After we started, Borden told me that Fitch had brought him notice to serve on Dempster--old John Dempster, his friend. Now, that made a bad job for the Marshal. I saw it from the way he answered not a word to Fitch, who now and then pressed up--intent on the business--to make him talk. Once Borden pulled out his heavy wrinkled boot from the stirrup and kicked the other's horse in the belly until it reared on its haunches. For Borden was the law's officer, but no man's servant. Our way ran three miles up from Kinton. There was no road, and we followed along the edge of the bluffs as best we were able, until finally we dipped down into a ravine and so came to our destination. It was a wooded flat on the bank of the river, made by a sudden retreat of the hills--a sort of pocket. The space was not large, a handful of acres, and it looked smaller than it really was. The bluffs curved around it on three sides in a yellow, crumbling wall; on the fourth flowed the muddy waters of the Missouri. The house was in the center of a small clearing, and when we came in sight of it Fitch pulled up behind a small thicket of scrub. Borden, as if he never saw the fellow halt, rode straight up to the door where John Dempster sat shaping an axe-haft. "Jack," said Borden, swinging down from his saddle, "I've come to have a talk with you." Dempster shaved the haft a minute, laid it aside, and gazed off toward the clump of scrub. The two men were something alike, though the man seated on the door-sill was the older, both past the prime, both spare of words, both come to the West in the same year. They had lain side by side behind a sleety log before Fort Donelson, and each in his three years of service had felt the touch of hot lead. "How d'you come--friend or enemy?" "The first, and always, I hope. It depends on you. Why did you kick him off of here yesterday, Jack? He's full of poison over it." "Let him keep off then," was the gruff response. Both looked again at the clump where Fitch could be seen through the thin screen of bushes. After a while Dempster took out his tobacco, cut off a piece, and passed the rest to us. "You're in a dirty way of business when you're mixed up with him," he said slowly. "An' I 'spose you've come to run me out." "What's at the bottom of this trouble?" returned Borden, evading the point. "'Tain't the land--what is it he's after?" Dempster spat. "He's gettin' even. I knocked him down last spring when I was at Nebraska City, for lyin' about--never mind. That's all. So he sneaked around an' hunted out where I live an' filed on the land." A dull fire lighted up under his bushy eyebrows. "Why didn't you file long ago?" "Does the gover'ment take away a man's home when he's fought in the war?" "You know how I feel about it," replied Borden, and he laid his hand on the other's shoulder. "But it's too late for you to try to keep it now. You'd better look up another place." "No, I'm goin' to stay here, I guess, or nowhere."