It was currently reported that a love affair, in early life, had ended disastrously for Benner and had soured his disposition. Where he came from, when he settled on the Brazos, no one knew. He had been so long in his present location, however, that his original hailing place had long since ceased to be a matter of any interest. Steers bearing his brand--the Circle-B--were numbered by thousands, and ranged over many square miles of country. At this particular time the cattle business was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, and wealth flowed in on Benner far and away beyond his powers of spending. This very fact seemed to render him irritable. He pictured to himself the delights which money could buy in Galveston, San Antonio, New Orleans and New York, and fretted because he dared not leave his ranch to go to places where his money could bring him a larger return of enjoyment. He hadn’t a foreman whom he could trust. A younger brother, a hunchback, lived with him, but even this brother had little of his confidence. Jerry, as the hunchback was called, was all well enough as an aide, but if Benner had absented himself for any great length of time from the ranch, Jerry would surely have manipulated affairs to his own profit. Jerry was a schemer. Shrewd as a fox, he was as sly as a serpent, brutal and utterly unscrupulous. His nature seemed to have been warped into ugly channels when his body was broken. Benner had given Jerry a home, and Jerry repaid his brother by giving him advice. The advice, although not always honest, never failed to redound to Lige Benner’s benefit. So, while he had come to trust to Jerry’s shrewdness in counsel, he came also to distrust his principles--principles which Benner occasionally appropriated to his own use. During the forenoon of the day that had witnessed the call of Sim Pierce at the Star-A ranch, Lige Benner and his hunchback brother were in the big living room of the adobe house. Jerry’s crippled body was almost lost in the depths of an easy-chair. He was smoking a home-made cigarette and watching Lige with two brilliant, ferret-like eyes. Lige Benner, deeply wrought up over something, was pacing up and down the room. “What’s the use of fretting?” asked Jerry in his thin, high-pitched, querulous voice. “Do as I tell you, Lige, and you’ll get even with that outfit up the river.” “I can’t get the girl, can I?” fumed Lige, halting and whirling on the crooked form in the chair. “You can get something better, Lige,” answered the hunchback, his eyes glimmering, “and that’s revenge for having lost the girl.” “Revenge on who?” “On Dunbar, on Perry--perhaps on Buffalo Bill and his pards.” “Without making trouble for myself?” It was not so much the coward that spoke, as the man of secret ways and dark.