"Hell, no!" he snapped. "It's none of her damned business--nor anybody's!" He grinned maliciously when he saw Rogers' face whiten. "Barbara will need a husband now," Deveny went on. "With old Morgan gone and her brother sloped from the home ranch, she'll be kind of lonesome. I aim to cure her of that." He laughed, and Rogers writhed inwardly. For Rogers had long nursed a secret hope that one day the fates might take a notion to give him the chance that Deveny intended to seize. But Rogers was forced to conceal his jealousy and disappointment. He laughed mirthlessly. "So she can't get away, eh?--she's corralled!" "Bah!" declared Deveny; "she won't want to get away--once she knows what I mean--that it's going to be a regular wedding. She'll raise a fuss, most likely, to make folks believe she's unwilling, but in the end she'll get over it." Deveny glanced out of the window at the blot that was now closer. "It's Laskar, all regular," he said. "He's leading a sorrel horse--Dolver's horse. Old Morgan got Dolver--looks like, the damned old gopher! Men as willing as Dolver are not found every day." He looked at the third man, who had not spoken. "Lawson," he said, "you mosey down the trail a little piece and meet Laskar. Bring him here!" Lawson, a thin-faced, medium-sized man with narrow shoulders, whose distinguishing mark was a set of projecting upper teeth that kept his mouth in a continual smirking smile, got up quickly and went out. Deveny and Rogers, their thoughts centered upon the same person--Barbara Morgan--sat silent, watching Lawson as he rode down the street toward the point where the trail, crossing the broken stretch of country that intervened, merged into the desert. Half an hour later Laskar, holding his chest, where Purgatory had kicked him, was sitting at the table in the rear room of the First Chance, cursing with a fluency that he had not yielded to in many years. "Dolver's wiped out!" he gasped hoarsely; "plugged so quick he didn't know he was hit. A center shot--plumb in the heart; his own gun goin' off while he was fallin'. I looked him over--after. He was croaked complete. Then that sober-faced hyena lifts my gun--an' the rifle--an' says things to me, which I don't try to cross him. Then he goes behind the rock--where we was havin' it out--an' while he's gone I tries to git my guns from under that devil-eyed cayuse of his'n. "An' I don't succeed--noways. That black devil turns on a half-dollar an' plants his hoofs plumb in my breast-bone. If I'd been an inch nearer, or if he'd have kicked me a foot lower, or a foot higher, I'd be layin' out there where Dolver is now, the coyotes an' the buzzards gnawin' at me." Unmoved by Laskar's incoherence, Deveny calmly watched him. And now, when Laskar paused for breath, Deveny spoke slowly: "A _black_ horse, you said. How did a black horse get there? Old Morgan rode a bay when he left Lamo--Balleau says."