut in Slim hotly.

"Shut up, Slim!" she commanded. "I'm running this here game; Phil, how many straight passes did you make?"

"Me? Oh, I dunno. Maybe—five."

"Five straight passes!" said the girl. "Five straight passes!"

"You heard me say it," growled big Phil Marvin.

All at once she laughed.

"Phil, give that two hundred back to Slim!"

It came like a bolt from the blue, this decision. Marvin hesitated, shook his head.

"Damned if I do. I don't back down. I won it square!"

"Listen to me," said the girl. Instead of threatening, as Terry expected, she had suddenly become conciliatory. She stepped close to him and dropped a slim hand on his burly shoulder. "Ain't Slim a pal of yours? You and him, ain't you stuck together through thick and thin? He thinks you didn't win that coin square. Is Slim's friendship worth two hundred to you, or ain't it? Besides, you ain't lying down to nobody. Why, you big squarehead, Phil, don't we all know that you'd fight a bull with your bare hands? Who'd call you yaller? We'd simply say you was square, Phil, and you know it."

There was a pause. Phil was biting his lip, scowling at Slim. Slim was sneering in return. It seemed that she had failed. Even if she forced Phil to return the money, he and Slim would hate each other as long as they lived. And Terry gained a keen impression that if the hatred continued, one of them would die very soon indeed. Her solution of the problem was a strange one. She faced them both.

"You two big sulky babies!" she exclaimed. "Slim, what did Phil do for you down in Tecomo? Phil, did Slim stand by you last April—you know the time? Why, boys, you're just being plain foolish. Get up, both of you, and take a walk outside where you'll get cooled down."

Slim rose. He and Phil walked slowly toward the door, at a little distance from each other, one eyeing the other shrewdly. At the door they hesitated. Finally, Phil lurched forward and went out first. Slim glided after.

"By heaven!" groaned Pollard as the door closed. "There goes two good men! Kate, what put this last fool idea into your head?"

She did not answer for a moment, but dropped into a chair as though suddenly exhausted.

"It'll work out," she said at length. "You wait for it!"

"Well," grumbled her father, "the mischief is working. Run along to bed, will you?"

She rose, wearily, and started across the room. But she turned before she passed out of their sight and leaned against one of the pillars.

"Dad, why you so anxious to get me out of the way?"

"What d'you mean by that? I got no reason. Run along and don't bother me!"

He turned his shoulder on her. As for the girl, she remained a moment, looking thoughtfully at the broad back of Pollard. Then her glance shifted and dwelt a moment on Terry—with pity, he wondered?

"Good night, boys!"

When the door closed on her, Joe Pollard turned his attention more fully on his new employee, and when Terry suggested that it was time for him to turn in, his suggestion was hospitably put to one side. Pollard began talking genially of the mountains, of the "varmints" he expected Terry to clean out, and while he talked, he took out a broad silver dollar and began flicking it in the air and catching it in the calloused palm of his hand.

"Call it," he interrupted himself to say to Terry.

"Heads," said Terry carelessly.

The coin spun up, flickered at the height of its rise, and rang loudly on the table.

"You win," said Pollard. "Well, you're a lucky gent, Terry, but I'll go you ten you can't call it again."

But again Terry called heads, and again the coin chimed, steadied, and showed the Grecian goddess. The rancher doubled his bet. He lost, doubled, lost again, doubled again, lost. A pile of money had appeared by magic before Terry.

"I came to work for money," laughed Terry, "not take it away."

"I always lose at this game," sighed Joe Pollard.

The door opened, and Phil Marvin and Slim Dugan came back, talking and laughing together.

"What d'you know about that?" Pollard exclaimed softly. "She guessed right. She always does! Oughta be a man, with a brain like she's got. Here we are again!"

He spun the coin; it winked, fell, a streak of light, and again Terry had won. He began to grow excited. On the next throw he lost. A moment later his little pile of winnings had disappeared. And now he had forgotten the face of Joe Pollard, forgotten the room, forgotten everything except the thick thumb that snapped the coin into the air. The cold, quiet passion of the gambler grew in him. He was losing steadily. Out of his wallet came in a steady stream the last of his winnings at Pedro's. And still he played. Suddenly the wallet squeezed flat between his fingers.

