"Somebody must 'a' stepped on her toe," decided Loudon. "Bet she don't dance with Dawson again." She didn't. Marshal Dan Smith, perspiring and painfully conscious of a hard shirt and a forest-fire necktie, was her next partner. Loudon wondered why he had not hitherto perceived the marked resemblance between Dan Smith and a jack-rabbit. He found himself speculating on Kate's reasons for breaking her engagement. As he looked at Kate, her extreme beauty, contrasted with that of the other girls in the room, was striking. "Kate is certainly a heap good-looker." Mrs. Ragsdale and the freighter's wife turned sharply and stared open-mouthed at Loudon. Not till then did that young man realize that he had voiced aloud his estimate of Kate Saltoun. He fled hurriedly, his skin prickling all over, and dived into the kindly darkness behind the corral. "Now I have done it!" he mourned, bitterly, squatting on the ground. "Those old tongue-wagglers heard me, an' they'll tell her. I seen it in their faces. What'll she think o' me. Luck! There ain't no such thing. If all the rocks was tobacco an' all the grass cigarette-papers, I'd be there without a match." From the hotel drifted thinly the lilt of "Buffalo Girls." A bevy of convivial beings in the street were bawling "The Days of Forty-Nine." Across the discordant riot of sound cut the sudden clipping drum of a galloping pony. "Injuns!" shouted a voice. "Injuns!" Loudon sprang up and dashed around the corral. In the flare of light from the hotel doorway a dusty man sat a dustier horse. The man was hatless, his dark hair was matted with dirt and sweat, and his eyes were wild. "Injuns!" cried the dusty man. "Injuns on Hatchet Creek! I want help!" In thirty seconds there was a fair-sized group surrounding the horseman. In a minute and a half the group had become a crowd. Up bustled Marshal Dan Smith followed by Telescope Laguerre, Jim Mace, and the gentleman from the Barred O. Loudon, first on the scene, was jammed against the rider's stirrup. "Gents," the dusty man was saying, "my three pardners are a-standin' off the war-whoops in a shack over by Johnson's Peak on Hatchet Creek. There's more'n a hundred o' them feather-dusters an' they'll have my pardners' hair if yuh don't come a-runnin'." "Johnson's Peak!" exclaimed Jim Mace. "That's fifty mile away!" "All o' that," assented the dusty man, wearily, without turning his head. "For God's sake, gents, do somethin', can't yuh? An' gimme a fresh hoss." Already three quarters of his hearers were streaking homeward for their Winchesters and saddles. The men from the ranches were the last to move away. No need for them to hurry. The few who had brought rifles to the Bend had left them with their saddles at the various corrals.