"I didn't know that you'd come to six-o'clock dinners in this part of the country," the doctor laughed. "Not as I know of," the cook-horse-wrangler said. "This dinner that I'm gittin' ready, stranger, is for tomorrow noon, when the stage comes by from Comanche. I always cook it the day before to be sure it'll be ready on time." With that the forehanded cook turned and went back to his pot. As Slavens rode away he heard the cabbage crunching under the cook's knife as he sliced it for the passengers of the Meander stage, to have it hot and steaming, and well soaked with the grease of corned beef, when they should arrive at noon on the morrow. Dusk was settling when the doctor reached his tent. Before he dismounted he rode to a little clear place among the bewilderment of stones which gave him a view of half a mile, and he sat there looking a while down the stage-trail toward Comanche. Beyond him a few hundred yards another tent had been planted. In front of it a man sat cooking his supper over a little blaze. "Boyle lost no time in getting here," muttered the doctor, turning to his own shelter and kindling a fire on the ashes of other days. Ashes were graying again over the embers long after he had boiled his pot of coffee and put away his can of warmed-over beans. Night was charged with a threat of frost, as is not uncommon in those altitudes at the beginning of September. It was so chilly that Slavens had drawn a blanket over his back as he sat before his dying fire, Indian fashion, on the ground, drawing what solace he could from his pipe. A sound of scrambling hoofs laboring up the sharp hill from the direction of Meander came to him suddenly, startling him out of his reflections. His thought leaped to the instant conclusion that it was Agnes; he laid light fuel to the coals, blowing it to quicken a blaze that would guide and welcome her. When the rider appeared an eager flame was laving the rocks in the yellow light, and Slavens was standing, peering beyond its radius. A glance told him that it was not she for whom he had lighted his guiding fire. It was a man. In a moment he drew up on the other side of the blaze and leaned over, looking sharply into Slavens' face. "Hello!" he hailed loudly, as if shouting across a river. Slavens returned his bellowed hail with moderation, recognizing in the dusty traveler Comanche's distinguished chief of police, Ten-Gallon, of the diamond rings. Slavens never had been able to feel anything but the most lively contempt for the fellow; now, since learning of Ten-Gallon's treatment of Agnes, and his undoubted hand in the plot of Hun Shanklin and Boyle against himself, the doctor held him to be nothing short of an open enemy. "I'm lookin' for a man by the name of Boyle," announced Ten-Gallon. "Are you holdin' down camp for him?" "He's on down the road a little way."