"Pollard," he said regretfully, "I'm broke."

The other waved away the idea.

"Break up a fine game like this because you're broke?" The cloudy agate eyes dwelt kindly on the face of Terry, and mysteriously as well. "That ain't nothing. Nothing between friends. You don't know the style of a man I am, Terry. Your word is as good as your money with me!"

"I've no security—"

"Don't talk security. Think I'm a moneylender? This is a game. Come on!"

Five minutes later Terry was three hundred behind. A mysterious providence seemed to send all the luck the way of the heavy, tanned thumb of Pollard.

"That's my limit," he announced abruptly, rising.

"No, no!" Pollard spread out his big hand on the table. "You got the red hoss, son. You can bet to a thousand. He's worth that—to me!"

"I won't bet a cent on him," said Terry firmly.

"Every damn cent I've won from you ag'in' the hoss, son. That's a lot of cash if you win. If you lose, you're just out that much hossflesh, and I'll give you a good enough cayuse to take El Sangre's place."

"A dozen wouldn't take his place," insisted Terry.

"That so?"

Pollard leaned back in his chair and put a hand behind his neck to support his head. It seemed to Terry that the big man made some odd motion with his hidden fingers. At any rate, the four men who lounged on the farther side of the room now rose and slowly drifted in different directions. Oregon Charlie wandered toward the door. Slim sauntered to the window behind the piano and stood idly looking out into the night. Phil Marvin began to examine a saddle hanging from a peg on one of the posts, and finally, chunky Marty Cardiff strolled to the kitchen door and appeared to study the hinges.

All these things were done casually, but Terry, his attention finally off the game, caught a meaning in them. Every exit was blocked for him. He was trapped at the will of Joe Pollard!



CHAPTER 25

Looking back, he could understand everything easily. The horse was the main objective of Pollard. He had won the money so as to tempt Terry to gamble with the value of the blood-bay. But by fair means or foul he intended to have El Sangre. And now, the moment his men were in place, a change came over Pollard. He straightened in the chair. A slight outthrust of his lower jaw made his face strangely brutal, conscienceless. And his cloudy agate eyes were unreadable.

"Look here, Terry," he argued calmly, but Terry could see that the voice was raised so that it would undubitably reach the ears of the farthest of the four men. "I don't mind letting a gambling debt ride when a gent ain't got anything more to put up for covering his money. But when a gent has got more, I figure he'd ought to cover with it."

Unreasoning anger swelled in the throat of Terry Hollis; the same blind passion which had surged in him before he started up at the Cornish table and revealed himself to the sheriff. And the similarity was what sobered him. It was the hunger to battle, to kill. And it seemed to him that Black Jack had stepped out of the old picture and now stood behind him, tempting him to strike.

Another covert signal from Pollard. Every one of the four turned toward him. The chances of Terry were diminished, nine out of ten, for each of those four, he shrewdly guessed, was a practiced gunman. Cold reason came to Terry's assistance.

"I told you when I was broke," he said gently. "I told you that I was through. You told me to go on."

"I figured you was kidding me," said Pollard harshly. "I knew you still had El Sangre back. Son, I'm a kind sort of a man, I am. I got a name for it."

In spite of himself a faint and cruel smile flickered at the corners of his mouth as he spoke. He became grave again.

"But they's some things I can't stand. They's some things that I hate worse'n I hate poison. I won't say what one of 'em is. I leave it to you. And I ask you to keep in the game. A thousand bucks ag'in' a boss. Ain't that more'n fair?"

He no longer took pains to disguise his voice. It was hard and heavy and rang into the ear of Terry. And the latter, feeling that his hour had come, looked deliberately around the room and took note of every guarded exit, the four men now openly on watch for any action on his part. Pollard himself sat erect, on the edge of his chair, and his right hand had disappeared beneath the table.

"Suppose I throw the coin this time?" he suggested.

"By God!" thundered Pollard, springing to his feet and throwing off the mask completely. "You damned skunk, are you accusin' me of crooking the throw of the coin?"

Terry waited for the least moment—waited in a dull wonder to find himself unafraid. But there was no fear in him. There was only a cold, methodical calculation of chances. He told himself, deliberately, that no matter how fast Pollard might be, he would prove the faster. He would kill Pollard. And he would undoubtedly kill one of the others. And they, beyond a shadow of a doubt, would kill him. He saw all this as in a picture.

