Hawk knew from the expression of Laramie's eyes he must drop the subject, and though he lost none of his bantering manner, he desisted: "They didn't have a warrant for me down at the marshal's office, did they?" "They were short of blanks," retorted Laramie coolly. "How you fixed for flour?" "Plenty of it." Laramie spoke loudly for fear Simeral might protest. Then he called promptly to the kitchen: "Ben, get up some flour for Abe." Ben quavered a protest. "Get it up now before you forget it," insisted Laramie. "Is Tom Stone still foreman over at Doubleday's?" "I guess he is," returned Laramie. "What does Doubleday aim to do with Stone?" asked Hawk, cynically, "steal his own cattle from himself?" "A cattleman nowadays might as well steal his own cattle as to wait for somebody else to steal 'em." Laramie spoke with some annoyance. "There's going to be trouble for these Falling Wall rustlers." "Meaning me?" asked Hawk, contemptuously. "I never mean you without saying you, Abe--you ought to know that by this time. But this running off steers is getting too raw. From the undertalk in Sleepy Cat there's going to be something done." "Who by?" "By the cattlemen." "I thought," Hawk spoke again contemptuously, "you meant by the sheriff." "But I didn't," said Laramie. "I meant by the bunch at the range. And when they start they'll stir things up over this way." Hawk hazarded a guess on another subject: "It looks like Van Horn--putting in Stone over at Doubleday's." "It is Van Horn." Hawk looked in silence out of the open door at the distant snow-capped mountains. "Why don't you kill him, Jim?" he asked after a moment, possibly in earnest, possibly in jest, for his iron tone sometimes meant everything, sometimes nothing. Laramie, at all events, took the words lightly. He answered Hawk's question with another. But his retort and manner were as easy as Hawk's question and expression were hard. "Why don't you?" The bearded man across the table did not hesitate nor did he cast about for words. On the contrary, he replied with embarrassing promptness: "I will, sometime." "A man that didn't know you, Abe, might think you meant it," commented Laramie, filling his coffee cup. Hawk's white teeth showed just for the instant that he smiled; then he talked of other things. CHAPTER IX AT THE BAR The arrival of a baby at the home of Harry Tenison in Sleepy Cat had an immediate effect on Kate Doubleday's fortune in the mountains--and, indeed, on the fortunes of a number of other people in Sleepy Cat--wholly out of proportion to its importance as a family event. It was not, it is true, for the Tenisons a mere family event. Married fifteen years, they had been without children until the advent of this baby. And the birth of a boy to Harry Tenison excited not alone the parents, but the town, the railroad division and the hundred miles of range and desert, north and south, tributary to the town.