“Fellow shot him last night, by jiminy by jinks, an’ set fire to his wheat.” “Did?” Black shot one startled, questioning look at his employer. Jake cackled with splenetic laughter. “No, sir. Don’t you look at me thataway, Don. I hadn’t a thing to do with it. If I’d ’a’ done it, it would ’a’ been done right. This fellow was a tramp, they say. He didn’t get any consid’rable amount of the wheat an’ he didn’t get Clint.” Fate had played a strange trick when it put the unscrupulous and restless soul of a Lucifer in the warped body of Jake Prowers, when it expressed that soul through a thin, cracked voice and pale-blue, washed-out eyes. To the casual observer he seemed one of life’s ineffectives. Those who knew him best found reason to shudder at his mirthless laughter and his mild oaths, at the steady regard of his expressionless gaze. They seemed somehow to stress by contrast the man’s dark and ruthless soul. There were moments when from those cold eyes flamed something sinister and blasting that chilled the blood. Black had been living for weeks at an out-of-the-way cabin in the hills. He was riding herd on a bunch of Prowers’s cattle feeding on the edge of the Government reservation. Consequently he had been out of the way of hearing the news of the community. “What had this tramp got against Clint?” he asked, firing accurately with tobacco juice at the face of a flat rock. “You know how high-headed Clint is. He beat up a bunch of tramps an’ one came back to even up things. Last night he took a whirl at it. The fellow set fire to some wheat-stacks an’ gunned Clint when he showed up, by the jumpin’ Jehosaphat. But Clint’s no invalid. He’d take right smart killing, an’ all he got was one pill in the leg. Trouble with most of these here bad men is they ain’t efficient. When you lay for Clint, Don, I’d advise you to spill about a pint of lead in him.” The little man grinned with broken-toothed malevolence at his henchman. “I don’t aim to lay for Clint,” growled Black. He was not a humorist and he never knew when Prowers’s jokes were loaded with dynamite. Jake cackled. “O’ course not. Clint, he’s a good citizen if he did kick you off’n the Diamond Bar K once. What’s a li’l’ thing like that between friends.” “I don’t claim him as any friend of mine. If you ask me, he’s too dawg-goned bossy--got to have everything his own way. But that ain’t sayin’ I got any notion of layin’ in the brush for him. Not so any one could notice it. If Clint lives till I bump him off, he’ll sure be a Methuselah,” Black answered sulkily. “That’s fine,” jeered the cattleman. “I’ll tell Clint to quit worryin’ about you--that you ain’t got a thing against him. Everything’s lovely, even if he did kick you around some.” The rider flushed darkly. “He ain’t worryin’ none about me, an’ I didn’t say everything was lovely. I like him same as I do a wolf. But all I ask is for him to let me alone. If he does that, we’ll not tangle.”