"Pollard," he said, more gently than before, "you'll have to eat that talk!"

A flash of bewilderment crossed the face of Pollard—then rage—then that slight contraction of the features which in some men precedes a violent effort.

But the effort did not come. While Terry literally wavered on tiptoe, his nerves straining for the pull of his gun and the leap to one side as he sent his bullet home, a deep, unmusical voice cut in on them:

"Just hold yourself up a minute, will you, Joe?"

Terry looked up. On the balcony in front of the sleeping rooms of the second story, his legs spread apart, his hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, his shapeless black hat crushed on the back of his head, and a broad smile on his ugly face, stood his nemesis—Denver the yegg!

Pollard sprang back from the table and spoke with his face still turned to Terry.

"Pete!" he called. "Come in!"

But Denver, alias Shorty, alias Pete, merely laughed.

"Come in nothing, you fool! Joe, you're about half a second from hell, and so's a couple more of you. D'you know who the kid is? Eh? I'll tell you, boys. It's the kid that dropped old Minter. It's the kid that beat foxy Joe Minter to the draw. It's young Hollis. Why, you damned blind men, look at his face! It's the son of Black Jack. It's Black Jack himself come back to us!"

Joe Pollard had let his hand fall away from his gun. He gaped at Terry as though he were seeing a ghost. He came a long pace nearer and let his arms fall on the table, where they supported his weight.

"Black Jack," he kept whispering. "Black Jack! God above, are you Black Jack's son?"

And the bewildered Terry answered:

"I'm his son. Whatever you think, and be damned to you all! I'm his son and I'm proud of it. Now get your gun!"

But Joe Pollard became a great catapult that shot across the table and landed beside Terry. Two vast hands swallowed the hands of the younger man and crushed them to numbness.

"Proud of it? God a'mighty, boy, why wouldn't you be? Black Jack's son! Pete, thank God you come in time!"

"In time to save your head for you, Joe."

"I believe it," said the big man humbly. "I b'lieve he would of cleaned up on me. Maybe on all of us. Black Jack would of come close to doing it. But you come in time, Pete. And I'll never forget it."

While he spoke, he was still wringing the hands of Terry. Now he dragged the stunned Terry around the table and forced him down in his own huge, padded armchair, his sign of power. But it was only to drag him up from the chair again.

"Lemme look at you! Black Jack's boy! As like Black Jack as ever I seen, too. But a shade taller. Eh, Pete? A shade taller. And a shade heavier in the shoulders. But you got the look. I might of knowed you by the look in your eyes. Hey, Slim, damn your good-for-nothing hide, drag Johnny here pronto by the back of the neck!"

Johnny, the Chinaman, appeared, blinking at the lights. Joe Pollard clapped him on the shoulder with staggering force.

"Johnny, you see!" a broad gesture to Terry. "Old friend. Just find out. Velly old friend. Like pretty much a whole damned lot. Get down in the cellar, you yaller old sinner, and get out the oldest bourbon I got there. You savvy? Pretty damned pronto—hurry up—quick—old keg. Git out!"

Johnny was literally hurled out of the room toward the kitchen, trailing a crackle of strange-sounding but unmistakable profanity behind him. And Joe Pollard, perching his bulk on the edge of the table, introduced Terry to the boys again, for Oregon had come back with word that Kate would be out soon.

"Here's Denver Pete. You know him already, and he's worth his weight in any man's company. Here's Slim Dugan, that could scent a big coin shipment a thousand miles away. Phil Marvin ain't any slouch at stalling a gent with a fat wallet and leading him up to be plucked. Marty Cardiff ain't half so tame as he looks, and he's the best trailer that ever squinted at a buzzard in the sky; he knows this whole country like a book. And Oregon Charlie is the best all-around man you ever seen, from railroads to stages. And me—I'm sort of a handyman. Well, Black Jack, your old man himself never got a finer crew together than this, eh?"

Denver Pete had waited until his big friend finished. Then he remarked quietly: "All very pretty, partner, but Terry figures he walks the straight and narrow path. Savvy?"

"Just a kid's fool hunch!" snorted Joe Pollard. "Didn't your dad show me the ropes? Wasn't it him that taught me all I ever knew? Sure it was, and I'm going to do the same for you, Terry. Damn my eyes if I ain't! And here I been sitting, trimming you! Son, take back the coin. I was sure playing a cheap game—and I apologize, man to man."

But Terry shook his head.

"You won it," he said quietly. "And you'll keep it."

"Won nothing. I can call every coin I throw. I was stealing, not gambling. I was gold-digging! Take back the stuff!"

"If I was fool enough to lose it that way, it'll stay lost," answered Terry.

"But I won't keep it, son."

"Then give it away. But not to me."

"Black Jack—" began Pollard.

But he received a signal from Denver Pete and abruptly changed the subject.

"Let it go, then. They's plenty of loose coin rolling about this day. If you got a thin purse today, I'll make it fat for you in a week. But think of me stumbling on to you!"

It was the first time that Terry had a fair opportunity to speak, and he made the best of it.

"It's very pleasant to meet you—on this basis," he said. "But as for taking up—er—road life—"

The lifted hand of Joe Pollard made it impossible for him to complete his sentence.

"I know. You got scruples, son. Sure you got 'em. I used to have 'em, too, till your old man got 'em out of my head."

Terry winced. But Joe Pollard rambled on, ignorant that he had struck a blow in the dark: "When I met up with the original Black Jack, I was slavin' my life away with a pick trying to turn ordinary quartz into pay dirt. Making a fool of myself, that's what I was doing. Along comes Black Jack. He needed a man. He picks me up and takes me along with him. I tried to talk Bible talk. He showed me where I was a fool.

"'All you got to do,' he says to me, 'is to make sure that you ain't stealing from an honest man. And they's about one gent in three with money that's come by it honest, in this part of the world. The rest is just plain thieves, but they been clever enough to cover it up. Pick on that crew, Pollard, and squeeze 'em till they run money into your hand. I'll show you how to do it!'

"Well, it come pretty hard to me at first. I didn't see how it was done. But he showed me. He'd send a scout around to a mining camp. If they was a crooked wheel in the gambling house that was making a lot of coin, Black Jack would slide in some night, stick up the works, and clean out with the loot. If they was some dirty dog that had jumped a claim and was making a pile of coin out of it, Black Jack would drop out of the sky onto him and take the gold."

Terry listened, fascinated. He was having the workings of his father's mind re-created for him and spread plainly before his eyes. And there was a certain terror and also a certain attractiveness about what he discovered.

"It sounds, maybe, like an easy thing to do, to just stick on the trail of them that you know are worse crooks than you. But it ain't. I've tried it. I've seen Black Jack pass up ten thousand like it was nothing, because the gent that had it come by it honest. But I can't do it, speaking in general. But I'll tell you more about the old man."

"Thank you," said Terry, "but—"

"And when you're with us—"

"You see," said Terry firmly, "I plan to do the work you asked me to do— kill what you wanted killed on the range. And when I've worked off the money I owe you—"

Before he could complete his sentence, a door opened on the far side of the room, and Kate Pollard entered again. She had risen from her bed in some haste to answer the summons of her father. Her bright hair poured across her shoulders, a heavy, greenish-blue dressing gown was drawn about her and held close with one hand at her breast. She came slowly toward them. And she seemed to Terry to have changed. There was less of the masculine about her than there had been earlier in the evening. Her walk was slow, her eyes were wide as though she had no idea what might await her, and the light glinted white on the untanned portion of her throat, and on her arm where the loose sleeve of the dressing gown fell back from it.

"Kate," said her father, "I had to get you up to tell you the big news— biggest news you ever heard of! Girl, who've I always told you was the greatest gent that ever come into my life?"

"Jack Hollis—Black Jack," she said, without hesitation. "According to your way of thinking, Dad!"

Plainly her own conclusions might be very different.

"According to anybody's way of thinking, as long as they was thinking right. And d'you know who we've got here with us now? Could you guess it in a thousand years? Why, the kid that come tonight. Black Jack as sure as if he was a picture out of a book, and me a blind fool that didn't know him. Kate, here's the second Black Jack. Terry Hollis. Give him your hand agin and say you're glad to have him for his dad's sake and for his own! Kate, he's done a man's job already. It's him that dropped old foxy Minter!"

The last of these words faded out of the hearing of Terry. He felt the lowered eyes of the girl rise and fall gravely on his face, and her glance rested there a long moment with a new and solemn questioning. Then her hand went slowly out to him, a cold hand that barely touched his with its fingertips and then dropped away.

But what Terry felt was that it was the same glance she had turned to him when she stood leaning against the post earlier that evening. There was a pity in it, and a sort of despair which he could not understand.

And without saying a word she turned her back on them and went out of the room as slowly as she had come into it.



CHAPTER 26

"It don't mean nothing," Pollard hastened to assure Terry. "It don't mean a thing in the world except that she's a fool girl. The queerest, orneriest, kindest, strangest, wildest thing in the shape of calico that ever come into these parts since her mother died before her. But the more you see of her, the more you'll value her. She can ride like a man—no wear out to her—and she's got the courage of a man. Besides which she can sling a gun like it would do your heart good to see her! Don't take nothing she does to heart. She don't mean no harm. But she sure does tangle up a gent's ideas. Here I been living with her nigh onto twenty years and I don't savvy her none yet. Eh, boys?"

"I'm not offended in the least," said Terry quietly.

And he was not, but he was more interested than he had ever been before by man, woman, or child. And for the past few seconds his mind had been following her through the door behind which she had disappeared.

"And if I were to see more of her, no doubt—" He broke off with: "But I'm not apt to see much more of any of you, Mr. Pollard. If I can't stay here and work off that three-hundred-dollar debt—"

"Work, hell! No son of Black Jack Hollis can work for me. But he can live with me as a partner, son, and he can have everything I got, half and half, and the bigger half to him if he asks for it. That's straight!"

Terry raised a protesting hand. Yet he was touched—intimately touched. He had tried hard to fit in his place among the honest people of the mountains by hard and patient work. They would have none of him. His own kind turned him out. And among these men—men who had no law, as he had every reason to believe—he was instantly taken in and made one of them.

"But no more talk tonight," said Pollard. "I can see you're played out. I'll show you the room."

He caught a lantern from the wall as he spoke and began to lead the way up the stairs to the balcony. He pointed out the advantages of the house as he spoke.

"Not half bad—this house, eh?" he said proudly. "And who d'you think planned it? Your old man, kid. It was Black Jack Hollis himself that done it! He was took off sudden before he'd had a chance to work it out and build it. But I used his ideas in this the same's I've done in other things. His idea was a house like a ship.

"They build a ship in compartments, eh? Ship hits a rock, water comes in. But it only fills one compartment, and the old ship still floats. Same with this house. You seen them walls. And the walls on the outside ain't the only thing. Every partition is the same thing, pretty near; and a gent could stand behind these doors safe as if he was a mile away from a gun. Why? Because they's a nice little lining of the best steel you ever seen in the middle of 'em.

"Cost a lot. Sure. But look at us now. Suppose a posse was to rush the house. They bust into the kitchen side. Where are they? Just the same as if they hadn't got in at all. I bolt the doors from the inside of the big room, and they're shut out agin. Or suppose they take the big room? Then a couple of us slide out on this balcony and spray 'em with lead. This house ain't going to be took till the last room is filled full of the sheriff's men!"

He paused on the balcony and looked proudly over the big, baronial room below them. It seemed huger than ever from this viewpoint, and the men below them were dwarfed. The light of the lanterns did not extend all the way across it, but fell in pools here and there, gleaming faintly on the men below.

"But doesn't it make people suspicious to have a fort like this built on the hill?" asked Terry.

"Of course. If they knew. But they don't know, son, and they ain't going to find out the lining of this house till they try it out with lead."

He brought Terry into one of the bedrooms and lighted a lamp. As the flare steadied in the big circular oil burner and the light spread, Terry made out a surprisingly comfortable apartment. There was not a bunk, but a civilized bed, beside which was a huge, tawny mountain-lion skin softening the floor. The window was curtained in some pleasant blue stuff, and there were a few spots of color on the wall—only calendars, some of them, but helping to give a livable impression for the place.

"Kate's work," grinned Pollard proudly. "She's been fixing these rooms up all out of her own head. Never got no ideas out of me. Anything you might lack, son?"

Terry told him he would be very comfortable, and the big man wrung his hand again as he bade him good night.

"The best work that Denver ever done was bringing you to me," he declared. "Which you'll find it out before I'm through. I'm going to give you a home!" And he strode away before Terry could answer.

The rather rare consciousness of having done a good deed swelled in the heart of Joe Pollard on his way down from the balcony. When he reached the floor below, he found that the four men had gone to bed and left Denver alone, drawn back from the light into a shadowy corner, where he was flanked by the gleam of a bottle of whisky on the one side and a shimmering glass on the other. Although Pollard was the nominal leader, he was in secret awe of the yegg. For Denver was an "in-and-outer." Sometimes he joined them in the West; sometimes he "worked" an Eastern territory. He came and went as he pleased, and was more or less a law to himself. Moreover, he had certain qualities of silence and brooding that usually disturbed the leader. They troubled him now as he approached the squat, shapeless figure in the corner chair.

"What you think of him?" said Denver.

"A good kid and a clean-cut kid," decided Joe Pollard judicially. "Maybe he ain't another Black Jack, but he's tolerable cool for a youngster. Stood up and looked me in the eye like a man when I had him cornered a while back. Good thing for him you come out when you did!"

"A good thing for you, Joe," replied Denver Pete. "He'd of turned you into fertilizer, bo!"

"Maybe; maybe not. Maybe they's some things I could teach him about gun- slinging, Pete."

"Maybe; maybe not," parodied Denver. "You've learned a good deal about guns, Joe—quite a bit. But there's some things about gun fighting that nobody can learn. It's got to be born into 'em. Remember how Black Jack used to slide out his gat?"

"Yep. There was a man!"

"And Minter, too. There's a born gunman."

"Sure. We all know Uncle Joe—damn his soul!"

"But the kid beat Uncle Joe fair and square from an even break—and beat him bad. Made his draw, held it so's Joe could partway catch up with him, and then drilled him clean!"

Pollard scratched his chin.

"I'd believe that if I seen it," he declared.

"Pal, it wasn't Terry that done the talking; it was Gainor. He's seen a good deal of gunplay, and said that Terry's was the coolest he ever watched."

"All right for that part of it," said Joe Pollard. "Suppose he's fast— but can I use him? I like him well enough; I'll give him a good deal; but is he going to mean charity all the time he hangs out with me?"

"Maybe; maybe not," chuckled Denver again. "Use him the way he can be used, and he'll be the best bargain you ever turned. Black Jack started you in business; Black Jack the Second will make you rich if you handle him right—and ruin you if you make a slip."

"How come? He talks this 'honesty' talk pretty strong."

"Gimme a chance to talk," said Denver contemptuously. "Takes a gent that's used to reading the secrets of a safe to read the secrets of a gent's head. And I've read the secret of young Black Jack Hollis. He's a pile of dry powder, Joe. Throw in the spark and he'll explode so damned loud they'll hear him go off all over the country."

"How?"

"First, you got to keep him here."

"How?"

Joe Pollard sat back with the air of one who will be convinced through no mental effort of his own. But Denver was equal to the demand.

"I'm going to show you. He thinks he owes you three hundred."

"That's foolish. I cheated the kid out of it. I'll give it back to him and all the rest I won."

Denver paused and studied the other as one amazed by such stupidity.

"Pal, did you ever try, in the old days, to give anything to the old Black Jack?"

"H'm. Well, he sure hated charity. But this ain't charity."

"It ain't in your eyes. It is in Terry's. If you insist, he'll get sore. No, Joe. Let him think he owes you that money. Let him start in working it off for you—honest work. You ain't got any ranch work. Well, set him to cutting down trees, or anything. That'll help to hold him. If he makes some gambling play—and he's got the born gambler in him—you got one last thing that'll be apt to keep him here."

"What's that?"

"Kate."

Pollard stirred in his chair.

"How d'you mean that?" he asked gruffly.

"I mean what I said," retorted Denver. "I watched young Black Jack looking at her. He had his heart in his eyes, the kid did. He likes her, in spite of the frosty mitt she handed him. Oh, he's falling for her, pal—and he'll keep on falling. Just slip the word to Kate to kid him along. Will you? And after we got him glued to the place here, we'll figure out the way to turn Terry into a copy of his dad. We'll figure out how to shoot the spark into the powder, and then stand clear for the explosion."

Denver came silently and swiftly out of the chair, his pudgy hand spread on the table and his eyes gleaming close to the face of Pollard.

"Joe," he said softly, "if that kid goes wrong, he'll be as much as his father ever was—and maybe more. He'll rake in the money like it was dirt. How do I know? Because I've talked to him. I've watched him and trailed him. He's trying hard to go straight. He's failed twice; the third time he'll bust and throw in with us. And if he does, he'll clean up the coin—and we'll get our share. Why ain't you made more money yourself, Joe? You got as many men as Black Jack ever had. It's because you ain't got the fire in you. Neither have I. We're nothing but tools ready for another man to use the way Black Jack used us. Nurse this kid along a little while, and he'll show us how to pry open the places where the real coin is cached away. And he'll lead us in and out with no danger to us and all the real risk on his own head. That's his way—that was his dad's way before him."

Pollard nodded slowly. "Maybe you're right."

"I know I am. He's a gold mine, this kid is. But we got to buy him with something more than gold. And I know what that something is. I'm going to show him that the good, lawabiding citizens have made up their minds that he's no good; that they're all ag'in' him; and when he finds that out, he'll go wild. They ain't no doubt of it. He'll show his teeth! And when he shows his teeth, he'll taste blood—they ain't no doubt of it."

"Going to make him—kill?" asked Pollard very softly.

"Why not? He'll do it sooner or later anyway. It's in his blood."

"I suppose it is."

"I got an idea. There's a young gent in town named Larrimer, ain't there?"

"Sure. A rough kid, too. It was him that killed Kennedy last spring."

"And he's proud of his reputation?"

"Sure. He'd go a hundred miles to have a fight with a gent with a good name for gunplay."

"Then hark to me sing, Joe! Send Terry into town to get something for you. I'll drop in ahead of him and find Larrimer, and tell Larrimer that Black Jack's son is around—the man that dropped Sheriff Minter. Then I'll bring 'em together and give 'em a running start."

"And risk Terry getting his head blown off?"

"If he can't beat Larrimer, he's no use to us; if he kills Larrimer, it's good riddance. The kid is going to get bumped off sometime, anyway. He's bad—all the way through."

Pollard looked with a sort of wonder on his companion.

"You're a nice, kind sort of a gent, ain't you, Denver?"

"I'm a moneymaker," asserted Denver coldly. "And, just now, Terry Hollis is my gold mine. Watch me work him!"



CHAPTER 27

It was some time before Terry could sleep, though it was now very late. When he put out the light and slipped into the bed, the darkness brought a bright flood of memories of the day before him. It seemed to him that half a lifetime had been crowded into the brief hours since he was fired on the ranch that morning. Behind everything stirred the ugly face of Denver as a sort of controlling nemesis. It seemed to him that the chunky little man had been pulling the wires all the time while he, Terry Hollis, danced in response. Not a flattering thought.

Nervously, Terry got out of bed and went to the window. The night was cool, cut crisp rather than chilling. His eye went over the velvet blackness of the mountain slope above him to the ragged line of the crest—then a dizzy plunge to the brightness of the stars beyond. The very sense of distance was soothing; it washed the gloom and the troubles away from him. He breathed deep of the fragrance of the pines and then went back to his bed.

He had hardly taken his place in it when the sleep began to well up over his brain—waves of shadows running out of corners of his mind. And then suddenly he was wide awake, alert.

Someone had opened the door. There had been no sound; merely a change in the air currents of the room, but there was also the sense of another presence so clearly that Terry almost imagined he could hear the breathing.

He was beginning to shrug the thought away and smile at his own nervousness, when he heard that unmistakable sound of a foot pressing the floor. And then he remembered that he had left his gun belt far from the bed. In a burning moment that lesson was printed in his mind, and would never be forgotten. Slowly as possible and without sound, he drew up his feet little by little, spread his arms gently on either side of him, and made himself tense for the effort. Whoever it was that entered, they might be taken by surprise. He dared not lift his head to look; and he was on the verge of leaping up and at the approaching noise, when a whisper came to him softly: "Black Jack!"

The soft voice, the name itself, thrilled him. He sat erect in the bed and made out, dimly, the form of Kate Pollard in the blackness. She would have been quite invisible, save that the square of the window was almost exactly behind her. He made out the faint whiteness of the hand which held her dressing robe at the breast.

She did not start back, though she showed that she was startled by the suddenness of his movement by growing the faintest shade taller and lifting her head a little. Terry watched her, bewildered.

"I been waiting to see you," said Kate. "I want to—I mean—to—talk to you."

He could think of nothing except to blurt with sublime stupidity: "It's good of you. Won't you sit down?"

The girl brought him to his senses with a sharp "Easy! Don't talk out. Do you know what'd happen if Dad found me here?"

"I—" began Terry.

But she helped him smoothly to the logical conclusion. "He'd blow your head off, Black Jack; and he'd do it—pronto. If you are going to talk, talk soft—like me."

She sat down on the side of the bed so gently that there was no creaking. They peered at each other through the darkness for a time.

She was not whispering, but her voice was pitched almost as low, and he wondered at the variety of expression she was able to pack in the small range of that murmur. "I suppose I'm a fool for coming. But I was born to love chances. Born for it!" She lifted her head and laughed.

It amazed Terry to hear the shaken flow of her breath and catch the glinting outline of her face. He found himself leaning forward a little; and he began to wish for a light, though perhaps it was an unconscious wish.

"First," she said, "what d'you know about Dad—and Denver Pete?"

"Practically nothing."

She was silent for a moment, and he saw her hand go up and prop her chin while she considered what she could say next.

"They's so much to tell," she confessed, "that I can't put it short. I'll tell you this much, Black Jack—"

"That isn't my name, if you please."

"It'll be your name if you stay around these parts with Dad very long," she replied, with an odd emphasis. "But where you been raised, Terry? And what you been doing with yourself?"

He felt that this giving of the first name was a tribute, in some subtle manner. It enabled him, for instance, to call her Kate, and he decided with a thrill that he would do so at the first opportunity. He reverted to her question.

"I suppose," he admitted gloomily, "that I've been raised to do pretty much as I please—and the money I've spent has been given to me."

The girl shook her head with conviction.

"It ain't possible," she declared.

"Why not?"

"No son of Black Jack would live off somebody's charity."

He felt the blood tingle in his cheeks, and a real anger against her rose. Yet he found himself explaining humbly.

"You see, I was taken when I wasn't old enough to decide for myself. I was only a baby. And I was raised to depend upon Elizabeth Cornish. I—I didn't even know the name of my father until a few days ago."

The girl gasped. "You didn't know your father—not your own father?" She laughed again scornfully. "Terry, I ain't green enough to believe that!"

He fell into a dignified silence, and presently the girl leaned closer, as though she were peering to make out his face. Indeed, it was now possible to dimly make out objects in the room. The window was filled with an increasing brightness, and presently a shaft of pale light began to slide across the floor, little by little. The moon had pushed up above the crest of the mountain.

"Did that make you mad?" queried the girl. "Why?"

"You seemed to doubt what I said," he remarked stiffly.

"Why not? You ain't under oath, or anything, are you?"

Then she laughed again. "You're a queer one all the way through. This Elizabeth Cornish—got anything to do with the Cornish ranch?"

"I presume she owns it, very largely."

The girl nodded. "You talk like a book. You must of studied a terrible pile."

"Not so much, really."

"H'm," said the girl, and seemed to reserve judgment.

Then she asked with a return of her former sharpness: "How come you gambled today at Pedro's?"

"I don't know. It seemed the thing to do—to kill time, you know."

"Kill time! At Pedro's? Well—you are green, Terry!"

"I suppose I am, Kate."

He made a little pause before her name, and when he spoke it, in spite of himself, his voice changed, became softer. The girl straightened somewhat, and the light was now increased to such a point that he could make out that she was frowning at him through the dimness.

"First, you been adopted, then you been raised on a great big place with everything you want, mostly, and now you're out—playing at Pedro's. How come, Terry?"

"I was sent away," said Terry faintly, as all the pain of that farewell came flooding back over him.